Urban and Rural Futures Revisited

Cities, Peak Oil, and Sustainability

(Published in Permaculture Activist #58, November, 2005)

In mid-August I drove to a party in the country outside of Portland, Oregon. Twenty miles of freeway took me to a two-lane road that wound ten miles up steep forested hills and down through remote valleys. As the roads grew narrower and less traveled, I began to wonder how, if gas hits $5 or $10 a gallon, people and supplies will reach these isolated spots. What kind of post-oil vehicle will climb this hilly, winding road that quite literally goes nowhere—a converted truck run on home-made biodigested methane? Then, after I arrived at the secluded acreage, I questioned whether my hosts could really supply most of their own needs, just the two of them and their kids.

I think these isolated places will disappear the way that Roman outposts in Britain and Gaul did during the empire’s decline.

In a recent issue of this magazine (Permaculture Activist 54 p. 2, “Designing Beyond Disaster”) I wrote that when I moved to the country 11 years ago I assumed that rural people use fewer resources than urbanites, but now that I’m back in the city I can see that isn’t true. That article has generated more response than any other I’ve written, and has been reprinted around the Web many times, often with some furious comments. Obviously, a lot of people are thinking about the same topics. I’d like to re-visit the subject, respond to some of the commentary, elaborate on my reasoning, and describe some new thoughts on the subject.

First, a clarification on word usage. When I speak of rural, I generally mean places where people live on acreage outside of towns, with most services too far to walk to. Small towns decreasingly can be called rural, as their takeover by chain stores, engulfment by sprawl, and reliance on non-local goods renders many indistinguishable from suburbs.

Inspiration for my article came from a piece called “Green Manhattan” by David Owen in the October 18, 2004 New Yorker. Owen argued that Manhattanites have a far smaller ecological footprint than the average American, whether urban, rural, or suburban. In Manhattan, hardly anyone drives cars, dwellings are tiny (even a ritzy Park Avenue apartment is much smaller than a typical suburban McMansion), and per-capita energy use is relatively low, since far less energy per person is used to heat and cool an apartment building than single-family dwellings housing the same population. No, New Yorkers aren't growing their food, but then, neither are most other Americans.

But, you ask, what about all of New York’s infrastructure? It’s got enormous water pipes, thousands of miles of roads, and so forth. Doesn’t that use a ridiculous amount of resources? Well, yes. But that densely compacted infrastructure serves many million people. Owen pointed out that if the inhabitants of New York City were spread out at the same density of the small Connecticut town where he now lives, they would occupy all six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey. Think of all the roads, wires, pipes, fuel, and so on, those spread-out suburbanites would consume—far more than what New York uses now. Living in rural Connecticut, Owen uses seven times the electricity he used in Manhattan. Other non-urban sites fare as badly. An average apartment in San Francisco uses one-fifth the heating fuel per capita burned by a tract house out in the suburbs. Given two present-day urban and rural populations of equal size, the urban one has a much smaller ecological footprint.

Some readers of my article thought I was saying that cities are paragons of ecological living. Please. Little in the US, let alone an enormous city like New York, is sustainable. Manhattan may use a bit less energy than some places, but the practice of pouring billions of tons of