Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world.
This is just people leaving the peasant villages and going to live in greater density. Effectively, what happened to New England a century back. I see it in parts of Portugal. I’ve seen it up in Czechia.
It’s also an interesting counterpoint to that idea that we’re ripping up the natural world ever more when, in fact, we’re retreating from large land areas.
AFAIUI, 95% of the people live on 10% of the land, and 50% of the people live on 1%………
Go walking around the Japanese countryside is it’s rammed with abandoned houses and farms.
@jgh – Which is what happens when you’re economy revolves around massive companies in the Tokyo-Osaka corridor. All your youth ends up moving their to get jobs.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the Japanese no longer want (or can no longer afford) children.
It also points to our future if we can get rid of the 3rd world cockroaches, because a population which cannot afford proper housing can’t afford kids, so that population is a rapidly declining one.
Demographics is destiny.
@jgh – Which is what happens when your economy revolves around massive companies in the Tokyo-Osaka corridor. All your youth ends up moving there to get jobs.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the Japanese no longer want (or can no longer afford) children.
It also points to our future if we can get rid of the 3rd world cockroaches, because a population which cannot afford proper housing can’t afford kids, so that population is a rapidly declining one.
Demographics is destiny.
I wonder how long this trend will continue. Sweden already has net emigration of recent migrants. If we achieved the same, housing costs would fall. Cheaper houses or bigger ones? If bigger, couples would have more children. (Surveys show they would like to but can’t afford to.)
WFH (ok,ok, put in the quotation marks if you like) means people can work in nice bucolic surroundings. So desertification of the countryside reverses.
Also killing the kulaks and impoverishing the yokels is official Labour policy. So surely won’t work.
Many of the Highland Clearances were the same phenomenon, but earlier because Britain had earlier agricultural and industrial revolutions. The (few) clearances that were forced by the landlords would probably have happened spontaneously if they’d been more patient.
Not that I have any principled objection to landlords refusing to renew leases but I do have objections to some of the detail of their behaviour – there’s a difference between exercising your property rights and choosing to do it in an inhumane way.
And yet still the Scots (mainly of the staunchly SNP voting variety) piss-and-moan about “Tory Absentee Landlords” and “The Highland Clearances” as if it was some earlier incarnation of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust and the (compulsory) Clearances have three things in common, I suspect: (i) They did happen, (ii) The numbers purportedly affected should be treated with scepticism, and (iii) Some reported details of what happened will be false because … well, because that’s the way humans are.
But then all numbers in the public sphere should be treated with scepticism. That used to be one of the points of getting an education: it would improve your sceptical powers.