Re: Working with Optimism Toward the Future

[I nearly forgot to add these before I posted it!
* quotes on past vs. future, city vs. country living.
* lots of people in  3 1/2 -story row-houses in a maritime-climate city
* city support from its own hinterland, with several-months' food storage
* most other cities around the world right now
* Americans' "lack-of-vision" problem.    D.]

At 10:43 25/03/00 -0800, Eric Storm wrote:
>*Finding Clues Where We Can and Working Out a New Future
>*Ranting About How Technologically Based Cities are Unsustainable
>
>Mike wrote:
>> I don't understand your optimism, since there are hardly any 
>> examples as evidence to support you.
>
Eric wrote:
>You are looking into the past to see what we have done.  I am looking into
>the future at how we must change. 
> ... looking at past realities not future possibilities.  With
>that kind of thinking we wouldn't have airplanes, computers, sweaters, or
>knives.  I see DE as all about how we need to _change_ how we think and
>behave, not about living out past patterns that haven't worked.
> ... I'd rather spend time discussing how it might work.
>
>Mike wrote:
>> Compact communities conserve heat by building one house against the 
>> next. They also make it easy to live without a car. Almost everything I 
>> need is within 3 blocks of my house, including public transit ...
Eric wrote:
>Mike, I think our ideas of sustainability are very different. .. I guess 
>it looks entirely feasible to have tens of thousands of people living 
>close 
>together and importing much of what they need or producing it 
>within the cities.  
>When I take a look at the infrastructure and energy (fuel, human, etc.)
>required to create and run such cities, I can't see where all the resources
>would come from and still be sustainable.  ... when
>the amount of energy available per person drops far below where it is now.
>   Looking a hundred years down the road, how will the light rails and
>apartment buildings and buses and all the other things you envision in the
>cities be produced, maintained and run?
>

**  Eric, I think you've fallen into the same thinking-trap you were saying
Mike had, and more than that, your blinkered vision was only on US cities.

**  /I/ would say, at a guess, that the per-person energy cost (for
example) of maintaining large numbers of people in  3 1/2 -story row-houses
in a city with a maritime climate is definitely less than in a one- or
two-family centrally-heated house in the continental climate of most of N.
America. Which is (I'm guessing) what your alternative to living in cities
comes down to.

**  Such accommodation is very common in cities in most of Europe, even in
the parts only slightly affected by Gulf-stream warming.

**  That's the living-space; the person- and goods-transport also needs to
be considered. My guess is that, in the 10,000 to 50,000 range, a city can
be supported by short-distance transport from its own hinterland (with
several-months' food storage for winters). This sort of transport could be
a mix from the past and future; renewable energy sources (e.g. hydro- and
wind-energy, hydrogen or methane fuel cells, etc.) would enable the
necessaries, some desirables, and the occasional luxury to be brought into
the city and distributed so as to be available on foot or bicycle. Again as
is usually done in most other cities around the world right now (except for
the use of diesel fuel instead of renewables).

**  The houses and some of the buses here in NZ (& in many parts of the
world) are a good 30 years old; we have a thriving repair industry to keep
them going. Being "built to last" is so common a concept here that it has
become something of a joke. It certainly is the aspect of technology that
much of the USA seems to have discarded (to the benefit of the richest 5%).

**  To me, the "lack-of-vision" problem is too often caused by Americans'
provincialism, "what I see around me, right here and now, is what has to 
be".

David.
(David MacClement) d1v9d@bigfoot.com 
www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/3142/Pg1-AD11.html
 or better: http://www.emucities.com.au/member/davd/
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