Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

I think this is mostly a straw man or nut picking. From what I can tell, there aren't many rural people arguing that rural transit policy should be imposed on urban areas, but rather the debate is about whether or not policies that arguably make sense in an urban environment should be imposed on the rest of the country. Notably, rural people have enough exposure to urban environments that they understand that urban environments differ from rural environments, but not so much the other way around: e.g., everyone watches the same entertainment media that is almost invariably set in urban environments and most people have traveled to an urban area for business or pleasure, but there's very little media set in a rural environment and "rural tourism" isn't exactly a popular pastime of urbanites.

> I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces.

Sure, I actually agree with a lot of this. I would like to see American cities and suburbs become more walkable, and I'm sure the car industry lobbied for car-centric planning, jay-walking laws, etc. My criticism isn't that anti-car policies are unfounded or they don't make sense anywhere, but that the anti-car movement is generally ignorant (in a literal sense, not pejoratively) of the non-urban world.

> We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population?

Yes, outside of urban areas we certainly can do this for the foreseeable future. Most of America isn't constrained by space.

> I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand.

No one is dismissing these concerns out of hand--I'm only arguing that the policies that policies which assume a high degree of density don't make sense in areas where that assumption is incorrect. This seems almost tautological.

> but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life.

Fully agree. I think we could have a lot more productive conversations if we started by reimagining collectively rather than asserting how others should live their lives (without demonstrating any understanding of their concerns).

Feeding cows grain in a CAFO setting allows them to rapidly put on weight and turnover their herds faster. Not doing so would result in dramatically lower yields per acre of grassland.

The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. Of course it'll vary from person to person and family to family. I think urban environments offer children much more freedom than corresponding suburban environments, while being safer. There's much more mobility and access to things outside of the house, which I'd argue significantly enriches childhood experience and leads to more adaptable adults.

As an adult, I'm overjoyed by the ease with which I can get to things around my city. I never have to deal with traffic, I can walk to three different grocery stores in under fifteen minutes. I have dozens of restaurants in similar distance, and I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home. I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. (A co-worker of mine lives out in the suburbs of our city, which are denser than most, and takes the light rail into work; half an hour on the train, 5 minute walk from the station. If he took a car, we'd need parking for him and everyone else that had one, and roads for it [see again, induced demand in my post above], and I wouldn't be able to walk to work myself). A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads. Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn.

As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. We can invest in more public services since we're not committed endlessly to maintaining the cost-sink of asphalt plains. [1] Public transit is an amazing economic equalizer as well: In a suburban environment, you must have a reliable car to make it to work. If you're too poor (or just starting out) to afford a car, or if it's unreliable, that's going to severely curtail your available job pool. (There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences; my highschool girlfriend spent two hours on the bus, one way, to work, because her family only had one car, and her mother needed it for her job. That's four hours a day she can't use to cook, or study [she could try, but a bus is far from an ideal study environment], or sleep. If our town had better transit, or if our town wasn't so dense that it took two hours to travel from house to shopping district, it'd be a very different story.)

This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. I feel like putting these at the end really undercuts their significance, but we never seem to talk about these facts. Car accidents are the eighth-leading cause of death in the US [2]. Imagine the economic savings, and the amount of medical resources, we could free up by reducing that. Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...

At a 50x loss in efficiency.

According to this guy [1], the US could feed 800 million people with the grain spent on cows today. Not grass, grain.

[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...