You would do better directing you ire against the British upper classes, who just removed the tax on internal flights, and block any attempt to provide alternatives to driving -- to give two examples that come to mind.
Bit of a weak and snarky straw man, friend. I'm absolutely not against immigration - what I am against is immigration to the UK, and any other already overcrowded place for that matter, when it necessarily results in destruction of the environment else destruction of quality of life for the population. Pod life will be miserable (intentionally miserable?) when it comes.
I agree with you on the ruling classes - who are ethnically distinct from and apparently contemptuous of the indigenous population, dating back to Norman times.
unless born there
> which is even more crowded than the UK
at least for now (0.37% growth vs. 0.48).
Or are you against people moving from the countryside to London too?
Ah, so you'd like emigrate...off the Earth? /s
Short term I think we have to find a way to allow more sustainable small multi-polar village life happen so we don’t all crowd into the same dozen or so mega-cities on the planet
I think the current impact on the environment demonstrates that we need to (slowly) reduce our population - UK included.
However, according to the statistics, we can maintain a certain level of immigration while also reducing our population - and in fact need to do so to avoid an age pyramid that is so far inverted such that it causes great economic problems.
So while I agree with you that immigration ought to be restricted such that we don't continue population growth, we don't actually need to reduce it by much to make that the case.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
I highly doubt immigration is affecting our population that much. Plus, as recent news has shown, UK is nothing without our migrant workers.
If the UK replaces all its farmland with forest then they have to import all their food, right? That's not great for the environment, or the UK. A balanced approach seems reasonable.
Insofar as the presence of humanity is the enemy of biodiversity, the problem is suburban sprawl and excessive rural development, and the answer is urban density. Immigration is only a facet of that larger paradigm.
i.e. live in the pod?
They say that if everyone lived like a New Yorker, you could fit the world population in Texas. I imagine that if everyone in the UK lived like a Londoner, you could fit the non-London population in a London 2?
But before you come back and say "yeah well not everyone wants to be an urban hipster" and this turns into an "urban elite" conversation, have you ever thought about the flip side of that, a sense of "rural elite"? Land is limited. Space is limited. There's something odd about people with all the property in the world saying "this is all mine, keep everyone else out, there's not enough to go around, mine." And they don't have as much space as the average citizen, they have THE MOST SPACE.
Like, if this isn't a race or nationalism thing, would [parent] be cool with a mass exodus of Londoners who suddenly developed a taste for, I dunno, fox hunting or whatever? If not, why?
At any rate: living in the country and worrying about immigrants is ridiculous. They come to the cities to look for work, everyone knows that. Regarding biodiversity, I wouldn't support any kind of program that forced people to move to pods in the city, but we should certainly work on making cities more appealing so that people will make more sustainable choices.
I think there's definitely a percentage of humans who are just hard-wired not to live in cities. I for one can't stand urban living, I'd be a depressed alcoholic within months of moving to a place like London I think. Don't get me wrong I'm not one of those "I hate cities and everyone who lives in them" sorts, I visit cities fairly often and appreciate their qualities but after a while I literally start tasting the air and feel gross for it. There's nothing that could make dense living in a concrete environment appealing to me long-term, and I think there's a bit of a presumptious attitude in some parts of this discussion* that we can just coerce, gaslight, or "nudge" people until they're mentally ground down enough to grudgingly live in a city. Personally I'd emmigrate long before we reached this point - I've had enough "nudges" for a lifetime over the last two years!
Remote working has been a real blessing for me, and hopefully things like Starlink will be even better for people who fall into the "knowledge workers who instinctively dislike urban life" category. I also recognise that this is an enormous privilege though, most of society isn't in a position to take advantage of these things and there's all sorts of issues caused by people moving to less well-off areas and driving up house prices and other services out of the reach of people who've lived their lives there. I'm not sure what the solution is really, but I definitely think there's shades of grey.
* not your post by any means, I think you make good points
That also avoids us all taxing the same few nearby hiking trails like I see in some urban areas.