An Infrastructure Agenda for Rural Eco-Socialism

Bringing library socialism to the countryside

Discussions of rural eco-socialism almost always focus on agriculture. This is understandable, given the enormous negative impacts of industrial ag on people and planet. The urgent necessity of transitioning away from energy-intensive agriculture to prevent climate and biodiversity collapse is indeed a truly pressing crisis.

But for both political and practical reasons, we should also explore what kinds of public goods eco-socialism can offer rural residents. Winning any sort of eco-socialist agenda will require a base of support in the countryside, and building that support will mean proposing and delivering improvements to rural quality of life while regenerating our damaged ecosystem.

Here are some ways we can do it.

Industrial Farms Into Hunting Reserves

Industrial agriculture has transformed vast swaths of the countryside into factory farms: prairies and forests have become mono-crop nutrient mining operations that convert life into commodities. Depressingly, a huge portion of this rural destruction does not even feed hungry people. 45% of all corn grown in the United States is converted into ethanol to be used as a fuel additive, a colossally wasteful form of graft that funnels vast sums of public money to the richest agribusinesses in the world. This ruinous corruption plays a major role in raising the price of food and poisoning our ecosystem. Countless examples of the similar misapplications of rural land abound, from soybeans to alfalfa to cotton and so on.

There are far better uses for the countryside. One way to regenerate our ecosystem while providing high quality food and desirable recreational opportunities is with public hunting grounds. Public hunting grounds would be large tracts of public land restored and managed specifically for hunting. Former industrial monocultures are essentially a blank slate, albeit ones that has been severely degraded in a variety of ways, making them good candidates for conversion to biodiverse, ecologically rich hunting reserves.

The science and practice of managing lands to promote healthy populations of deer, turkey, waterfowl, elk and so on has advanced considerably in the past few decades. But both the land and resources necessary to implement such practices are mostly limited to wealthy private landowners. Eco-socialists should aim to make permanently protected hunting grounds available to all. Such an initiative would improve and beautify the countryside while simultaneously raising living standards--pollution, exploitation, exclusion, and ugliness would be replaced by biodiversity, public goods, and beauty.

Ending subsidies for commodity crops like those listed above would immediately make huge swaths of land available for such an undertaking. Farmers could be retrained and transitioned into land management roles, helping restore and steward the very land they once destroyed. Everyone except the agribusiness giants would be enriched by such a project.

Horse Libraries

Today, horses are for the rich. Without common land and resources to support their finicky diets, veterinary needs, and land requirements, the costs associated with keeping them are insurmountable for most people.

The role of horses and other draft animals has been filled by trucks, ATVs, and snowmobiles. This is a consequence of artificially cheap energy: fossil fuels subsidized at every level of our society--from direct payments to blood-soaked wars to the destruction of our climate--make absurd and ruinous "solutions" cheap compared to their sustainable alternatives. As a result, a job that was once done by animals that eat grass and crap out fertilizer--all while offering companionship, transportation, and fiber to their handlers--is now done by a hunk of metal and plastic that consumes fossil fuels and belches out toxic air pollution, while vandalizing the countryside with noise, erosion, and chemical spills. On top of all that, when a horse dies it becomes soil; when an ATV dies, it becomes noxious trash with an indefinite lifespan.

Replacing every gas-powered utility vehicle on Earth with an electric version is not an ecologically or socially viable solution for a million different reasons, from resource extraction to embodied energy to battery waste and so on. If the costs of fossil fuels rise--as they should, to reflect their myriad negative externalities--a better alternative will be needed.

One solution is horse libraries, a fanciful name for publicly-owned stables. As with any tool that is onerous for one person or family to maintain, horses should be social resources accessible to all, with maintenance provided by the collective wealth of society. This would offer anyone a sustainable source of rural transportation or agricultural draft animals on an as-needed basis. Horses are well-suited to such an arrangement because their chief utility--fast, powerful labor--is hard to replace but infrequently required.

Horse libraries mean that collective ownership would allow for a more efficient use of that resource, while simultaneously guaranteeing a higher level of care than would be provided by private owners. Public horse stables staffed by trained handlers would improve life for both rural people and horses, converting a luxury resource into a public good available to all. Such stables already exist in some places, but they are geared towards recreational use rather than utility. Eco-socialism should seek to expand the scope of those programs and make them universal.

Heated Community Garden Greenhouses

A heated greenhouse is an unparalleled tool for temperate agriculture, offering a vast array of benefits to the cold climate grower. A warm, sunny place where select plants can be overwintered, seeds can be started early, and certain work can go on year round is irreplaceable. The spatial needs for each individual user are small: even an area the size of a drafting table is enough to dramatically increase the yield and efficiency of a large garden.

The problem is that they are expensive and resource-intensive to build and maintain. The solution is to construct community gardens under glass. Allocating a modest space in a heated greenhouse to anyone who wants it would be a minor cost to a municipality or county, but with significant upsides in sustainability and food security.

Most heated greenhouses use fossil fuels for heat, but that can easily be replaced by compost-heating in the form of Jean Pain systems: large, long-lasting woody compost piles containing a specific mix of appropriately prepared materials. A well-built Jean Pain system can continuously provide heat and hot water for up to 18 months, eventually degrading into a mound of rich compost.

Such community greenhouses would allow gardens to begin yielding weeks or months earlier than usual, providing a major boost to local agriculture. They would also allow for the cultivation of a wider array of cultivars, expanding food quality and variety. Such a small investment would act as a meaningful bulwark against rising food costs and fragile supply chains in an ecologically unstable world.

Public Foraging Grounds

Foraging has made a comeback in recent years, powered by media coverage positioning it as a crunchy bourgeois hobby and a haute cuisine trend. Less discussed is the unglamorous foraging that has been a part of rural life for many generations, offering an important source of food with minimal inputs.

The big issue with foraging today is that it exists in a legal and ecological gray area. Much foraging involves trespassing on private land or engaging in activities--like roaming off-trail or over-harvesting--that are prohibited or contribute to problems on public lands. The solution is to create designated public foraging sites on well-suited rural land: agroecological parks, open to all.

Foraging is often understood as the harvesting of plant material from unmanaged land, but this is at odds with its history. All sorts of things have been done to improve the yield of foraging grounds, from scattering mushroom spawn or seeds to planting favorable host species and introducing new cultivars. Humans have shaped ecosystems in countless active and passive ways to create rich foraging grounds since the dawn of time, and we should continue that practice under eco-socialism.

Foraging has always been something of a hybrid form of agriculture, giving it a key advantage: it's a lot less work than full-blown cultivation. Foraging relies primarily on the normal functioning of a wild ecosystem but with thoughtful nudges along the way. Public foraging grounds would utilize the best practices and latest science to produce rich yields for the general public, managed by experts to ensure sustainability and high performance.

We are all entitled to the joy and convenience of harvesting foraged food, and anyone who has emerged from the forest with a 50 lb Chicken of the Woods mushroom can attest just how enriching it can be.

We ought to make that experience the norm via well-managed public foraging grounds.

Community Rail

Transportation in rural areas is awful, both for residents and the environment. Utterly car dependent, rural transportation is exorbitantly expensive and regressive, placing a disproportionate burden on working class residents while requiring massive greenhouse gas emissions, road pollution, and aesthetic degradation, on top of the nightmarish traffic violence.

The answer to all this is community railways. While high speed rail gets all the hype from tech fetishists, old school narrow gauge rail is vastly cheaper to build and maintain. Vintage light rail cars are cheap, abundant, and durably built, ready to go back to work shepherding people and small loads of cargo between farms and villages.

Low speed rail, gondolas, and funiculars connect rural areas across many parts of the world, most notably Switzerland. In the rugged terrain of the Alps, a mix of new and old infrastructure serves farmers, villagers, and visitors across the country, beautifully enhancing the landscape and offering convenient accessibility, while socializing many of the costs of transportation.

The ability to gracefully move around the rural countryside in a railcar is both a pleasure and an important piece of infrastructure that helps densify development around stations, preventing ruinous sprawl development patterns. It is also order of magnitude more energy efficient than cars or busses and chews up far less land.

Such a pleasant, sustainable system should be the norm in any ecological civilization.

---

For daily updates, you can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky, and Mastodon.