EarthSky

October 17th, 2006 - Human World

sagar: Author=” program=” video=”Geographer Alex de Sherbinin.
h4(cutline). Alex de Sherbinin on how the US might change as our population continues to grow.

_Alex de Sherbinin is a geographer, an expert in looking at the big picture of how people interact with the environment. He spoke with Earth & Sky’s Jorge Salazar shortly before the 300 millionth American was born._

*Salazar:* With the 300 millionth American here, what are we, as Americans, becoming?

*de Sherbinin:* We’re becoming a largely urban, or suburban-based people, who have certain assumptions about what the good life entails.

We’re also becoming increasingly disconnected from the land. As we make public policies that affect the environment, we have to recognize that many people have a very limited awareness of the environment around them.

*Salazar:* I understand that urbanization is a worldwide trend. As more and more people live in urban areas, what will the city of the future look like, here in the U.S.?

*de Sherbinin:* Nobody has a crystal ball to say what the future city will look like.

There’s a range of things that are ideal. The ideal city of the future, perhaps, will have rooftop gardens. That just means growing plants on top of buildings to take up some of the carbon and also reduce the urban heat island effect. It’s a slow process, but it’s one that could yield tremendous benefits. If more rooftops were green in the city, the city of the future would protect the surrounding ecosystems, so that those more rural areas can continue to provide clean water and clean air and other amenities the city needs.

The city of the future will also have better transportation systems that will allow people to get to where they need to be without their having to take their own personal car to work or to go shopping.

*Salazar:* What about suburbia?

In the United States, we have “sprawl,” essentially the expansion of low-density development into rural areas. And sprawl has both land consumption aspects and also other repercussions, for example, in how we can get people to work without being car dependent.

There are a few examples that we can point to of successes in this area. They’re models of what people want to shoot for, like in “Curitiba, Brazil”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curitiba%2C_Brazil. In the U.S., Portland put a strict control on its expansion into the surrounding countryside. There’s a forced emphasis on controlling growth and making the city more compact.

*Salazar:* A person commented to us about whether a loss of open space is really a problem. He commented that, while looking down from an airplane, it’s apparent that there are huge open spaces between population centers.

*de Sherbinin:* Certainly there’s lots of open space left in the United States. Our population density is less than the global average. It is approximately the same as Europe’s, if you include the Scandinavian countries, with their very low population densities.

But the reality is a little bit more complex. Each person, even if they’re living in an urban area in the U.S., requires a certain number of resources that they might take for granted. These are what scientists now call ecosystem services, like fresh water, that come from areas that need to be kept relatively free of pollution so that the city can get its water supply. Even the air that we breathe comes from forests and other healthy ecosystems.

And of course we want to maintain the biodiversity that we have around us. Each species that we lose, it’s said, could be the future cure for cancer.

*Salazar:* How are American households responding to changes in population and environment?

*de Sherbinin:* It’s difficult to characterize the average American household. But one interesting area of research recently has been that environmental impacts increase more rapidly with the growth in the _number of households,_ in contrast to the growth in the average population.

Each household requires a certain number of basic things. You need to have that household’s space, whether it’s a house or an apartment. You need to have a refrigerator and some basic kitchen equipment, a television set, DVD player, VCR, and so on. As households have become smaller in the United States, the growth in households has actually outstripped the population growth.

*Salazar:* Why is this happening?

*de Sherbinin:* It’s due to two trends. One is aging. You have more people living longer, and as they outlive their spouses, they end up living alone. But probably the bigger trend has been towards divorce and families splitting apart, which results in people no longer living and sharing one housing unit, but rather splitting up into two or more housing units.

In terms of how households experience the change, I think that it varies from place to place. But certainly, the journey to work has increased in most areas because of the “exurban”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exurban_growth growth, people living farther out and people commuting not only from the suburban areas to the city center, but also from one suburban area to another.

I think that also, households typically now are becoming less connected to the environment. Maybe 3% to 4% of the U.S. population actually makes its living physically off the land, from either agriculture, forestry, or fisheries. The rest of us are pretty much working in the industry or service sectors, with the service sector being the overwhelming majority of jobs.

This has repercussions for how we relate to the environment. And it may have repercussions for the future, as the next generation becomes increasingly alienated from the land and from the soil.

*Salazar:* With the 300 millionth American here, what kind of challenges are ahead of us?

*de Sherbinin:* One of the things that I think needs to be addressed and thought about, in the context of America turning the clock to 300 million, is our global impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, energy, materials usage, a whole range of things.

Resource scarcity trends are causing gas prices to rise. I think that these are going to begin to impinge on our lifestyle

Recently, with the rise in gas prices, there’s been a tremendous shift towards more fuel-efficient cars. But there hasn’t been a noted drop in the actual amount of vehicle miles driven, partly I think because many people’s driving habits are pretty fixed.

Just a couple of statistics that I think are really stark, we’ve got less than one quarter of the population of China, yet we consume twice the amount of energy. We also produce 20 tons per person of greenhouse gasses each year, and China produces only two metric tons of CO2, so basically we produce 10 times as much carbon dioxide emissions per capita as does China, which has more than four times the population that we have.

Part of the difference is due to a culturally prescribed set of assumptions about what the “good life” is – which is related to certain consumption patterns. Whether we are born here or immigrate here from somewhere else, we all share these assumptions to a greater or lesser degree. A big house in the suburbs, a big yard, lots of private space, and with it the long commute. But these assumptions are going to have to be changed – or we’ll be in for some painful scenarios such as extreme climate shifts.

I’m hoping that what we can do as a society is, instead of looking at these evironmental trends or gas-price hikes as terrible things, we can instead see these as opportunities to come up with novel solutions such as more fuel efficient transport systems. We’re a nation that prides itself on innovation.

We’re already starting to do that, but we need to begin to change our consumption aspirations so that we can be more in line with environmental constraints. We need to see things such as denser urban or suburban neighborhoods as a good thing and not a bad thing, and something to be encouraged and appreciated. If properly designed, with walkways and bike paths, these neighborhoods can create a real sense of community and wellbeing that doesn’t exist in the typical subdivision.