Here’s a follow-up to the smallholder farms I mentioned yesterday. Microfinance and it effects on the environment.
I was walking back from doing a radio interview earlier, thinking about some of the conversation. I often talk about walking or biking to work, and it’s become a little bit of a cudgel in some ways. And in some ways, it should be.
But I can walk to work because I live in the small town where my job is. I was thinking about an article I saw recently, about the ever-crowded planet and the difficulty of doing something about over-population without crafting laws that are inhuman. There’s something to that, related to my ‘walking to work’ idea that “we can’t tell people where to live.”
But isn’t that what we’ve been doing anyway? Encouraging people to live in certain places, and selling them houses and cars without including the prices of the negative externalities of living/driving there. That’s how they could live there. Otherwise – and now many are realizing this – they couldn’t live there.
Anyway. As you were.