Full stop at “city is more efficient” Individuals not requiring an auto don’t necessarily use less gas, nor does lacking necessity prevent them from buying autos. Houston, TX is a city of 5 million or something & everyone drives.
But even that city which is practically all suburban is more efficient at getting water, recycling waste, distributing food/goods, services & basic shelter than those same 5 million people would be if they were spread out in some vast rural setting. Where they would produce their own food? Or something?
My household produces food, I’m rural. The buildings on our spread were essentially built by the previous inhabitants with only some help from specialists like electricians/plumbers.
I suppose if I stopped there it’d support some of the contentions present?
But I can’t stop there. We have services, propane & wood delivery, electricity etc. Well water, but 160’ wells don’t get dug by homesteaders & require electric pumps or a lot of manual effort to utilize.
Our roads, which we drive on, must be maintained. Okay, so until I’m almost at the highway it’s a gravel road for me, but that still needs a grader & additional aggregate several times a year, which requires a water truck to keep the dust down, & in the winter it requires a plow. My particular gravel road is 10-12 kilometers servicing less than 100 people on 50 or so spreads over thousands of acres. Each spread has at least a quarter kilometer lane or road to the main residence, usually more, sometimes much more if there are remote outbuildings.
When we drive we go to get all the things we don’t grow or raise or craft ourselves. That’s like, everything. I’m 25 kilometers from a store, any store, or gas. In rural speak we might say “Only 25 kilometers”.
We all have trailers to hitch to our cars or trucks or can borrow one to go & get tons of goods that had to be shipped from cities to reach us.
It’s not all doom & gloom. My place has a nice solar array, a solar water heater, underground cold storage, Canada’s lack of any need for air conditioning & even though we aren’t ourselves farmers we have lots of fruit trees, a huge garden producing you-name-it & we can a lot of it for winter, chickens, soon to have bees. So we do produce some of our own heat & electricity, bushels & bushels of food as well as eggs & some meat (free range forage, doesn’t even require a ton of chicken feed).
The woodlots on our spread produce way more than we need for heating, but the way things work is that it is better for me to pay a proper woodsman to bring 3-4 cords of seasoned, split wood in the back of a huge dumptruck. Then all I have to do is spend a day stacking it, instead of spending a week or more chopping & splitting & storing every year so that after 3 years I could have proper seasoned wood of my own each year.
Telling ya, held against what we consume & the extra trouble to consume it all here & I’m telling you: Cities are efficient.
Let’s not put aside either what I -don’t- have, at least not without driving much, much further.
City-class theatres, universities, medical complexes, museums, it’s a long list but it boils down to the benefit of people, together.
Specialists in our society, only possible through food production that must be successful enough to produce a surplus that can support specialists, social & political strata, non-food-producing minds & bodies that explain how we went from hunter-gatherers covered in fleas to creatures capable of space travel in a scant 15,000 years.
Impossible without cities. The scientific advancements that allow modern food production to support so many persons per farmed acre were primarily a result of cities, not farms.
I would say that if we abandoned cities to live a clean that never was we would also be abandoning the one slim hope we have of evading the all the trouble we cause: the next technological breakthrough.
Microbes → People → Cities
Centralization works at every level.
BTW cities can & do outperform rural on recycling per person due to higher participation/compliance rates.
In developed countries, food is mainly for food. Only a small percentage gets to people. Scroll up & I’ll bet a vegan or something has pointed out x wastage/GHG per calorie or x pounds of grain = 1 pound of protein. Srsly, our food eats way more than we do.
In closing, I agree, I could have a lower carbon imprint than any city dweller if I chose too.
But I’m no Charles Ingalls & not even the Amish or Shakers or Mennonites or any other group can claim a individual footprint smaller than a true urban dweller that practices/tries to practice conservation, of which there are more every day & more needed.
None of my neighbours, some of which are hardcore hippies, will be trading in their Vanagons for buckboard wagons & only going to town once a month or less.
& if the 5-6 million urban people within 500 or so kilometers of me tried to leave the city… they better turn south or something…
