There's public transportation, natural gas fueled buses, but it's spotty on the half hour, nine-to-five weekdays, or worse. It's easy to lose track of time and get stranded, and transfers can become quite convoluted.
We're within easy walking distance of schools, which was nice when are our children were school age. They've grown up, graduated from college, and moved to huge cities.
From our home I can hear the kids playing at our elementary school and football games at the high school. We can see my wife's work, and in the opposite direction, the elementary school our kids attended, from our upstairs balcony. We can feel the low rumble of the big Caterpillar emergency generators at my wife's work when they test them once a month.
I work at home.
Our neighborhood ranges from three story apartment blocks with generous balconies (great for potted plants and gardens), maybe half of which are government subsidized or mandated affordable housing in various ways, on up to big five bedroom houses with ten foot backyards and five foot side yards. There's quite a few multi-generational families living in the big houses especially, but even in the smaller apartments.
Our own house has an anomalously large backyard for the neighborhood because of the odd shape of the lot. There's a public park / open space on one side, including a well traveled foot path to the high school, which is why I'm always painting over graffiti on the wall, but that doesn't bother me too much. My past experience as a secondary school teacher is put to good use when I happen to catch a kid holding a spray can, if they don't run away first... some of 'em are fast!
My wife and her sister discovered this house, and my wife had pretty much made the down payment when she called me about it, all because of the big back yard.
The majority of our neighbors are not white. I grew up in a place that was affluent and 99% white and I didn't care for it. Neither did my parents or my siblings. We all moved away as soon as we could. My parents were there for the work. As artists with a mess of kids in the Catholic tradition they went where the work was.
My wife's dad was born in a tent near a small farm my parents used to own. His parents were Mexican farm workers.
40% of our neighbors don't speak English as their primary language at home, but most of the children do. My wife is bilingual, I'm not.
Solar development here these last few years has been insane. About a a quarter of our neighbors have solar panels on their roofs, the schools have solar panels, and one nearby supermarket has solar panels over its parking lot.
Nevertheless, I don't believe solar and wind energy are going to "save us" because they depend on natural gas to fill in the gaps when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining brightly overhead, which is most of the time. These solar and wind developments represent a serious and deadly commitment to natural gas in the foreseeable future.
Natural gas, especially fracked natural gas, is hardly any better than coal, and will destroy what's left of our earth's natural environment same as coal would. The largest industrial projects on the planet today, and many deadly political conflicts, involve the extraction and distribution of natural gas. There's nothing "natural" about natural gas.
Nuclear power is probably the only sustainable way to support the high energy industrial economy many affluent people now enjoy. An exclusively solar-wind-and-other "alternative" energy powered society would look nothing like the society many of us now enjoy.
The Mother Earth News lifestyle would be an environmental catastrophe if billions of people suddenly decided that was the most desirable way to live.
If Chernobyl or Fukushima taught us anything, it's that human beings, especially rural and semi-rural human beings, are worse for the natural environment than nuclear waste. (As a thought experiment, I'd personally rather be a slightly radioactive wild animal running free than meat on someone's dinner table...)
The people with the smallest environmental footprints are urban vegans and vegetarians who live in small spaces sharing common walls, places that are easily heated and cooled, places connected to very sophisticated sewage treatment and garbage recycling facilities.
My parents, and my wife's parents, are avid gardeners and retired with comfortable pensions. They've both chosen rural lifestyles, driving into town once a week for church, shopping, socializing, etc.. It's not something we or any of our siblings could afford, however, not at this stage of our lives. We'd have to commute to work. (My wife's parents don't even have a good internet connection, and cell phone reception is limited, spotty, or non-existent, which drives the younger people in our family crazy. Wait, what? My phone doesn't work here, and the internet isn't fast enough for video???)
I think about these things a lot.
One of the larger aspects of our household environmental footprint is our adopted animal shelter dogs -- husky and husky plus sizes. I don't expect dogs to be vegetarian. I have a lot of contempt for people who breed popular but more difficult dogs like huskies, dogs that later end up in shelters because their owners didn't know what they were setting themselves up for. All our dogs are like that. They should never have been born, but here they are.
I pretty much feel the same about people too. Seven and a half billion of us is too many, but here we are, and what are we going to do about it?
Edit history
Recommendations
0 members have recommended this reply (displayed in chronological order):
= new reply since forum marked as read