man i feel your pain ARG... compromises always leave some blood on the walls. well done for listening to your inner yearning to live more appropriately than the model the cultural forces were pushing you towards. you certainly have a more interesting story to tell because of your choices, and those years of better sleep will help you stick around longer, and help educate future generations. i'm sure your efforts to hew to principle have done much to encourage others to strive similarly.

great diary, paul. well written and personal. i really liked your inclusiveness.

@magnifico... i see it differently. the means used to reduce carbon eventually first used more, (the 'speeding up to get to the rest spot' syndrome.)

ultimately though the means to get there (simpler, less consumption-driven life) can be upgraded, what's important is to keep the thread unbroken between city and farm, and to keep alive the knowledge and skills.

with the global exodus towards cities, any move the other way is worthwhile in the interests of balance.

there are already too many overcrowded cities, overdependent on fossil fueled supply lines.

some people will still move from countryside to city without any economic pistol goading them, for though farming supplies physical needs, it cannot concentrate culture like cities can, so we need transport and travel between the two, though i suspect it will have to be a lot more ecologically justifiable than popping out to the local bigbox supermarket a few dozen driving miles away for something trivial, or just going out for a spin.

it comes down to country culture desperately needing right sustenance revival, and public and/or private transport that is both carbon neutral and plentiful, both tough nuts to crack, though i believe we the people have all kinds of intelligent solutions that are being and have been suppressed in order to keep the dying elephant stagger on another few miles.

but die it must, and unless more people do similarly to paul, there will be far too many city folk wondering where their next meals are coming from, and realising late in the game that farming is not going to be as simple as chemfert-plough-herbicide-combine-truck-to-table has been making it since the beginning of the last century.

it's not whether we can't afford it, we have to, instead of dismissing it we need to make it easier and above all ecologically cheaper, that way removing, by incremental amelioration, the validity of your objection.

some things are worth the cost, most aren't. time's lessons will add considerably to our somewhat atrophied powers of discrimination in this regard, methinks.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

ARGeezer:

I read The Limits to Growth when it first came out in paperback and it seemed well presented and intuitively obvious to me.

How unserious™ of you. Don't you know that book is still not even wrong  even after its third edition?

In 2008 Graham Turner at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia published a paper called "A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality".^[5][6] It examined the past thirty years of reality with the predictions made in 1972 and found that changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21st century.^[7]

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

ARGeezer:

And were Paul 27 today I suspect he would chose a different path.

I am in a very small minority among my immediate coworkers riding the tram to work. Most drive, some of them up to 30 miles (in heavy traffic, so lots of pollution). And the development model I see in the outskirts in Madrid is just like California's suburban sprawl. Outdoor malls with fast food restaurants, pillbox shopping and entertainment centres, the lot.

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

for defending me - but Magnifico has a legitimate point. I can list some mitigating factors, but, ultimately, I was exploiting the situation/system. I got mine, so to speak.

The diary, however, was simply using my experience to try to demonstrate some lifestyle - what shall I call them? - imperatives, perhaps. Skill development, physical labor, simple recreation, and political/social involvement are my prescriptions. They are all important factors in the present and - in my opinion - will be more important in the future - especially in the U.S.A.

I left out some of the more speculative elements of the rural/urban interface in the future. Melo touched on some of them in his comment. The interdependence of the two sectors is skewed a bit: the urban areas are more dependent on the rural for essentials. And I don't think that urbanites - and suburbanites - appreciate that fact. When disruption occurs, the urban areas are going to need plenty of spokespersons with some 'standing', such as myself, to maintain the interface. The simple fact is that we can survive out here on the land, and the urban areas cannot - at least they cannot survive intact.

paul spencer