Which is more eco and community friendly?

[IllegalArgument]

I'm reading a very interesting book on sprawl and I'm yet again thinking about moving into DC. I currently live in Reston, which is a very nice planned community. Very nice, meaning lots of trees, walking paths, public pools, and lots of restrictions on what you can build.

So, my question and discussion topic is. Which is more eco-friendly? Anecdotes encourged, especially from people who have moved from the suburbs into cities

All the stuff the below is completely IMHO, so add your own + and -.

By the way, I have always lived in the suburbs.

Countryside:
Pluses: Lots of green space, the option to build eco friendly structures, use solar and wind, grow your own food if you like

Negatives: You're developing yet more wilds, you must have a car, long commutes, you are the leading edge of sprawl, no public transportation

Suburbs:
Pluses: Shorter commutes, if it's well planned, decent amount of green space, might be able to use more eco-friendly power supplies, but doubtful. Some public trans
Negatives: Still must have a car, sprawl, traffic

City:
Pluses: Car is not neccesary, public transportation, many things are available by foot. More cultural attractions nearby
Negatives: Eco-friendly energy pretty much not available, polution, at least some cities, traffic though strangely not as bad as the suburbs I have read

The list is a bit random, but I wanted to provide for some food.

One way to think of it, is why do you like where you live? Would you raise kids there?

 

[Tex]

I've got to believe that living in a city with good public transportation is the most eco-friendly. Transportation is the key. Not only do you have to travel shorter distances (generally) to get to where you need to go (work, school, store), but you generally share the transportation with others, meaning less energy consumed per capita. As for eco-friendly energy not being available in the city, that may be true in practice, but there's no reason it need be so. You can't put up a windmill but the energy could still be generated cleanly and transported to the city.

Now living in a city may be a "dirtier" experience for the individual, since you would be living in close contact with everybody else's trash and pollution, but I think the per capita effect on the overall environment would be minimized.

 

[DaChew]

I'm going with country side.

Gives you the option to plant trees over cleared farm land which will result in cleaning more air than you dirty. Hunt your own meat. You draw your own water from your own well only when you need it rather than having gigantic municipal pumps running 24 hours a day to ensure pressure. Sewage disposal will be handled by your own septic system. Wind power is an option but remember that wind mills can screw up TV reception. It's also easier to install a geothermal heating system or build underground.

 

[Number Six]

I don't know which is most eco friendly but while I find disucssions like this to be theoretically interesting I don't find them very useful from a practical point of view because you can always go further and further with the analysis and in the end it's hard to know what is truly best.

For instance, say you hunt your own meat. Okay, so you don't have to rely on a slaughterhouse to kill the animal or a truck to bring it to market and all that stuff. But you do have to either own a lot of land or else have access to some kind of hunting preserve, which ties up that resource. And you have to use guns and ammo (i.e., resources) to hunt. And unless you're going to hunt in your back yard then you have to drive to wherever you'll hunt. Of course, you'd have to drive to the grocery store to get meat if you lived in town but you'd be getting a dozen other things during the trip too.

And after you bag your animal you have to bring it home and freeze it, which uses resources. Of course, the grocery store in town has to do that too but they don't have to have a big freezer for just a few people like you and your family have to do. In general there are economies of scale that help the commerical meat industry be more efficient in some respects.

Now all that isn't to say that hunting your own meat isn't more efficient. Maybe it is. But the point is that you'd have to take into account all the things I mentioned above plus fifty others to know the answer. And it's hard to know have enough information about some of those things to make an informed decision.

Also, if you keep going you may find you come to a different problem, namely, when you consider what is most efficient, do you also consider your time and labor? If hunting your own meat is more efficient but it takes an hour a day on average longer than going to the grocery store in town then is the extra time worth it?

I don't know where it is or what the answer to the question is. But more generally I think a good thing is to set up things so that people have a realistic option of making an environmentally friendly choice. Most people don't care enough to go to a lot of time and trouble to do something that is environmentally friendly but they will do ordinary things in their daily lives if it's not a big pain for them to do so. Consequently, a way to have a big impact on the environment is to set things up so that it's easy for lots of people to have a little impact on the environment.

IMO surbabn sprawl isn't a problem per se but rather the problem is that people don't any realistic options _but_ to live in the suburbs.

 

[IllegalArgument]

The book I'm reading talks about that's wrong design-wise with the suburbs. It's very interesting, not so much bashing suburbs as a universal evil, but as poorly designed. Too much segregation between housing of different prices, catering too much to cars. They make a lot of useful suggestions how to improve the suburbs, ecological and community wise.

As for hunting your own meat, I was interested in where people who populate this forum would like to live and why. I don't think many of us here would start hunting our own food in the country regularly.

 

[username]

Something almost always missing from these discussions is why a person would choose to live rurally or in a suburb instead of in a city.

I live on the edge of the suburban/rural type of area. I work in the city.

I can't stand cities. I simply despise the close crowding of sardines, I mean people.

I can't stand the crime that inevitably occurs when people live on top of one another. I can't stand the noise and the pollution.

If not for the fact that most of the high paying jobs are in the cities where the potential work force is larger, I would live more remotely than I do. When I retire I will live further from cities or at least in an area with more land around me.

I like to hike and garden. My idea of a hike is not walking around a paved path running through a corporate park. My idea of gardening is not buying 100 pots and filling them with potting soil and setting them on an apartment balcony.

So which is better? Well for all of you it is better that I live rurally otherwise I would be one of those guys walking into Mcdonalds with a gun and opening fire after I lost it in the rat cage known as the city.

It is also less expensive for me to buy land and build a new, large home on it in the country than it would be for me to buy a 75 year old home of half the size and not even half the yard size in the city.

Schools seem consistently good in the country as well. A tad on the conservative side, but I don't mind that for a K-12 school. In the city the schools stink and feature metal detectors. Not sending my kids there.

 

[Beerina]

I've got to believe that living in a city with good public transportation is the most eco-friendly. Transportation is the key. Not only do you have to travel shorter distances (generally) to get to where you need to go (work, school, store), but you generally share the transportation with others, meaning less energy consumed per capita. As for eco-friendly energy not being available in the city, that may be true in practice, but there's no reason it need be so. You can't put up a windmill but the energy could still be generated cleanly and transported to the city.

Now living in a city may be a "dirtier" experience for the individual, since you would be living in close contact with everybody else's trash and pollution, but I think the per capita effect on the overall environment would be minimized.

Plus, living in a city gives you the benefit of being a member of larger concentrations of humans who will elect officials who will tell the country folk that they (the country folk) must now live as the city folk wish them to live, and must preserve things that the city folk didn't, because the city folk wish it and this bit of fluff makes the city folk feel good, as stroked by the government officials they just elected.

 

[DaChew]

As for hunting your own meat, I was interested in where people who populate this forum would like to live and why. I don't think many of us here would start hunting our own food in the country regularly.

I do. I have deer running through my back yard (I live on 10 acres about a 20 minute drive northeast of Detroit.). Sometimes one of them doesn't make it. Usually in October.