permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

On 10/18/04 2:37 PM, "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com> wrote:

> Manhattanites have a smaller footprint than average Americans, but Owen
> ignores all their ecological costs outside of dwellings and transportation.

Dwellings and transportation make up a huge portion of our impacts on the
environment, so focusing on them makes sense. Food is the only other factor
I can think of that is as significant (see below about food).
> Individuals have smaller apartments etc., but the ecological costs of 
> building
> and maintaining those places inside the dense city is not counted.

Environmental costs of building apartments are less than housing an equal
number of people in single-family dwellings-- smaller dwellings, shared
walls, floors, ceilings, roofs, plumbing, wiring, etc, so far fewer
resources used. Also fewer roads and sidewalks, sewer pipes, etc., per
person. And thus maintenance will be less impact too, plus fewer resources
are needed to heat and cool multi-family dwellings. And moving materials
into a city site, per capita, will use less fuel than building a sprawling
suburb or a mess of 5-acre mini-farms. In the country, Owen uses 7 times the
electricity he used in NYC. An average apartment in San Francisco uses 1/5
the heating fuel per capita that a tract house out in Davis uses.

> 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.

But no reason to expect they consume more either, so the total city resource
use is less per capita. Cities actually might use less resources getting
food and other consumables, because goods probably travel fewer miles from
rail and trucking hubs in cities versus being spread over a sprawling
suburban ring or thousands of square miles of rural area. In a perfect
world, of course, we'd all be growing food locally, so cities might require
more shipping, not less. But in the present case, I think resources used for
distribution are less in cities.

> My impression is rural people survived better than city people in the
> Depression.

Intuition would suggest that's so, but it's not the case. I was basing my
statement on books by Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and other sociologists
who've studied cities. They show that cities have almost always done better
in depressions. They have the economic power to direct resources to them at
the expense of non-city dwellers. In the Depression, farmers initially did
better in terms of food, but city dwellers got all the coal (hard to repair
tools at a farm forge without it), medicine, metal goods, fuel, and
eventually, most of the food because the combined economic power and higher
wages in cities (even with rampant unemployment) plus sheer political pull
(where do gov't officials work?) meant they got first dibs on all the
resources. If you've got a food riot in Detroit and one in East Podunk,
where do you think the food trucks are going to be sent? There's a reason
that the Okies weren't from cities.

It's possible that an oil-scarcity based depression may look very different,
but most claims of "we've never seen anything like this before" turn out to
be wrong--like the New Economy, which wound up obeying the same rules that
any other economy obeys. So I'll bet an oil-based depression will follow
familiar patterns. Having lived in a rural area, I know that not very many
people are growing food there; most farmers don't have gardens and they buy
food at the store (excepting the minority of small market farmers). The
potential is great in the country, but then, the cities could be growing an
awful lot of food, too. And the resources to do it are concentrated in
cities. Compare shipping seeds to a central, walkable warehouse that serves
150,000 urban gardeners as opposed to a suburban site where 150,000 people
are spread over the US suburban average of 1500 per square mile, or 100
square miles (probably strung out along a freeway instead of in a block).
And the numbers are even worse in the country. The seeds will be shipped to
the city. 

So I realize that intuition would suggest that city-dwellers will fare worse
in bad times, but that's not been the case historically (except in plagues).
Urban economic, social, and political power, as well as the incredible
synergies of human networks, have made and could continue to make cities a
very good place to be when things get bad.

Toby
www.patternliteracy.com