If you look at suburban telecommuters who drive less than 10,000 miles a year, and I know several, the numbers you quote change.
Then factor in the number of those people who grow and preserve large amounts of their own fruit and vegetables, about 50 percent of the suburban telecommuters. Now add on that most of the telecommuters already own a hybrid car that they use for those less than 10,000 miles driven per year and the numbers change even more.
None of them have big golf course lawns so they do not use large amounts of oil based pesticides or fertilizers. They use compost and manure from livestock they own. Often it is goats for milk and cheese, horses for riding and heavy pulling instead of a tractor, but a few have raised the occasional pig or cow for slaughter. One couple even has a solar panel they use to charge their electric lawn and garden tools.
Taking in all of that and much more into account and you find an emerging life style trend that is very Thoreau like without the carbon footprint of the typical suburbanite.
I would bet it beats the carbon footprint of a city dweller, even with the urban efficiencies you mention.
Henry David Thoreau is a hero to many traditional environmentalists. The idea of being self-sufficient among the natural world is a catchy one. But are the real environmentalists those who are actually living in the urban jungle?
Edward Glaeser thinks so. In fact, he says in the Boston Globe today, “If you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to live in the heart of a city.”
In a study, Glaeser, a Harvard economist, and author of the new book Triumph of the City, found that households living in communities of 10,000 or more people used an average of 687 gallons of gas per year, while households in communities of 1,000 or less used an average of 1,164 gallons.
We estimated that a standardized household in Boston’s urban core emits about 6,700 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide per year due to driving habits than an equivalent suburban household. Certainly, when I moved from Cambridge to a woodsy suburb, I spent endless hours in my planet-polluting Subaru. The public transportation that is more common in cities does little to balance the scales.
But it’s not only the car habits of urbanites that make cities greener. Cities use electricity much more efficiently than their suburban foes, he argues.
There are also substantial electricity and home heating differences between cities and suburbs, mostly because suburbanites have bigger homes, even holding income and family size constant. After all, many people move to the suburbs precisely because they want a bigger home. On average, electricity use is 88 percent higher in single-family detached homes than in apartments in buildings with five or more units.
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All told, the standardized suburban household in the Boston area produces almost six tons more carbon dioxide per year than the standardized urban household.
So what’s the best rule to live by if you want to be green? Glaeser: ”Living around trees is less green than living around concrete.”
Photo: Robert Goodwin/Flickr
