week 17 / 2026: city and country

“Ribonucleic acid freak out, the power of prayer / long halls of science, and all the lunatics committed there...”

Greetings from Malmö, where the sky is blue, the air is crisp, and the deadlines just keep coming. This week we’re thinking about the world outside the city, and wondering what exactly we mean when we talk about granting rights to the natural world.

OK, back to the format. Please join me, as we spelunk the more informative corners of the internet…

• among the pixels
• between the pages
• lookback
• ticked off

among the pixels

Let’s start with this well-designed look at rural depopulation in Europe.

Europe’s overall population has grown over recent decades – yet half of all cities and municipalities have lost residents.

The map-based visualisation really makes the point powerfully, but—wearing our foresight hats—it’s the implications that are particularly interesting. As the article notes, the flow of population into cities puts additional strain on local government in rural areas, as the tax base shrinks and a pervasive sense of decline settles over the smaller towns and villages.

My good friend and colleague Andrew Curry has had an eye on this for about a decade now; here’s something he wrote in the aftermath of the UK elections in 2021:

In short, then, we are moving to a new form of political alignment based on geography rather than social class. The expression of this political alignment is about forms of identity, but its base is in the realignment of the productive economy around the city. This is where the money is, and because of the strong age cohort effects associated with the emerging post-materialist values, this is also where the energy is.

It’s worth recalling that the pandemic was still ongoing at this point—a point when there was a lot of excited talk (here in Sweden, at least) about a new urban exodus. I haven’t looked at the figures, but the rapid decline of that discourse strongly suggests it was a momentary thing; for the most part, choosing to live in a rural area is an expression of relative advantage. Feeling trapped there by circumstance, however, is exactly the opposite… and that’s the engine of the political disaffection that attends the rural decline discussed in the first article.

Which is ironic, in the literal and the vernacular sense of that term. As the article notes, things would be worse still were it not for immigration—and while the headlines focus on the performative cruelty of immigration rhetoric (which is part of the point of such policy positions), the details suggest that even the more nationalist governments understand the economic necessity of inward migration, even as they’ve painted themselves into a corner by relying on demonisation as a positioning strategy.

The irony, then, is that rural voters are in many ways right to be worried about migration, but it’s domestic migration that’s doing the damage to the places where they live, not international migration. Admittedly, most of the benefits of the latter accrue to the cities, but there’s no reason that should be so: programmes of rural revitalisation, in which immigrants were incentivised and supported to settle in non-urban areas, could easily be put together.

The main difficulty—besides the need for a political climb-down after decades of counter-productive fear-mongering—would be the latent hostility to outsiders that the rhetoric has served to entrench. However, all the data suggests that fear of otherness correlates strongly homogeneity, and that few things do a better job of changing attitudes than actually living and working alongside people from different backgrounds. Seeing some life—and, yes, some economic activity—return to their towns might help disaffected rural folk see things in a different light.

Let’s move even further out from the city and into the wilds. Here’s a great essay that riffs on the philosophical writings of one Aldo Leopold, a USian wilderness ranger from the first half of the C20th, and in particular his much-discussed injunction to “think like a mountain”.

‘Thinking like a mountain’ is what Leopold hadn’t been doing all those years he was killing wolves. To think this way, he writes, is to realise that a mountain lives in mortal fear of its deer just as the deer live in fear of the wolves, and just as humans sometimes live in fear of predators, too. It means seeing how everything is connected and how you cannot intervene in just one part of some environment without affecting some other aspect.

As Simpson notes, this way of seeing doesn’t sound as radical now as it did when he wrote it, three quarters of a century ago. But to talk in terms of fear puts a different edge on it:

Leopold does not ask us to erase ourselves from the land, nor to self-sacrificingly suppress our needs and concerns for some abstract whole. He is more demanding. Can we enlarge our sense of responsibility, stretch our moral imagination across species and timescales, and learn to live with the discomforts that genuine membership entails? Can we learn to coexist with the fear that arises from our relationships with the natural world? The reality is that not everyone is ready.

This is, I feel, a useful counter (if not a full-on corrective) to the well-intentioned but nonetheless overly cuddly approach of much ecological discourse, which talks a good game about “multi-species ethics” and “more-than-human” perspectives—often cribbed in shallow forms from the far more complex worldviews of various indigenous peoples—but which often amounts in practice to thinking fondly of urban foxes or contemplating a dabble with urban beekeeping.

For the record, I am pro-urban foxes, and would be happy to see more beehives around town! But the point is that ecosystemic balance requires more than simply increasing the presence of the aspects of nature that we deem to be nice.

Simpson brings forward Leopold in order to remind us that the flipside of life is death—a topic which we in the West are woefully unable to contemplate as anything other than a risk to be arbitraged away. We celebrate the granting of personhood to watercourses, but to understand the river as a person is to understand that it has as much right to flood as we have to fish in it.

So here, perhaps, is another good reason to revitalise the rural. Urban living, and the seemingly ex nihilo magic trick of infrastructure that makes it possible, has made us fearless, in a sense—but it has made us anything but brave.

While we’re talking about rights for non-human things, here’s Cory Doctorow making a succinct version of an argument that I’ve been trying to formulate concisely for years.

(As someone who writes online, I’ve had twenty years to get accustomed to Cory’s uncanny ability to do this, which is in no small part due to the man’s relentless work ethic—though it helps that he's as sharp as a tack, too.)

It’s been around for some time, but it’s becoming very popular at present to build on the rights-for-nature argument and claim that we should extend the same rights and personhood to software constructs. Quoth Cory:

For years, I'd uncritically accepted that argument, but after hearing [Michael] Pollan speak, I changed my mind. Rather than treating Siri with respect because it impersonates a woman, we should demand that Siri stop impersonating a woman. I don't thank my Unix shell when I pipe a command to grep and get the output that I'm looking for, and I don't thank my pocket-knife when it slices through the tape on a parcel. I can appreciate that these are well-made tools and value their thoughtful design, but that doesn't mean I have to respect them in the way that I would respect a person.

That way lies madness – the madness that leads us to ascribe personalities to corporations and declare some of them to be "immoral" and others to be "moral," which is always and forever a dead end...

Amen, brother.

And I would add that continuing down this path is exactly how you end up with a Butlerian Jihad—which, to be clear, is not an outcome I want to witness.

between the pages

It’s been a very slow week for reading offline, due to workload and other life stuff, but I did manage to Heinrich’s The Homing Instinct, as discussed last week.

I remain ambivalent about it; it’s not a bad book, but the author’s reductionism seems such a strange thing when sat alongside his obvious passion for natural world. It makes a little more sense after the final few chapters, though, which are more memoir-ish. They focus on Heinrich’s sense of connection to his New England settler predecessors, as well as to his roots in rural Germany before the second world war, but also on his life-long passion for hunting.

His connection to the land is genuine, but it is nonetheless a connection framed in terms of mastery and ownership—albeit a sort of custodianship much removed from the more rapacious extractivism of untrammelled capital. Without wanting to go too deep down a theoretical rabbit-ole, what can be seen here is the foundational link between the scientific-determinist worldview and the idea, inherited from the religions of the book, that the world is a gift from god to man.

I have no doubt Heinrich, like many scientists, would scoff at any suggestion of such a connection—but it is there, nonetheless, and it has shaped the world in ways that we do not fully appreciate or understand. It’s high time I went back to some of the books that trace that story, and wrote about them here.

lookback

Another busy week. April has been very intense, and that’s reflected in my lack of reading. It’s not that I’ve not had the time, but rather that I’ve lacked the mental bandwidth in the evenings to properly enjoy my reading—and if I’m not enjoying it, I tend to stop, because I know I won’t actually be taking any of it in.

There’s a few more hectic days to go, but then it’s Valborg and May Day here in Sweden, which are both “red days”—and while I’ll likely not be having a true long weekend, in the sense of not working at all, I am looking forward to rather more breathing room than there’s been of late!

ticked off

• Fourteen hours on PROJECT MUNICIPAL. (Grinding out an interim report deliverable. Not the most thrilling aspect of my work, perhaps, but you can still get a good flow state going once you get in the zone, and that comes with its own satisfacations. It’s even nicer when the results are well received.)
• Six hours on PROJECT ADRIATIC. (Applying for arts funding is just as time-consuming as any other sort, especially when it involves learning a whole new set of narrative conventions, and developing the first version of standard documents like CVs and portfolios. But hey, that’s the way the game is played!)
• Four hours on PROJECT LUDIC. (The latest Media Evolution collaborative foresight cycle is off the blocks! It’s going to be fun learning more about the world of games and game development.)
• Four hours of admyn. (Accounting, emails, bit and bobs.)
• Four hours of preparing for and talking at my Rogue Union spark session. (Many thanks to the WA subscribers who turned up! It’s always nice to see some familiar names in the gallery.)
• Three hours on PROJECT CHAPERONE. (And another three, most likely, after these weeknotes go out. Polishing up a chapter about narrative prototyping for an academic book.)
• Three hours on these here weeknotes.
• Two hours of art practice. (Squeezed in last Sunday afternoon; not very productive or successful, but hey, you’ve gotta keep turning up and doing the work.)
• And ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

Right then, that’s all for this week; I’ve got a chapter to finish. It’s good to have you around, and I hope all’s well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 17 of 2026. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend!