permaculture

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

Yes, Manhattanites have a smaller footprint than average Americans, but Owen 
ignores all their ecological costs outside of dwellings and transportation. 
Individuals have smaller apartments etc., but the ecological costs of 
building and maintaining those places inside the dense city is not counted. 
The ecological costs of all they consume, food included, is not counted, and 
there's no reason to expect they consume less by being in Manhattan.

My impression is rural people survived better than city people in the 
Depression. My own family experience bears that out, according to my parents' 
generation. When things get really nasty out there again, I suspect the 
farmer won't have to look far to sell food.

paul@largocreekfarms.com
http://medicinehill.net
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 10/18/2004 at 1:58 PM Toby Hemenway wrote:

>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
>
>
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