Environmental Issues

Executive Summary
Governments all over the world are today worried by the scarcity of natural resources, especially land and fossil fuels. The consumption of these resources has increased tremendously over the years, encouraged by the adoption of suburban lifestyles and rapid population increase. Suburbia is one of the major factors contributing to the scarcity of resources because it is basically an energy-intensive culture. In a suburban culture, people live far away from their places of work and have to travel daily. It means that more resources are used to travel and build office complexes in cities and family homes in suburban environments. The problem of resource scarcity can be addressed through teleworking, whereby people work remotely without necessarily having to travel to their places of work. This will reduce reliance on fossil fuels and minimize the demand for prime land to build offices.
Introduction
The scarcity of natural resources is one of the most serious socio-environmental and economic problems in the world today. Indeed, since the 18th century industrial revolution, the exhaustion of the world’s natural resources has been accelerating at a very alarming rate. This trend is encouraged by the explosive population increase witnessed over the years, increasing demand for industrial raw materials, and the insatiable consumerism culture of the 21st century. Consequently, more and more non-renewable sources like natural gas, oil reserves, and minerals, are depleted daily throughout the world. If this trend remains unchecked, continued and uncontrolled exploitation will eventually lead to the complete exhaustion of these resources, most of which are vital for the world’s economic stability. A major factor of this problem is the suburbia lifestyle, also known as urban sprawl. Suburbia is an energy-intensive lifestyle whose survival depends on the over consumption of resources. Within the suburbia system, people live further away from major cities and towns, industrial centers and their places of work. For the suburbia culture to function, more land is needed to accommodate single families, fuel personal cars to drive daily to work, and electricity to run homes. At the same time, suburbia systems depend on a vibrant infrastructure like highways for people to commute daily to and from work, as well as for the supply of social amenities and transportation of consumer goods. Similarly, the suburbia lifestyle uses more resources to serve less people, such as sewage, water and electricity infrastructure for single families, as compared to urban dwellings where compact residences share such facilities. In this light, the suburban living style presents a major environmental problem, especially with regards to its sustainability in the face of depleting natural resources. This essay examines the environmental challenges posed by urban sprawl (suburban lifestyle) and the viability of teleworking as a solution to these challenges.
Background
Suburbia is to a large extent a direct consequence of the 19th century industrial growth, which saw upper and middle -class earners move to cleaner neighborhoods far away from the polluted industrial centers. At the same time, government investment in transport infrastructure enabled people to live away from their places of work and access basic goods and services easily. Moreover, the fast growth of the automobile industry gave rise to the personal car, which made it even more convenient for workers to commute daily to work from their suburban residences. In the years following the Second World War, the housing boom and the growing automotive industry facilitated massive development of suburban neighborhoods around major cities. In the United States, in particular, economic growth during the 20th century and the emerging concept of “The American Dream” encouraged families to seek better living conditions; which ideally meant the adoption of suburban lifestyles in which single families lived in their own homesteads.
Environmental Issues Associated with Suburbia
Suburban living has its lifeline in the availability of cheap oil. Abundant oil energy is essential for people to live comfortably in suburban settings. In a documentary portraying the unsustainability of suburbia, The End of Suburbia, director Gregory Greene portrays suburban living as the most energy consuming lifestyle that will cease to function in an energy-crisis situation. He predicts this eventuality, by noting that suburbia competes against the 21st century industrial energy needs and resource-intensive consumer culture. Not surprisingly, hordes of people are still chasing the American Dream into the suburbia world, which in turn pushes up its energy demand. In major cities of North America such as Toronto, there is an increasing demand for more expressways and expansion of existing ones. As such, the existence of suburbia depends on the continued exploitation of the world’s natural resources. This is necessary to sustain the high-energy dependence culture of suburban lifestyle. In fact, America’s aggressive foreign policy reveals the country’s over-consumption culture, which supersedes its natural resources capacity. While it constitutes only 4% of the world’s population, and with about 150 million people living in suburban neighborhoods, America consumes more than 25% of the world’s resources. The fact that most of these resources are not available domestically points to the bleak future of suburbia.
The 2008 oil crisis reveals an uncomfortable truth about the state of the world’s oil resources, and by extension, the impending crisis facing suburban living. Oil and gas production has reached its peak level, while consumption is steadily increasing. Consequently, it has created a gap in the supply-demand equation. Oil is a nonrenewable resource, which means that its supply cannot be increased beyond the earth’s oil reserves capacity. On the other hand, demand has to reduce to a level that is at par with the rate of supply. The implication of this situation is that human and industrial consumption will have to adopt more economical strategies in order to survive in a low-resource environment. This makes the future of suburbia bleak, as there will be a scramble to leave suburban neighborhoods due to worsening oil crisis and plummeting property value. Accordingly, the current trends in the North American society and in the developed world in general are unsustainable in the present energy demand situation. Similarly, alternative sources of energy such as solar energy and biogas cannot sufficiently meet the requirements of suburbia’s present spending rate. Even technology will not produce more oil or natural gas; at best, it will only improve efficiency. In this regard, suburbia is grossly uneconomical and environmentally unsustainable, and therefore has to transform by giving up its high-energy consumption culture. To this end, the survival of suburbia depends on the ability to re-urbanize, and most important, implement a teleworking policy to reduce the need to travel daily to work. It will involve the centralization of residential areas, industries and markets into a single neighborhood to become low-energy efficient. It is inevitable, then, that suburbia will eventually collapse and pave the way to a living system that will function with a limited energy supply, such as re-urbanization.
Commuting daily to and from work is a central factor in the unsustainability of suburbia. Millions of people drive themselves in fuel guzzling personal cars daily to and from work, which contributes to the mass wastage of energy. The convenience of driving to work compares dismally with the cost in terms of resource wastage. On the other hand, compact residential homes through re-urbanization will reduce energy consumption significantly. People will use economical means of transportation e.g. public transport, and reduce expenditure on social services such as water and sewerage infrastructure. Similarly, the cost of accessing basic necessities will reduce greatly as a result of locating shopping malls near residential areas. These advantages of re-urbanization over suburbia make the former a prospective solution to the problem of depleting natural resources. Consequently, for suburbia to survive it has to transform and adopt a cost-effective way of life.
Addressing the Environmental Problems Resulting from Suburban Living
Critics argue that the process of re-urbanization will be expensive and beyond the means of governments. There are over 40 million homes in suburbia neighborhoods, which will require extensive resource investment by governments to transform. In the case of the US, its mortgage debt is nearly the size of its GDP, which undermines any prospects of an en mass movement of people to newly constructed and centralized residential neighborhoods. Consequently, many people believe that the suburbia is not reversible. Former President Bush senior’s remarks during an Earth Summit in 1992 are telling in this regard. He observed that the American lifestyle is not negotiable, which reflects the centrality of suburbia in the American Dream. Regardless, Americans will soon have to awaken to the reality that suburban lifestyles operate in a self-destroying mechanism. Ecologically, decreasing land resources cannot accommodate more single homes and expansive lawns. Economically, the suburbia system exploits more resources such as oil-energy, land space and infrastructure investment to serve few people. Economist James Kunstler terms the creation of suburbia as “the greatest misallocation of resources in world history.” In this regard, high-energy consumption will eclipse the earth’s capacity to produce nonrenewable resources to sustain the suburban energy-consumption culture. This will consequently lead to the collapse of the suburbia system.
However, since the aim of this paper is not solely to discredit the relevance or otherwise of urban sprawl in today’s environmental circumstances, it is necessary to explore cheaper alternative solutions that will ensure effective and economical utilization of resources. In cue with the observations of some pro-suburbia pundits, the environmental problems associated with suburban lifestyles can be addressed through the decentralization of work. With the modern world’s advancements in information technology, individuals can work from their homes, thereby eliminating the need of having to commute to their places of work. The implementation of this policy will greatly reduce the amount of energy resources used in traveling to work, especially among users of personal cars. In terms of land resources, teleworking will eliminate the need for more land space to build office complexes. In fact, it is a fact of reality that a large portion of the skyscrapers that congest the world’s m...