I'll add a lot to this, probably in the comments section.
Here goes.
Total land area in the UK is 1,395,000 km²
We have about 60 million people, in 22m households. If you kept, say, 50% of the land for countryside, that divides up as 0.032 km2 per household - about 5.5m x 5.5m. Not much. We do need to live on top of each other a bit then.
Our land use breaks down like this:
19% urban
9% forest
67% agricultural, including grasses and bare fallow
5% other
(http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/land/lduse.htm)
69% of that land is owned by 0.6% of our population.
Hummm...
(http://www.newstatesman.com/200409200005)
Cicero considered farming the best of all Roman occupations. He writes in On Duties: “But of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman…” (wikipedia, Roman agriculture)
About Me
- Briony Greenhill
- I am a musician, teacher and innovator. www.brionygreenhill.com
6 comments:
what if we lived nicely? Ie, in nicely built homes, not crowded. Could our homes be a beautiful part of the 'countryside'? MacKintosh in his book Soil and Soul looks over a glen in the Hebrides and imagines a time, before the land clearances, when it was dotted with stone homes.
We want some wildness, we do, we need it. But if we have some high density housing and some homes in the countryside, we start to imagine more of a possibility of a crofting revival, that thing that so many of us seem to be yearning for: a home. Some roots. A little land. Space to grow vegetables and keep a goat or cow or chickens or all three. We still want to work, but not so much. We want to worry less, live more. Closer to nature, with more time for each other and the good things in life. We want more self-sufficiency, less reliance on Tesco and Topshop.
4 out of 10 UK adults under 35 dream of 'downshifting', according to research from Prudential
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2003/oct/15/changingjobs
Population of Washington State: 6,395,798
Total Land Area: 66,544 square miles
Total Water Area: 4,721 square miles
That's .0104 square miles per person, or 5.5 x 10 feet per person.
Am I doing the math right? It really doesn't seem right. There's a lot of open space in this state and not a whole lot of urban density....
I lived in a county in Southern Utah with a population density of one person per square mile. Cool, huh?
I KNEW something was awry, so this morning I sorted out the math:
The population density of the UK is roughly 246 people/square km. That means everybody gets their own patch of 100 m x 41 m.
The population density of Washington State (where I live) will soon be 100 people/square mile. That means everybody gets their own patch of land that is 1000' x 279'.
There! Not half so bad.
"Before the 1861 abolition of serfdom in Russia, a landowner's estate was often measured by the number of "souls" he owned." (wikipedia, Serfdom)
Also this
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/ecopsychology-the-force-of-nature-504640.html
(Ecopsychology: The force of nature. The Independent, 29 August 2005)
"It is almost de rigueur in some metropolitan circles to yearn for a simpler life in the country. And even those whose ambitions do not stretch to pressing olives or breeding pigs hotfoot it to the mountains or seaside at every opportunity."
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