Urban Life

Suburbia – Greatest Threat to the Environment

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When people think about what things cause harm to the environment they think of many things. They think of tall smokestacks pushing out sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides, rusty metal drums leaking orange liquid, or the endless repetition of housing in suburban development.

Most do not think about attitudes and cultures that insulate people from the natural world. Yet, that might just be the biggest threat. Consumption without context, a lack of understanding of pollution, a distant natural world, and apathy all lead up to some serious environmental degradation.

Suburbia is grounded in consumption, often without context. They go to the mall and grocery store and buy things. The trash man comes by on Wednesday and takes away what they dont want. The people there have no idea where things came from, what technologies are behind it, and what the real costs of their actions are.

The landfill is well hidden from view. The methane from the dump and the landfill can not be smelled to the user. The factory in India spewing out toxic chemicals simply does not exist. Pollution does exist in suburbia from car emissions, phenalates from vinyl, and lawn pesticides, but it takes a different context from reality.

People in suburbia drive to work in an air conditioned sport-utility vehicle. They live and work in air conditioned vehicles that seal out natural air. Nature is little more then a place for camping. It certainly is not a place for living or making a life out of. If nature is anything in such a world it is always thoroughly controlled and regulated.

Life is suburbia is good, maybe too good. It breeds contempt and apathy. When life is so good, why challenge our status quo to protect some abstract environment so far away? Suburbs are non-political except for the occasional fight over grandpas fence, or parking. Real issues seem not ever to rise to interest.

America’s Freeway Exit Mentality

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Many Americans are of the belief that if something does not have a named exit off a freeway it must not exist. After all, the logic goes, all the best places must have freeway exits otherwise they wouldn’t exist.

There is a map in many people’s heads of the world that looks like a freeway map with nothing else on it. If there is 30 miles between freeway exits, then their must be nothing for the next 30 miles.

One Car

That logic is faulty. There are many beautiful small communities and great places not serviced by freeways. Freeways are very expensive to build and even very basic rural exits can cost several million dollars to construct. Many good places are far removed from the freeway.

Indeed, especially when your a toll highway with toll collectors at every exit, don’t expect every an exit for every town or place you’d want to neccessarly go. And just because a super-highway “flies” past hundreds of small towns, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Your just bypassing them.