Micro-dust and the abyss of nothingness: desertification, deforestation, population density, and livestock density

Abbas Goya

According to available data, the area currently occupied by nearly 8 billion people for housing and urban infrastructure amounts to only about one percent of the planet’s total habitable land—roughly 1.5 million square kilometers. In other words, an area smaller than Iran is sufficient to accommodate the entire human population. Contrary to popular science-fiction narratives, humanity’s problem is not a lack of space, nor is there any necessity to “conquer other planets.”

All of the world’s 64 million kilometers of roads, together with roughly 2.5 billion housing units and other built infrastructure (excluding open spaces), would also fit into an area smaller than Iran. The real question, however, is not whether this is physically possible, but whether it is desirable for everyone—or even a large portion of humanity—to live at extremely high densities in one place. The answer is clearly no.

Urbanization has a history stretching back several thousand years, perhaps even ten thousand. While the precise indicators of urbanization vary across historical periods, one constant remains: the concentration of population, production, and services. Throughout history, higher population density has been associated with lower production and infrastructure costs.

Yet while urban life has existed in many social formations, large-scale rural-to-urban migration is a phenomenon specific to capitalism. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, only about 4 percent of the world’s population—roughly 19 million people—lived in cities. By 1900, this figure had risen to over 16 percent (270 million). In 1950, urban residents accounted for about 30 percent of the global population (750 million). Today, that share has reached 57.5 percent, or more than 4.6 billion people.

To understand the relationship between capitalism, land use, and population density, percentages alone are misleading. What matters is the absolute growth of the urban population. In just the past seventy years, nearly 4 billion people have been added to the world’s cities.

The dominant response to this massive influx has been the verticalization of cities. In this regard, several Chinese megacities now lead the world in both height and density. From a cost perspective, the logic is straightforward: the smaller the urban footprint and the taller the buildings, the cheaper it becomes to construct roads, provide transportation, and deliver public services. Education, healthcare, and welfare systems are significantly less expensive to operate in dense urban environments than in rural areas or dispersed settlements.

However, in countries where workers have failed to secure meaningful social and economic gains—including Iran, much of South and Southeast Asia, and large parts of Africa—urbanization has largely meant the expansion of poverty and slums. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 60 percent of the urban population lives in slums, often without access to clean water, sanitation, energy, or waste-management systems. This raises a fundamental question: where does tolerable urbanization end?

A society oriented toward human well-being—and toward the well-being of other living beings—can design settlements that coexist with nature and maintain reasonable population densities. But when the overriding goal is the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, the outcome is the proliferation of inhumane megacities.

Consider the Yangtze River Delta in China, home to more than 115 million people, occupying an area smaller than Iran’s Isfahan Province. The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau region, with around 75 million inhabitants, covers an area comparable to East Azerbaijan Province. Altogether, nearly 900 million people living in the world’s 45 largest metropolitan regions are compressed into an area less than one-third the size of Iran.

These are not neutral planning outcomes; they represent capitalism’s toxic solution to housing vast populations in confined spaces at extreme and inhuman densities.

Class contradictions—particularly under capitalism—are nowhere more visible than in the use of land. Industrial agriculture, the most extensive form of human intervention in nature since the Neolithic Revolution 10,000–13,000 years ago, illustrates this clearly. Since then, the planet has lost roughly one-third of its forests. Half of this destruction occurred over thousands of years; the other half took place within a single century—the twentieth. Of the original 60 million square kilometers of forest, only 40 million remain today.

Although deforestation has slowed compared to the last century, an area roughly the size of Bangladesh continues to be cleared each year. Why? Largely due to the expansion of agricultural land. This expansion appears necessary at first glance, but in reality it is not. About 77 percent of global agricultural output is used to feed livestock, which ultimately supplies only 18 percent of humanity’s calories and 37 percent of its protein.

Livestock—from cattle and sheep to chickens, pigs, fish, and even bees—are raised under appalling conditions in industrial farms. Moreover, more than 15 percent of global methane emissions come from the belching of over a billion cows. Even setting aside the damage caused by chemical fertilizers, soil degradation, and massive freshwater consumption, this is an industry that generates enormous profits while providing minimal nutritional benefit. Its workers are brutally exploited, animals are subjected to extreme cruelty, and the planet itself is driven toward ecological collapse.

In Iran, one of the clearest expressions of this crisis is the dust phenomenon. Official reports indicate that climate change has extended the monsoon season in Sistan and Baluchestan from four months to six. At the same time, Iran’s deserts are expanding by nearly one million hectares. The drying of wetlands and their conversion into dust-producing zones has played a central role in accelerating desertification. According to the Natural Resources Organization, 43 percent of the country now falls within critical micro-dust zones, and the number of desert provinces has increased from 14 in 2003 to approximately 21 today.

From population densities of over 100,000 people per square mile in Philippine cities, to the hellish conditions of livestock in industrial farms; from deforestation to desertification and micro-dust—these are all expressions of a single social system. It is a system whose daily operation destroys land and endangers life, a system whose very raison d’être is the accumulation of profit.

These realities not only reinforce the case for rejecting capitalism; they demonstrate that criticism alone is insufficient. What is required is organization, resistance, and revolutionary action.

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