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> and reduce their ecological impact I wonder if this is true. Rural living is less efficient per capita then cities. The distributed electricity and water and

> and reduce their ecological impact I wonder if this is true. Rural living is less efficient per capita then cities. The distributed electricity and water and transportation are less efficient and they have a physically larger impact on the environment. Even the food they grow themselves requires a lot of external inputs which are shipped in via far flung transportation networks and are used less efficiently than they would be at a larger farm.

ch4s3 7y ago
Yeah, it's funny that people always seem to neglect these factors. If you account for food yield per acre, fertilizer input, and the amount of land required for any significant number of people to live like this, it starts to look silly.
coderintherye 7y ago
> Even the food they grow themselves requires a lot of external inputs which are shipped in via far flung transportation networks The author of the article noted they got their fertilizer from a neighbor. A lot of small farmers get dung of some sort from locals and spread it. >The distributed electricity and water and transportation are less efficient Many (most?) homesteaders are off-grid, so not sure this applies either. I think you might be conflating "rural" living with homesteading, which are different. That said, I imagine per capita efficiency is probably more efficient in cities as you said. It all kind of depends on what you do. If you are a rural homesteader and don't drive anywhere and don't fly anywhere, then that's already a big chunk of impact reduced.
jasminnoel 7y ago
Small-scale homesteading doesn't require to be located in a deep rural area. Any suburban house with a lawn can be converted to support gardening, solar panels and even animals if regulation allows it. If you grow edible plants instead of grass, there is a net positive in your carbon footprint.
- TopHand 7y ago
  I often thought that if people were serious about the environment they would grow food instead of lawns. The typical HOA frowns on this though. I was a big fan of John Jeavons back in the 90's. I'm sure he still has a lot of good things to say. http://www.johnjeavons.info/john-jeavons.html http://www.johnjeavons.info/john-jeavons.html
  - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
    I've done that living in the middle of Minneapolis. Half of my back lawn was prairie "garden" and corn and a good portion of the other half was a vegetable garden. The only issue I ever had with neighbors was one concern that my water garden was breeding mosquitos. It wasn't: fish did a good job of seeing to that.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    PSA: Please do soil and environmental status testing in the area first please. Many suburban areas are perfectly fine to live in but may have contaminated soil for natural or manmade reasons.
  - gbrown 7y ago
    And/or native plants. Growing a lawn is an atrocity in an arid climate, and a different kind of travesty where prairie would thrive.
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    Several people in our neighborhood have done this. We've debated it too. No HOA, but the houses are older. If you want a new house, it usually comes with an HOA.
pengaru 7y ago
It really depends on the style of rural living we're talking about. In my poor rural neighborhood most people simply consume substantially less than the average urbanite, and they reuse as much as possible. Since everyone has a lot of space, they tend to keep everything around and repair stuff, make things from disused junk, repurpose materials from disused/broken structures, etc. I've never lived in an urban setting where storage space was so readily available and eyesore messes tolerated that everyone could practice such extreme levels of reuse. I don't even have garbage service at my place. My urban experiences have been exercises in rampant waste and consumerism. There are folks who live an urbanite high-consumption lifestyle rurally, and those people are definitely burning a lot of energy getting everything brought to them continuously. But that seems to be the exception around me at least; those households stand out like a sore thumb, with a UPS truck visiting every day.
- tkgally 7y ago
  > It really depends on the style of rural living we're talking about. It also depends on the style of urban living we're talking about. People living in single-family houses and driving everywhere consume much more resources per person than those living in high-rise apartments and taking public transportation or walking. High population density, in general, means low per-capita consumption. I'm not sure how this argument applies to people living completely off the grid and raising their own food. But many parts of the world have too many people to make that a practical option for more than a tiny minority.
  - secstate 7y ago
    Except that as my sister discovered after moving to the Loop in Chicago, public transportation is great until you need to depend on it. Work doesn't care if you're chronically late because of chronically late trains. Maybe other cities are better here, but before long she was spending 45 minutes commuting 20 miles in a car because at least then she could choose to give herself more time, and swing by the store on the way home. Full caveat, I live on a homestead much like this story (except we still haven't gotten around to taking down the two dilapidated structures on our property). I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth. This is especially true when I think about the number of SUVs and trucks I see when I go to Boston, sigh.
TopHand 7y ago
I live on a ranch. We do not grow any crops, only beef. The surrounding area is a combination of wheat farms and ranches. The reason the ranches aren't wheat farms is because the terrain is just to rugged for productive wheat farming. I can't really speak to the total efficiency but the electrical distribution is very similar to what you have in the city. In fact we export electricity to other states. Water comes from a well and the sewer is a septic tank. That means that the water we use is returned to the water table minus evaporation. I imagine each bovine exported off the property represents some amount of water. Small outfits deal with what is called a co-op to offset the problems of purchasing small quantities of external inputs. This helps us stay somewhat competitive with the large corporate run farms and ranches. Because we work on the place we live, we do not have to drive long distances to work, saving fuel that way. My particular house uses a Ground Source Heat Pump for heating in the winter. In the summer we leave the windows open all night and the house gets down into the low 60's (F). We close the windows as soon as we get up and close the shades on the side of the house the sun is on depending on the time of day. I imagine though I can't really state it as fact, our place is more efficient than the typical mcmansion you see in the cities these days.
- tomcam 7y ago
  Please start a blog if you have the energy
- rriepe 7y ago
  > I imagine each bovine exported off the property represents some amount of water. A cow contains 100 to 200 gallons of water, by my estimate.
SECProto 7y ago
It all depends on what terms you're looking at. You're right about infrastructure - rural housing has much larger per-unit quantities of electric/transport distribution. Water is mostly a non-issue, anywhere I'd call rural has well water, which is in some ways more efficient than communal water (no treatment). In other metrics, though, rural living could be more efficient. Someone homesteading can have much less issue with nutrient and topsoil runoff, while producing much higher volumes of human-consumable calories per unit area. Not saying they do by default, but they could. Suburban living is the least efficient land use, though - large distances travelled daily by everyone, large per-unit quantities of water/wastewater/electric/transport infrastructure, large per-capita land usage, low-to-negligible production of useful stuff (solar energy or food)
codingdave 7y ago
Why do your utilities needs to be distributed? We have our own well, and generate our own solar power. Transportation isn't a big concern because the kids walk to school, we grow food, and I work from home. With the mix of animals and crops we grow, there is a full ecosystem that supply our fertilizer via composting. Our waste is reduced because we use less packaging, and even food waste goes to the chickens and becomes our egg supply. Those counter-points notwithstanding, your larger point is still valid -- but you are bringing in a pile of assumptions.
tylerjwilk00 7y ago
No one ever mentions concrete production [1] when ecological impact comes up. It's often absent from all analysis too. Like these poured structures just appeared one day. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_conc...
joejerryronnie 7y ago
Just the lack of DoorDash delivered meals probably means rural living has a lower ecological impact than urban living

ch4s3 7y ago

Yeah, it's funny that people always seem to neglect these factors. If you account for food yield per acre, fertilizer input, and the amount of land required for any significant number of people to live like this, it starts to look silly.

coderintherye 7y ago

> Even the food they grow themselves requires a lot of external inputs which are shipped in via far flung transportation networks The author of the article noted they got their fertilizer from a neighbor. A lot of small farmers get dung of some sort from locals and spread it. >The distributed electricity and water and transportation are less efficient Many (most?) homesteaders are off-grid, so not sure this applies either. I think you might be conflating "rural" living with homesteading, which are different. That said, I imagine per capita efficiency is probably more efficient in cities as you said. It all kind of depends on what you do. If you are a rural homesteader and don't drive anywhere and don't fly anywhere, then that's already a big chunk of impact reduced.

jasminnoel 7y ago

Small-scale homesteading doesn't require to be located in a deep rural area. Any suburban house with a lawn can be converted to support gardening, solar panels and even animals if regulation allows it. If you grow edible plants instead of grass, there is a net positive in your carbon footprint.

TopHand 7y ago
I often thought that if people were serious about the environment they would grow food instead of lawns. The typical HOA frowns on this though. I was a big fan of John Jeavons back in the 90's. I'm sure he still has a lot of good things to say. http://www.johnjeavons.info/john-jeavons.html http://www.johnjeavons.info/john-jeavons.html
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  I've done that living in the middle of Minneapolis. Half of my back lawn was prairie "garden" and corn and a good portion of the other half was a vegetable garden. The only issue I ever had with neighbors was one concern that my water garden was breeding mosquitos. It wasn't: fish did a good job of seeing to that.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  PSA: Please do soil and environmental status testing in the area first please. Many suburban areas are perfectly fine to live in but may have contaminated soil for natural or manmade reasons.
- gbrown 7y ago
  And/or native plants. Growing a lawn is an atrocity in an arid climate, and a different kind of travesty where prairie would thrive.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Several people in our neighborhood have done this. We've debated it too. No HOA, but the houses are older. If you want a new house, it usually comes with an HOA.

pengaru 7y ago

It really depends on the style of rural living we're talking about. In my poor rural neighborhood most people simply consume substantially less than the average urbanite, and they reuse as much as possible. Since everyone has a lot of space, they tend to keep everything around and repair stuff, make things from disused junk, repurpose materials from disused/broken structures, etc. I've never lived in an urban setting where storage space was so readily available and eyesore messes tolerated that everyone could practice such extreme levels of reuse. I don't even have garbage service at my place. My urban experiences have been exercises in rampant waste and consumerism. There are folks who live an urbanite high-consumption lifestyle rurally, and those people are definitely burning a lot of energy getting everything brought to them continuously. But that seems to be the exception around me at least; those households stand out like a sore thumb, with a UPS truck visiting every day.

tkgally 7y ago
> It really depends on the style of rural living we're talking about. It also depends on the style of urban living we're talking about. People living in single-family houses and driving everywhere consume much more resources per person than those living in high-rise apartments and taking public transportation or walking. High population density, in general, means low per-capita consumption. I'm not sure how this argument applies to people living completely off the grid and raising their own food. But many parts of the world have too many people to make that a practical option for more than a tiny minority.
- secstate 7y ago
  Except that as my sister discovered after moving to the Loop in Chicago, public transportation is great until you need to depend on it. Work doesn't care if you're chronically late because of chronically late trains. Maybe other cities are better here, but before long she was spending 45 minutes commuting 20 miles in a car because at least then she could choose to give herself more time, and swing by the store on the way home. Full caveat, I live on a homestead much like this story (except we still haven't gotten around to taking down the two dilapidated structures on our property). I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth. This is especially true when I think about the number of SUVs and trucks I see when I go to Boston, sigh.

TopHand 7y ago

I live on a ranch. We do not grow any crops, only beef. The surrounding area is a combination of wheat farms and ranches. The reason the ranches aren't wheat farms is because the terrain is just to rugged for productive wheat farming. I can't really speak to the total efficiency but the electrical distribution is very similar to what you have in the city. In fact we export electricity to other states. Water comes from a well and the sewer is a septic tank. That means that the water we use is returned to the water table minus evaporation. I imagine each bovine exported off the property represents some amount of water. Small outfits deal with what is called a co-op to offset the problems of purchasing small quantities of external inputs. This helps us stay somewhat competitive with the large corporate run farms and ranches. Because we work on the place we live, we do not have to drive long distances to work, saving fuel that way. My particular house uses a Ground Source Heat Pump for heating in the winter. In the summer we leave the windows open all night and the house gets down into the low 60's (F). We close the windows as soon as we get up and close the shades on the side of the house the sun is on depending on the time of day. I imagine though I can't really state it as fact, our place is more efficient than the typical mcmansion you see in the cities these days.

tomcam 7y ago
Please start a blog if you have the energy
rriepe 7y ago
> I imagine each bovine exported off the property represents some amount of water. A cow contains 100 to 200 gallons of water, by my estimate.

SECProto 7y ago

It all depends on what terms you're looking at. You're right about infrastructure - rural housing has much larger per-unit quantities of electric/transport distribution. Water is mostly a non-issue, anywhere I'd call rural has well water, which is in some ways more efficient than communal water (no treatment). In other metrics, though, rural living could be more efficient. Someone homesteading can have much less issue with nutrient and topsoil runoff, while producing much higher volumes of human-consumable calories per unit area. Not saying they do by default, but they could. Suburban living is the least efficient land use, though - large distances travelled daily by everyone, large per-unit quantities of water/wastewater/electric/transport infrastructure, large per-capita land usage, low-to-negligible production of useful stuff (solar energy or food)

codingdave 7y ago

Why do your utilities needs to be distributed? We have our own well, and generate our own solar power. Transportation isn't a big concern because the kids walk to school, we grow food, and I work from home. With the mix of animals and crops we grow, there is a full ecosystem that supply our fertilizer via composting. Our waste is reduced because we use less packaging, and even food waste goes to the chickens and becomes our egg supply. Those counter-points notwithstanding, your larger point is still valid -- but you are bringing in a pile of assumptions.

tylerjwilk00 7y ago

No one ever mentions concrete production [1] when ecological impact comes up. It's often absent from all analysis too. Like these poured structures just appeared one day. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_conc...

joejerryronnie 7y ago

Just the lack of DoorDash delivered meals probably means rural living has a lower ecological impact than urban living