Clean Energy Springfield

When I signed up for Blog Action Day, I had a vision of myself really pouring stuff out today--I'm in between jobs with nothing pressing on the horizon. Sadly, move-related stuff wound up trumping everything today, so here I am squeezing this into the last few hours of the day. Ah, well.

I think cities are underappreciated in their potential to be environmental solutions. It's not simply that they allow for more efficient transportation, it's that cities can be, and should be, understood as a social extension of natural phenomena. As their own peculiar kind of ecosystem, they're not living, but they are lifelike (see, for example, urban metabolisms). Understanding these flows of energy and materials through our cities is crucial to minimizing our impact on the earth, but that's just the beginning. Once we've got a better feel for those flows, we can start to imagine our urban systems as more like ecosystems, with one energy input (sunlight) and endless material re-use cycles. We can also start to better understand the interplay of different actors--the varied functions that trees can provide (water purity, material recovery, energy source, energy saver, wind break, climate control, and on), the cycle of food and wastes, the distributed production of energy.

But since they're also fundamentally social, cities are places where memory becomes culture and biographies become histories. Cities are where we're most exposed to one another--where differences can be perceived and overcome, where we have many roles to play, many ways to relate to one another, in many combinations of cooperation and competition, equity and inequity.

A proper understanding of the role of cities doesn't just create respect for them, however. I think it also creates more respect for the role of rural areas. In William Cronon's book on the history of Chicago, Nature's Metropolis, he talks about hinterlands--the non-urban areas that feed raw resources into cities. I think "hinterland" has a perjorative taint to it, which is too bad, because it's an evocative way to reinvigorate how we think about cities and the areas around them. Too often, urban and rural are seen as opposed things--urbanites mock hicks in the sticks, while rural folk mistrust and reject the urbane. Which is bad, because we're not at opposite ends of a spectrum, we're different parts of a whole. This becomes plainly apparent when we look at the metabolism of cities.

Cross-posted.