permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

There's a thought-provoking article in the latest (Oct 18) New Yorker
Magazine. "Green Manhattan" by David Owen argues that Manhattanites have a
far smaller ecological footprint than the average American, urban, rural, or
suburban. Hardly anyone drives cars, dwellings are tiny (compare even a
wealthy person's Park Avenue apartment with a typical McMansion), and
per-capita energy use is very low, since far less energy per person is used
to heat and cool a big apartment building than single-family dwellings
housing the same population. No, they aren't growing their food, but then,
neither are most other Americans (or people in similar countries).

I know I'm using far fewer resources in the city than I did in the country.
My truck sits unused for weeks at a time, electric and gas bills are much
lower, and my water use is a fraction of what it was since I'm not
irrigating all those fruit trees. And Portland is hardly Manhattan.

People in rural areas could consume fewer resources, since they can grow
much more food than people with small or no yards, heat with wood from their
land, and find alternatives to cars. But none of those is the case in most
rural places (in overdeveloped countries). I needed a car to go anywhere
from my rural home. I had a whole septic system instead of a bit of drain
pipe and a tiny fraction of a treatment plant. So I think many cities may
currently consume fewer resources per capita than suburbs or ruralities
(excepting insane cities like LA, which is essentially suburbia). Or are
there big eco-footprint items I'm forgetting? I don't want to paint this as
a city-vs-country argument. Neither is doing very well vis-à-vis
sustainability right now.

In past depressions, city people have generally done better than country,
because the combined economic power in cities has been able to pull in
resources better than spread-out folks in the country, and denser human
networks can create survival systems more easily. But that's been in times
when resources were available and only money to buy them was lacking. When
oil (and thus everything else) is scarce, the story may be very different.
However, if a city-edge farmer can bring goods into town and sell them all
in one trip, versus having to travel much farther to find people scattered
all over a rural area, the farmer will more likely go to town (rural CSA
models excepted).

We'll probably know how it turns out before too long.

Toby
www.patternliteracy.com