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.

When it comes to defining and solving Major World Problems, I think the key is efficiency, so I'll try to cover 3 in as many weeks.

1. Climate Change-The Problem Climate change has been happening for years. Millions and millions of years, including both ice ages and times of tropical paradise in places as unlikely as North Dakota. Changes in climate have caused ocean levels to rise and fall, created and evaporated vast inland seas, covered whole continents alternatively in jungles and ice, and plowed gigantic furrows in the earth's crust.

Today, Climate Change is sells cars, light bulbs, diapers, and virtually every other product you thought was mature and immune to radical, game changing innovation. This is an enormous triumph for the companies that sell such things, whose enterprises needed the proverbial "shot in the arm." Other beneficiaries include scientists looking for grants, politicians seeking an issue, or people who have implicitly rejected organized religion yet still have a basic human desire to believe in something that requires both faith and sacrifice.

The only loser in this highly profitable frenzy is respect for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Nearly all the products, infrastructure, and ridiculously ascetic proposals seem to have one thing in common. The use more energy, and have more environmental impact, than the old, lower margin way of doing things. Cars with nickle-cadmium batteries, ethanol fuel, mercury lined light bulbs, pv solar panels, nuclear power, all have a net negative effect on the environment compared to the the alternative products.

Since the gullibility of consumers is matched only by their total inability to do simple math, education is not a viable solution. There's just too many individuals and companies with a vested interest in seeing Climate Change established as fact, and very few who don't*. What this situation really calls for is a good placebo, but is that the real solution, and how would it work? (I'll post what I think it is later this week, I'm interested in hearing everyone's opinion first)

*Some people put the oil companies in this category, but they're not really. From a strategic point of view they know they're going to sell oil until they run out of leases, Climate Change is a good segway revenue sources (see Shell's windfarms). Some companies, such as Exxon, just know their leases will last longer than Climate Change as we know it.