Page 369 - Environment: The Science Behind the Stories

Green building techniques add expense to construction.
The added cost is generally less than 3% for a LEED-silver Catskill/Delaware Watershed
building and 10% for a LEED-platinum building, but because West Delaware Hudson River Massachusetts
construction is expensive, these small percentages can repre- Aqueduct East Delaware
Aqueduct
sent large sums of money. Nonetheless, LEED certification is
booming. Portland now features several dozen LEED-certified Catskill
buildings, including nine LEED-platinum structures. Portland Aqueduct Connecticut
Croton
also boasts the nation’s first LEED-gold sports arena (the Delaware River Delaware Watershed
Rose Garden, where the Trailblazers basketball team plays). Aqueduct
New York
The savings on energy, water, and waste at the refurbished Pennsylvania
Rose Garden paid for the cost of its LEED upgrade after just
one year. Croton
Schools, colleges, and universities are leaders in sustain- New Jersey Aqueduct Long Island Sound
able building. In Portland, the Rosa Parks Elementary School, New York City
completed in 2007, is certified LEED-gold. This school build-
ing was built with locally sourced and nontoxic materials, New York Bay
uses 24% less energy and water than comparable buildings,
and diverted nearly all of its construction waste from the land- FIGURE 13.18 New York City pipes in its drinking water from
upstate reservoirs in the Croton and Catskill/Delaware
fill. The schoolchildren learn about renewable energy in their watersheds. The city acquires, protects, and manages watershed
own building by watching a display of the electricity produced land to minimize pollution of these water sources. When New York
by its photovoltaic solar system. Portland State University, the City was confronted in 1989 with an order by the Environmental
University of Portland, Reed College, and Lewis and Clark Protection Agency to build a $6-billion filtration plant to protect its
College are just a few of the many colleges and universities citizens against waterborne disease, the city opted instead to pur-
nationwide that are constructing green buildings as a part of chase and better protect watershed land—for a fraction of the cost.
their campus sustainability efforts (Chapter 24).
The long-distance transportation of resources and goods
Urban Sustainability from countryside to city requires fossil fuel use and thus has
considerable environmental impact. However, imagine that
all the world’s 3.6 billion urban residents were instead spread
Most of our efforts to make cities more safe, clean, healthy,
and pleasant are also helping to make them more sustainable. evenly across the landscape. What would the transportation
A sustainable city is one that can function and prosper over requirements be, then, to move all those resources and goods
the long term, providing generations of residents a good qual- around to all those people? A world without cities would
ity of life far into the future. In part, this entails minimizing likely require more transportation to provide people the same
the city’s impacts on the natural systems and resources that degree of access to resources and goods.
nourish it. Urban centers exert both positive and negative envi-
ronmental impacts. The extent and nature of these impacts Efficiency Once resources arrive at an urban center, the
depend on how we utilize resources, produce goods, transport concentration of people allows goods and services to be
materials, and deal with waste. delivered efficiently. For instance, providing electricity for
densely packed urban homes and apartments is more efficient
than providing electricity to far-flung homes in the country-
Urban resource consumption brings side. The density of cities facilitates the provision of many
a mix of environmental effects social services that improve quality of life, including medical
services, education, water and sewer systems, waste disposal,
You might guess that urban living has a greater environmental and public transportation.
impact than rural living. However, the picture is not so simple;
instead, urbanization brings a complex mix of consequences. More consumption Because cities draw resources from
afar, their ecological footprints are much greater than their
Resource sinks Cities and towns are sinks (p. 135) actual land areas. For instance, urban scholar Herbert Girardet
for resources, having to import from source areas beyond calculated that the ecological footprint of London, England,
their borders nearly everything they need to feed, clothe, and extends 125 times larger than the city’s actual area. By another
house their inhabitants and power their commerce. Urban estimate, cities take up only 2% of the world’s land surface but
and suburban areas rely on large expanses of land elsewhere consume over 75% of its resources.
to supply food, fiber, water, timber, metal ores, and mined However, the ecological footprint concept is most mean-
fuels. Urban centers also need areas of natural land to pro- ingful when used on a per capita basis. So, in asking whether
vide ecosystem services, including purification of water and urbanization causes increased resource consumption, we must
air, nutrient cycling, and waste treatment. Indeed, for their ask whether the average urban or suburban dweller has a
day-to-day survival, major cities such as New York, Boston, larger footprint than the average rural dweller. The answer is
San Francisco, and Los Angeles depend on water they pump yes, but urban and suburban residents also tend to be wealth-
368 in from faraway watersheds (FIGURE 13.18). ier than rural residents, and wealth correlates with resource

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