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Can We Stay in the
Suburbs?
Aaron Newton
There is little doubt that during that last 60 years we here
in America have transformed our manmade landscape in a way
that is fundamentally different from any form of human habitation
ever known. While many have flocked to this new way of organizing
the spaces in which we live, critics have noticed the shortcomings
and have loudly pointed them out. It's been suggested that
the development of the suburbs here in the U.S. was a really
bad idea. Author James Kunstler describes suburbia as, "the
greatest misallocation of wealth in human history." The
ability of most citizens to own and cheaply operate an automobile
means we've had access to a level of mobility never before
experienced. The outgrowth of which has been a sprawling pattern
of living that changed the rules about how and where we live,
work, and play and how we get there and back. We are now more
spread out than ever before, mostly getting back and forth
from one place to another by driving alone in our cars. This
could turn out to be a really bad thing. Continue this article
on our website at www.simplyhealthyfair.net/speakeraaronnewton-suburbs.htm
As the cost of fueling
those cars increases, it's becoming obvious we've foolishly
put too many of our eggs into one basket. And as America wakes
up to the realities of a changing climate, it's also painfully
obvious that soloing around in a huge fleet of carbon emitters
isn't the most thoughtful way to transport ourselves from
one side of suburbia to the other. The question is, as the
expansive nature of suburban life becomes too expensive, both
economically and ecologically, what will we do with this great
"misallocation" of wealth?
Will we, as some suggest,
simply abandon this experiment? The likelihood of moving everyone
out of suburbia and into mixed use, walkable communities is
quite remote. Likewise moving everyone from the suburbs out
into the countryside and onto farms is unlikely. To be sure
many, many people will move. Some people are already choosing
to move to places where they can safely walk and bike to meet
more of their daily needs. Others are choosing to reruralize,
but completely depopulating suburban America is a project
we have neither the fiscal resources nor the fossil fuel energy
necessary to accomplish. It seems reasonable to assume that
lots of people are going to continue to live in the suburban
communities we've created all over this country during the
last 60 years.
Will these places simply
devolve into slums with roving bands of thieves stripping
building materials and other valuables from abandoned homes
and formerly homeless drug addicts burning them down while
trying to keep warm? They'll probably be some of that especially
if the housing crisis worseness (and it will) and the government
continues to address it largely by bailing out banks. From
a recent article in The Atlantic, At Windy Ridge, a recently
built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte,
North Carolina, 81 of the community's 132 small, vinyl-sided
houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have
kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses;
drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In
December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son's bedroom
and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who'd moved to Windy Ridge
from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, "I
thought I'd bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined
in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen."
That is to say, this
is already a problem. And with more people defaulting on their
mortgages and losing their jobs as the economy slumps we're
likely to see this scenario play out repeatedly. But it's
important to take a moment and assess the possibilities presented
by the problem. That is, if we're going to do anything other
than whistle while a large number of the communities in this
country turn into the slums of the 21st century, we're going
to have to comprehensively address the problem and that means
starting with an assessment of not only the disadvantages
of suburban America but the advantages we might have in this
arrangement of living. Could the problem actually turn out
to be the solution?
One of the results of a declining in the availability of oil
and other fossil fuel resources will undoubtedly be a rise
in the cost of food or even outright shortages of certain
types of calories we've grown accustom to acquiring quite
easily. Lots of people have written about this. It's seems
increasingly obvious that we're going to have to grow food
differently if we have any chance of adapting to a low energy
lifestyle with any semblance of grace. Growing food means
using land for some sort of agriculture. Exactly what land
we use is entirely up to us. It's worth noting that while
David Pimentel et al have suggested that it takes 1.8 acres
of land to feed each of us now. That number could be reduced
to 1.2 acres per person while still meeting the nutritional
needs of the average American. But by 2050 we are likely to
have only 0.6 acres person both because of the rise in global
population and the loss of land due to desertification, salinization
and soil depletion. In the very near future we're not going
to have enough land to feed ourselves in the manner in which
we've been doing so. Where will more "new" land
come from?
The suburbs were born
out of an idea that each man could have his own cottage in
the forest, his own unmolested paradise outside of the nastys
of the industrializing cities and still go to work in those
cities each day. (Just how many of the problems we're facing
today are born out of us wanting to both have and eat our
cake?) The idea was that a man could still earn a living in
the dirty city but return to his pristine piece of land where
his wife and children could be free from pollution, crime,
brown people, noise and traffic. It never quite worked out
that way, which is to say it has, since the beginning, failed
to achieve what this experiment set out to accomplish; to
say nothing of the negative aspects of this way of developing
our countryside. But nevertheless, the end result is that
a lot of people live on small amounts of land in communities
that aren't completely paved over with asphalt and concrete.
Many of us here in this country have access to land albeit
in small amounts. This provides us with the most important
resource needed to address the rising cost of food- soil.
In other words, the fact that we've chopped up much of the
existing farmland that once surrounded major metropolitan
areas in this country and parceled it out in fairly small
sizes to many more people ultimately may or may not prove
to have been a really bad idea. But, not only is it the hand
we have now been dealt, it might turn out to have been a fairly
nifty way of developing and maintaining a moderately democratic
land ownership policy here in America. We still have, albeit
in another form and with a reduction in the quantity and quality
of soil ready for food production, a reasonable amount of
land for growing food.
Arthur C. Nelson, director
of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked
carefully at trends in American demographics, construction,
house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent
consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth
rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing.
The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus
of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of
an acre or more) by 2025-that's roughly 40 percent of the
large-lot homes in existence today.
What do you do with a surplus of more than 22 million large
lot homes during a period of failing industrial agriculture
and rising food costs? You establish new microfarms of course.
Those people who do continue to live in the suburbs either
because they can not move or because they don't want to, could
feed themselves by using this land to grow food for themselves
and their neighbors. The food could be grown largely free
from fossil fuel inputs and would be produced very close to
the people who will eventually eat it. This solves two of
the really big problems associated with the industrial model
of agriculture. It provides a ready land base not for the
reinstitution of plantation style farming whereby wealthy
landowners who profited from energy descent reintroduce a
horrible form of feudalism that enslaves the former paper
pushing population of America who are likely to lose their
jobs as the American economy continues to decline. No, this
land has already been subdivided into manageable parcels that
could serve as the basis for a revolution in agriculture.
Mention this idea to
an ordinary citizen unaware of the prospects we face in the
near future and you're likely to get a host of responses about
how unlikely or unreasonable such a solution might be. It's
likely we haven't reached the pain threshed necessary to get
the real attention of average Americans, but one response
certainly will be that we can't grow very much food by just
tearing out our lawns. This of course isn't true at all.
Several recent studies
suggest that small scale, sustainable agriculture is actually
more productive per unit of land than industrial farming.
We've come to think of farming efficiency in terms of human
labor, with the adoption of the idea that the fewer people
doing it the better. But in terms of what the land can yield,
we're better off farming it intensely on smaller plots of
land and the math is there to back up that claim. Yields can
be substantial even on such small plots as would be available
to the average suburbanite.
The Dervaes family of
project Path to Freedom provides an excellent example of what
is possible in our front and backyards. They live on an urban
lot of about 1/5th of an acre. They cultivate about 1/10th
of an acre or about 4,400 square feet. That's 210 feet X 210
feet. In other words, that's not much land and yet they consistently
produce more than 6,000 lbs of vegetables annually. The four
adults living there eat about 85% of their vegetarian diet
from the yard during the summer months and are still able
to get more than half of what they eat out of their gardens
in the winter. This and they sell some produce to nearby restaurants.
It should be noted that they live in southern California where
the weather is extremely generous to those who growing food
(and have access to water), but Eliot Coleman and Barbara
Damrosch point out in Four-Seasons Harvest: Organic Vegetables
from You Home Garden All Year Long, even people living in
Maine are capable of growing a tremendous amount and variety
of nutritional, tasty food regardless of where they live.
And let us not forget
all those paper pushers I just hand pink slips to earlier
in this post. Our government and a lot of well meaning business-as-usual
types are going to put together all sorts of plans to try
and reemploy all the people who lose their jobs in the post
carbon economy. There is already talk of a kind of "Green
Works Project Administration" like the WPA seen during
the New Deal era. At one time the WPA was the largest employee
base in the country and was designed as a way to build up
American infrastructure while reemploying those negatively
affected by the Great Depression. Such an effort now could
get much needed projects up and run in terms of new forms
of energy that aren't fossil fuel based. To say nothing of
conservation and energy efficiency projects such as home insulation
that needs to be done on a national scale. But this or any
other response that doesn't include a large measure of self
sufficiency for the average American would be missing out
on a great opportunity to redemocratize America. It is painfully
obvious that we are at our greatest disadvantage when we are
in debt to others for the basics we need in order to survive.
Growing more of our own food in our own personal gardens,
parks, school yards and community gardens is a great way to
address this problem while providing for the nutritional shortfall
likely to be experienced in the wake of the decline of industrial
agriculture.
Luckily the sun is still
shining and even those of us who live in heavily wooded neighborhoods
have the option of modifying the canopy of those trees to
gain access to sunlight. The soil is still under our feet
and we can use it going forward to meet more of our food needs.
The suburbs also offer a certain amount of impervious surfaces
or surfaces that shed water. This is often a problem in many
communities. The idea is that if too many roofs tops and too
many roadways shed too much water during a rainstorm. The
result is a high volume of water after a storm that has to
be diverted out of these neighborhoods before rushing into
our creeks, streams and rivers. This often leads to flooding
and/or substantial amounts of soil runoff, the number one
water pollution problem in many communities. I find it annoyingly
amusing that while my county has storm water problems to such
an extent that we are under EPA mandate to address this problem,
we are simultaneously experiencing water restrictions due
to the drought in southeastern America. In other words, we
have two water problems where I live, too much water and not
enough. It is too simple to suggest that we collect some of
what we get where it falls and use it?
The point is that the
structures of suburbia- specifically rooftops and roadways-
could be used to gather the water we would need to grow food
for ourselves. This could be especially important going forward
as global climate changes throws weather curveball after curveball
at us. The solution is to designing simple, elegant ways to
collect this water for use during times between rain storms.
600 gallons of water can be collected from 1,000 square feet
of rooftop in just a 1" rainstorm. Many McMansions are
much larger and as such have the capacity to gather much more
rain. It's worth noting that 65% of the water we use in our
homes each day goes to irrigation, toilet flushing and laundry.
Rainwater could be used to do all three with simple filtration.
Doing this could go a long way towards restoring the health
of our waterways.
In his paper Garden Agriculture:
A revolution in efficient water use, David Holmgren notes
that "Australian suburbs are no more densely populated
than the world's most densely populated agricultural regions."
Anecdotal evidence suggests that American suburbs are populated
in roughly the same way. This suggests to me that it is at
least within the realm of possibility that the suburbs could
be transformed in a way that helps us: A) take advantage of
new soil for growing food, B) foster a redemocratization of
America by offering a reasonable amount of food self sufficiency
for families during the coming era of change and volatility
and C) capture the rain water necessary to address the deepening
water crisis being experienced worldwide. We may find that
in a time in which we are unable to build out grand new responses
to peak oil and climate change, agriculturally at least, we
may not have to. We might do best to just stay put.
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