26bt Rotational Occupation
Permanent periodic migration of human populations to distribute the benefits and reduce the pressures of place living in an analogous way to crop rotation.
Cf. Migration, Human Migration
What types of places will rotate? Cities, rural areas, land, ocean? What will rotate? People, structures? What will be the distribution and the borders between zones? How frequent will the rotation be? How long will it last?
Are there precedents for this? How have they worked? What can we learn from them? What are the benefits and challenges of this? For individuals, communities, and the environment? What are the drawbacks and limitations of this approach? How plausible is this approach and what are the steps to implementation?
Examples
Serious proposals exist across several scales, with varying degrees of development.
Local and Landscape Scale
Transhumance as a historical and possible future practice: seasonal movement of people and livestock between highland and lowland pastures. It functions as rotational occupation in practice, resting ecosystems while in use elsewhere. UNESCO inscribed Mediterranean transhumance on its intangible cultural heritage list in 2019.
Cf. pastoralism.
Some Aboriginal Australian land management implicitly involves rotational territorial use, coordinated through seasonal ceremony.
Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2011.
Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome: Magabala, 2014.
Regional and National Scale
Managed retreat is the most active contemporary policy framework: planned relocation of settlements from climate-vulnerable zones (coastlines, floodplains, wildfire belts). This does not yet include reoccupying vacated land, but the logic is rotational over longer timescales as conditions change.
Siders, A. R. “Managed Retreat in the United States.” One Earth 1, no. 2 (2019): 216–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.09.008.
Hino, Miyuki, Christopher B. Field, and Katharine J. Mach. “Managed Retreat as a Response to Natural Hazard Risk.” Nature Climate Change 7, no. 5 (2017): 364–70. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3252.
Several states have built entirely new capitals to redistribute development pressure (Brasília, Naypyidaw, Putrajaya, Sejong). These are partial, unidirectional examples rather than cycles, but point toward state-scale spatial redistribution logic. The diplomats in such places and beyond also already rotate, and so are military, other professional polulations.
Continental and Global Scale
Half-Earth (E. O. Wilson) proposes dedicating half the planet's surface to biodiversity reserves, concentrating human activity in the remainder. It implies permanent retreat rather than rotation, but some extensions of the idea introduce periodic cycling.
Wilson, Edward O. Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. New York: Liveright, 2016.
Büscher, Bram, Robert Fletcher, Dan Brockington, Chris Sandbrook, William M. Adams, Lisa Campbell, Catherine Corson, et al. “Half-Earth or Whole Earth? Radical Ideas for Conservation, and Their Implications.” Oryx 51, no. 3 (2017): 407–10. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0030605316001228.
30x30 / Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (2022) includes the CBD target to formally protect 30% of land and ocean by 2030. Not rotational, but institutionally establishes the principle of zoning human impact at the global scale.
Rewilding proposals (Rewilding Europe, Rewilding Britain) involve deliberate removal of human occupation from degraded landscapes, with ecosystem succession as the goal. Rotation is implied if reoccupation follows recovery.
Tree, Isabella. Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. London: Picador, 2019.
Pettorelli, Nathalie, Sarah M. Durant, and Johan T. Du Toit, eds. Rewilding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Pleistocene Park (Siberia), an active project to restore grassland steppe by removing human pressure and reintroducing megafauna. An example of deliberate rotational land recovery at large scale.
Zimov, Sergey A. “Pleistocene Park: Return of the Mammoth’s Ecosystem.” Science 308, no. 5723 (2005): 796–98. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1113442.
Planetary boundaries framework (Rockström et al.) defines safe operating space for humanity and implicitly supports spatial rotation logic at Earth-system scale.
Rockström, Johan, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin, Eric Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009). https://doi.org/10.5751/es-03180-140232.
Steffen, Will, Katherine Richardson, Johan Rockström, Sarah E. Cornell, Ingo Fetzer, Elena M. Bennett, Reinette Biggs, et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet.” Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 1259855. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1259855.
Planetary and Deep-Future Scale
Cf. Space Exploration, Space Colonies
Settlements in space as a strategy to relieve Earth entirely, allowing planetary-scale recovery.
Longtermist and existential risk literature addresses rotation-like strategies (interplanetary dispersal, Earth recovery periods) as risk-distribution proposals. Cf. Longtermism