but yes, “cities” in and of themselves are not the culprit — country living can be just as unsustainable as city living.

sarah: on the topic of books that provide concrete steps individuals can take to reduce their ecological footprint, i would highly recommend Jim Merkel’s “Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth.”

with humour, humility, and ingenuity, Merkel offers the practical tools, the ethical justifications, and the inspiration needed to drastically reduce both your spending and your resource-consumption. it really is the sort of book that could change a person’s whole way of life.

signed,
dave (aka “dispatch,” aka briarpatch’s editor)

This article takes a good idea (the eco-footprint model) and misapplies it in an attempt to vilify cities. It’s about affluence - no matter where you live. Why not use the model to find an optimum density for human habitation? If each of us needs 1.8 Ha, then perhaps we should all live in suburbs…

First of all, as another poster above rightly pointed out, far from being the “natural order of things”, the nations of the west are wealthy overwhelmingly because we went in, concquored the lands now known as the “third world, undermined and destroyed their traditional ways of life (which were often very sustainable compared to ours), and exploited their labour and resources.

Secondly, far from them being lazy, I would submit to you that people in the third world freequently work longer and harder, for far less reward, than any of us in the rich world can even imagine. Do you think that you can run a family farm, with none of the conveniences of modern technology or very few of them, and not work from dawn to dusk? Additionally, why do you think that large multi-national companies are so fond of outsourcing production to the third world? It’s because many of those countries have, under threat of economic withdrawal from said multinationals among other threats, little to no legislation protecting the rights of workers, meaning that people are more often than not required to work longer shifts than our countries have seen in a century, often under dangerous and/or poisonous working conditions. I’m talking about people, including children, working eight, ten and even fourteen hour shifts in such conditions for significantly less than we over here accept as minimum wage. So don’t talk about third world people being lazy! If you had to live their lives, I daresay that rather than prospering, you’d be dead from exhaustion, not to mention malnutrition, within a week, a month at most.

Mr. Rees. Fascinating article. Do your books contain any suggestions which individuals living in modern cities in the North can do to lessen the size of our personal ecological footprint?

This is not a static ‘order’, but a balance that is currently imbalanced needs to rebalance. If we ignore and deny, it will rebalance violently. We problem solve now because if we DON’T the planet is toast!

Your response fails to recognize the main point of the above article: that the North’s standard of living is built on the resources and labour — the wealth — of the South. How it got this way requires understanding the rather brutal and violent history of colonialism: “we” took it from “them,” and we continue to do so. Perhaps you find it soothing to think that “our” industriousness and “their” laziness are the sole causes of the current global wealth disparity, but this view denies the historical record.

The North’s “development” actually depends upon the South’s “underdevelopment” — our wealth is only possible because of their poverty. Increasingly, it’s the labour and the resources of those “layabouts in the third world” and “foreigners,” to use your rather offensive terminology, that make our unsustainable standard of living possible.

You state that “Foreigners need to be educated that some things just are the way they are.” If you think that this unequitable and unjust state of affairs can be maintained simply by “educating” the majority of the world’s people that the “natural order of things” is for the North to take what the South has and squander it, leaving the majority of the world’s people with nothing to eat while we go on consuming four Earths-worth of resources, I’d be curious to hear exactly how you plan to convince them.

To learn more about how the North got so rich on the backs of the poor, I’d recommend picking up the following:

* The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World by Immanuel Wallerstein

* Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development by David Harvey

* Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance by Michael Hudson

Happy reading.

The structure of the cities themselves; narrow streets, open markets, and cities otherwise built for travel on foot promote a type of lifestyle that encourages sustainable living. On the other hand, modern urban sprawls (e.g. the Puget Sound area) encourage travelling by other means. Growing up travelling by car to the grocery store, shopping, and to see friends has made many to think it’s the norm. The only people who took mass transit were those who couldn’t afford to travel by car.

I believe individual wealth is a poor indicator of sustainable living. The aforementioned points indicate how a person who (obviously there’s many factors more than this) may have had more money, a higher education, and perhaps - even more wasteful. To equate wealth or education with sustainable practices is to err greatly, IMO.

I’ll stop prior to going into an essay, but your blog entry is really interesting.