Post by @fasnix
"Cities are Intensive Livestock Systems, and Humans are the Cattle
You are more dependent than you think.
Chapter 1: The City Is Not an Escape from Ecology
We do not think of ourselves as livestock - not the way we think of pigs, sheep or cows. But perhaps we should, and the place to start is where most of us live.
Cities are the ecological equivalent of intensive livestock systems for Homo sapiens.
That may sound extreme, because modern culture has trained us to see cities as evidence of human advancement. The city is where humanity supposedly became civilised. It is where we conduct and celebrate culture, politics, finance, medicine and technology, and tell ourselves that we have risen above the constraints of land, soil, weather and food.
That interpretation mistakes abstraction for ecological transcendence.
Humans do not escape ecology by building cities. Through cities, we reorganise ecological dependence into forms that are invisible to us in our daily lives.
Ignorance by design.
A feedlot concentrates animals in a simplified artificial environment. Their food is produced elsewhere. Their waste becomes a technical problem. Their movement is constrained. Their bodies are reorganised around production and output.
The modern city concentrates human bodies at high density, imports energy and biomass from elsewhere, converts those flows into economic activity and waste, and presents the arrangement as civilisation.
Feedlots and cities perform the same function for different species.
(...)"
https://adrianlambert.substack.com/p/cities-are-intensive-livestock-systems
