permaculture

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

Granted that in general apartments and mass transit can be less wasteful of 
resources, but that's about it. Owen only looks at individual people's 
footprint living in those apartments and taking the subway. The big picture 
tells the opposite story. He forgets how all the infrastructure got there in 
the first place, and forgets that most of those millions also have to have 
someplace to work (terribly wasteful office buildings), and apparently that 
doesn't count. Owen doesn't consider the enormous cost in resources to build 
those apartments in Manhattan versus cost of apartments elsewhere. Or the 
unbelievably high cost of materials, fossil fuels, and labor to construct 
subways in Manhattan, compared to mass transit in most other places.

The argument on transportation and distribution of goods is equally 
questionable. Fighting traffic for hours in densely populated areas wastes 
fossil fuel just like driving all over the countryside.  And stats on 
electricity usage are misleading if we compare apples and oranges. City 
infrastructure itself burns enormous amounts of fossil fuel. I live in a 
large county with no stoplights or sidewalks at all, and only the county seat 
with 1,500 people has a municipal sewer system. And rural looks even better 
if the "electricity-hogging" farm produces more of its own needs (and its 
neighbors needs) instead of having them shipped in from far away.

>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.

Translation: cities have the political power to rob the countryside, so go 
with the winners. Sounds like the story of agribusiness to me, not 
Permaculture.

>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.

No but the city slickers WERE from cities. Millions of city dwellers were 
thrown out of work and many rode the rails looking for work and food in the 
Depression.  "Brother, can you spare a dime?"  Of course if people weren't 
living in Detroit or East Podunk and were growing most of their own, any 
"food riot" could be handled by the local sherrif's deputy.  My parents' 
families had no money in the Depression, but they never missed a meal or went 
without basic needs. They lived outside Hutchinson, Kansas with a small 
garden and root cellar.

>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.

Only for those elites with lots of money to pay exhorbitant prices in severe 
shortages, and trust fund babies who don't need paying jobs to survive. The 
rest of us would starve in the city.

I agree there's a time and place for dense population and mass transit. But 
it's certainly not ecologically better in Manhattan.

paul@largocreekfarms.com
http://medicinehill.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 10/18/2004 at 11:19 PM Toby Hemenway wrote:

>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
>
>
>
>
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