Toby Hemenway and the Urban vs. Rural Sustainability Debate

One of the most common reactions people have upon internalizing the implications of oil depletion is an impulse to escape. “Return to the land” has become an uncontested mantra for many in the peak oil world; if there is a debate, it often centers around the question of what form a return to rural life should take—with “powerdowners” advocating a reconstruction of village life, and “survivalists” arguing for full-scale, individual retreat.

Last year, well-known Permaculture activist Toby Hemenway added another dimension to the debate with two articles exploring the contrast between urban and rural sustainability. His views upset a lot of people in the peak oil community by throwing into question some fundamental assumptions. Peak oil activists are used to having their convictions questioned, of course, but in this case, the questioner was not a high-paid think-tank, but a well-respected Permaculture activist and writer whose book, Gaia’s Garden is a classic manual of home-scale Permaculture gardening.

Last Saturday I attended a talk and discussion with Hemenway at the Inwood Nature Center in New York City. Though brief, the talk and group discussion provided some much-needed nuance to the superficial, black-and-white debate over urban vs. rural sustainability.

Hemenway began his career in Seattle, as a genetics researcher for a small drug company. At some point, he and his wife (who worked for Microsoft) began to feel that their work was not in accordance with their values. After a stint outside of the city, they bought land and moved to a very rural area of southern Oregon.

But after several years, Hemenway began to have doubts about the sustainability of his new lifestyle. For one thing, he was burning a lot more gas—simply going to the store for groceries (despite his gardening skills, he was not an entirely self-sufficient farmer) took 40 minutes for a round trip. And as far a sustainability and self-sufficiency went, his neighbors were far worse—putting up floodlights on their houses, or planting three acres of grass which they mowed on a riding mower. Rural life, at least as the people of that community were living it, was anything but sustainable.

Eventually, Hemenway and his wife decided to move to Portland, where he has worked on urban sustainability. For his talk, he focused on the importance of recreating networks of local communities; in his slideshow, he showed numerous examples of the community-building work of a group called City Repair, a volunteer organization which works on reclaiming the public realm in cities. According to its website, the group was

“born out of a successful grassroots neighborhood initiative that converted a residential street intersection into a neighborhood public square, City Repair began its work with the idea that localization (of culture, of economy, of decision-making) is a necessary foundation of sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities and nurture our local culture.”

Can cities be sustainable in a lower-energy world? Hemenway pointed to the example of Shanghai, China, which for a long time has produced a high percentage of its own food. On the other hand, “New York City might be too big,” he said, and pointed out that New Jersey is called the Garden State, because not so many years ago it was comprised of farms that were the food source for New York. Overall though, those of us who are living in cities “are doing as well as anyone else.”

So is rural or urban life more sustainable? The question itself is probably misleading. Just as it is apparent that cities will have major difficulties in the coming years, it is also obvious that striking out for the wilderness on one’s own alone is naïve; very few people are actually able to be completely self-sufficient, even if they are able to tolerate living that way. Even the ecovillage model, if conceived of as separate from regional sustainability, is unlikely to succeed as a self-contained unit.

Whether we like it or not, it seems that responding wisely the coming energy crisis will require engaging with government and society, even if only on a local level—a conclusion that will either be hopeful or utterly disheartening, depending on one’s point of view.