Micropanacea

I was going to call this post “Slinking to the High Road” to demonstrate how distraught I felt after being introduced to the concept that urban living might be pulling ahead in the planet-wide race to live green. When our friend brought this up the other day, it seemed rather counterintuitive – a land of sidewalks and cement and neon and fast skyscrapers is more environmentally friendly than, well, ANY alternative? The notion was in stark and disappointing contrast to the idealistic picture my husband and I had been painting for ourselves while reading Wendell Barry aloud on a recent road trip to our friend’s beautiful house in the New Hampshire woods. It was on this same trip that we got to tour her brother's new 15 acre farm and began making plans for our own [sizable] piece of [eventual] paradise.

And we plan to recycle! And compost! And conserve electricity! And water! And grow our own food and raise our own animals and do all sorts of deeply conscientious things. Then suddenly I’m faced the prospect that we might be doing more damage than good the further we stray from the city? Blasphemy!

We were able to take some solace from the fact that most of the evidence we’ve seen so far compares urban living with suburban living (which I have long since accepted as being unappealing at best and flat out mind numbingly evil at worst) rather than with rural living. Also, the studies seem to focus almost entirely on carbon emissions, neglecting discussion on other aspects of healthy and sustainable living, such as the impact on the poor land standing immediately underneath the city, the concentration of human waste and refuse, the effects of pollution on nearby rivers and lakes and sky, etc. These analyses also fall quite short of addressing the social problems created by urban dwelling brings, but since that is not the subject of this blog I’ll let it slide for now.

Still, for those of us interested in curbing our carbon, this info is an interesting look into our residences of choice. Check out Treehugger, Worldchanging, and greeninc for starters. Cities seem to score the most points by utilizing far less transportation energy and having lower heating and air conditioning costs. A recent Brookings study concluded that the average urban carbon footprint was 14 times less than that of a suburban dweller. Nothing to shake a stick at.

All that being said, I still have to believe that a responsible farmer is better than a responsible yuppie any day, so I’ll have to stubbornly stand by my rural aspirations for now, unless any of you can enlighten and persuade me otherwise.