Ah, the suburbs. Safe, quiet, green. Every American's dream, right? A soothing retreat from the workaday world. A place to proudly inhabit one's home/castle. A gentle setting for raising one's kids. The impulse that drove the development of the suburbs seems reasonable or at least easy to understand. But the fact remains that suburban America was built on numerous unhealthy, un-neighborly and unsustainable assumptions. Kids who live in suburban housing developments--many of which do not even have sidewalks--cannot safely bike or walk places and so must be driven instead. Often housing is located at a distance too remote to other daily necessities for it to be practical to do anything other than drive. Indirectly the development of suburbs has led to disconnected children with poor fitness. Likewise, the tendency for suburban families to inhabit their cars when they are not inhabiting their homes means that they miss opportunities to connect with neighbors and others who live nearby. Finally, the car culture that is fostered in suburban settings contributes to pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, road congestion, auto fatalities (there are more people on the road, right?) and numerous other negative, unintended consequences.
If you believe that we've reached Peak Oil on this planet--and there is a lot of scientific/geologic evidence out there suggesting that we have--then you have to imagine that systems dependent on petroleum are going to eventually break down. Suburban development has been made possible by access to cheap and apparently limitless fossil fuel energy. We wouldn't, after all, consider commuting 30 or 40 miles each day if gasoline was $15.00/gallon. We wouldn't consider building 2,500+ square foot homes if it cost us at least as much in dollars each month to heat them. Folks, the fact is, life in the suburbs cannot be sustained. Biofuels--which, by the way, have to be grown and therefore displace food production--can't fill our gas tanks, keep our computers running, heat our homes and power our lights. Why do we assume limitlessness when our resources are finite? We need to re-group and re-localize. And we need to do it now.
An interesting essay linking the current housing crisis and peak oil can be found at: http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/06/peak-suburbia.html
I need to devote more time and attention to generating ideas that support local developments and local economies. One way that I do that is with this blog. I hope some of you will share your ideas on ways to embrace re-localization as an answer to our very fragile and unsustainable way of life. For other ideas you might visit: http://lawnstogardens.com.
As one nearby neighborhood sign noted: "We're All In This Together."
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