[permaculture] Corn Ethanol's Dirty Little Secret
Toby Hemenway
toby at patternliteracy.com
Sun Sep 2 00:52:27 EDT 2007
A cliche-breaking book that I read a while back, "Sprawl: a compact
history" by Robert Bruegmann, shows that there are a lot of
misconceptions about the nature of sprawl and its causes and cures.
Breugmann points out that the northeastern US is denser than most of
Europe (Germany is 598 people/sq mi, France is half that, versus
Connecticut at 723 or New Jersey at 1183. New York State is much denser
than France. US big cities and suburbs are denser than the average in
the world. Europe's sprawl is at least as bad as the US's--look at
London and Paris. One fact that amazed me was that the greater Los
Angeles area, stereotyped as the essence of sprawl, is now denser than
the greater New York area. There is no reason, other than cheap gasoline
and an anti-transit attitude, that the US couldn't have superb transit
in its metropolitan areas if we wished it.
Toby
http://patternliteracy.com
> "Guyton Durnin" <gwdurnin at hotmail.com> wrote:
> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
> The US will never look like Europe. We are way to spread out to be able to
> have a similar mass transit system. Sprawl is a condition that is most
> common in the US; few other countries experience it. Instead, they just
> have gridlock.
>
>
>
>
>
More information about the permaculture
mailing list