Toby Hemenway argues that
“Virtually any service system – electricity, fuel, food – follows the same brutal mathematics of scale. A dispersed population requires more resources to serve it – and to connect it together – than a concentrated one”
Cities as such serve to reduce humans’ environmental footprint. Or put another way, if you’re going to move out the country, it would seem you’d have to invest substantially more homegrown food, solar panels, electric cars and the like before you even begin to be level with a city-dweller in terms of carbon neutrality.
Source: alykat [via Urban Nature]