[nephihaha]

This is the rewilding narrative. It's essentially misanthropic and benefits the rich and government agencies. In response, people are supposed to be shoved into cities and out of the countryside. We should be looking at ways that cities and suburban areas can be made more friendly to wildlife (other than the likes of pigeon, mice and rats etc) Humanity's future is co-operation with nature, not creating massive safari parks for rich people and quangos. Even at somewhere like the Chernobyl exclusion zone it is obvious that nature has not fully reverted to its previous state, since it contends with human artefacts and contamination at every step.

[watwut]

> In response, people are supposed to be shoved into cities and out of the countryside.

Both Ukraine and Russia have plenty of rural landscape. Neither government is trying to shove people into cities against their own will. Occasionally villages try to attract younger people, but those dont really wanna.

(But in both countries, urban people rarely move to villages due to lack of employment opportunities and do move to cities to get jobs.)

[nephihaha]

Most of Russia is actually uninhabitable due to climate — cold or aridity. Outside Europe Russians are mostly found along the Trans-Siberian corridor and a few other pockets such as Norilsk, Lake Baikal and some river basins. Norilsk itself is an anomaly and is harsh even today.

[kjshsh123]

Have to push back on the "people shoved into cities" narrative. It just sounds like the conspiracy theories around "15 minutes cities" all over again.

An example of rewilding on its wikipedia page is "wildlife-friendly overpasses and underpasses". That's literally going the "making areas more friendly to wildlife" route.

When it comes to 15-minute cities there's all these conspiracies, but then you look behind it and it's just about allowing economic liberty to build taller and allow more commercial uses like doctors, daycares, and corner stores in residential neighborhoods, and restrict free government subsidized street parking.

It's good to be viligant, okay? And if any policies come up that are shoving people into cities, feel free to protest. But until then, a lot of the policies are actually exactly the "being more friendly to wildlife" that you're asking for and not shoving people into cities.

[nephihaha]

We've already had "rewilding" here. It was called the Highland Clearances. Thousands of people kicked off their ancestral land to be replaced by sheep, grouse moors and deer.

We have the misanthropic billionaire Tetrapak heir buying swathes of countryside in the same region and wanting to kick the remaining people off it.

There are plenty of policies pushing people into cities. It is becoming dearer and dearer to run any kind of vehicle in the countryside here, while there is a near lack of public transport in most places.

The trouble with the fifteen minute city idea is that physical facilities are gone in many cases and replaced by online ones. We don't consider doctors to be "commercial usage" here yet.

[mapt]

At this stage rewilding is a matter of establishing lifeboats for what little remains before it completely disappears, not wiping the landscape clean.

You can't put the full measure of ecological complexity into a small cage in a zoo.

[nephihaha]

There are actually vast swathes of territory with very little human population. There is an entire continent which is almost completely inhabited apart from a few bases. Same with most of the Sahara and other such deserts. Or much of the larger mountain ranges. The world's population is not evenly distributed, and is mostly coastal even today. Even Asia, the most heavily populated continent has thousands of square miles with barely anyone in it.

We've already had some "rewilding" in Scotland and it was called the Highland Clearances. It resulted in the almost wholesale destruction of Gaelic culture, and most of the region's people losing their homes. Now we have billionaires and aristocrats who want to finish that process.

[mapt]

As far as I can tell, that's such an insane take I can't even recognize it as propaganda. The Highland Clearances had nothing to do with rewilding and everything to do with committing to better economies of scale in agriculture based on new technology... on top of (reading between the lines) a probable political imperative to deliberately wipe out the clans as organizing bodies, no different than dekulakization or killing all the bison.

AFAICT the Highlands (like much of the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK) aren't wild now, they're a sort of overgrazed brownfield site with damaged drainage patterns that have been reduced to a handful of species.

[nephihaha]

Many of my ancestors were "cleansed" from the Highlands. They were forced out of their homes with threat of violence from the landlords, and their culture and language now almost completely extinct.

That isn't propaganda, it's something barely discussed. You've probably never even studied it before and you won't get a rounded view of it off Wikipedia. In fact some of the incidents (which included burning down homes sometimes of elderly people) would have barely gone recorded if it weren't for the Napier Commission which nearly didn't happen. Most of the incidents never did get recorded, because the victims were already in the big cities and other continents.

Now the billionaire Tetrapak heir wants to remove the few remaining people from the Highlands to finish the process. The super rich were always misanthropic and this is just one more example. They can hide their hatred of the common people behind environmentalism all they like. I doubt they care much for nature either. How much pollution has Tetrapak etc produced from its factories? A tonne more than any crofter ever did. But guess who pays? The peasants like they always did.

The Highlands were not just like "the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK". They were completely different to many of them in multiple ways, even in language. They had been inhabited by people for thousands of years before abusive landlords evicted most of the population. They retained aspects of cultural and social organisation which had disappeared from much of Europe by that time.

This pattern repeats again and again. Most of the Irish were chased off their land by abusive landlords who ground them into poverty and famine. Stalin and other dictators forcibly removed millions of people from their ancestral lands by force and pressure.