Seite 276 [276]
"NOT EVERYONE CAN MOVE
TO THE COUNTRYSIDE"
URBAN COMMUNITY RESPONSES
Judit Farkas
A considerable part — 56 % — of the human population of the Earth live in cities
today’; cities are the world’s economic, social and power centers, exerting decisive
influence on the environment. Consequently, they cannot be ignored by
Environmental Humanities (hereafter EH).
The city
Cities are beset with several resource-related problems (food, water, energy,
transformation, garbage, etc.). With their enormous demand, they play a serious
role not only in their immediate environment but also in the whole world’s
ecological concerns (for one thing, they are responsible for 75 % of global carbon
emissions and for remote monocultures, not to mention innumerable examples
of environmental injustice. In their Introduction to Environmental Humanities,
Robert S. Emett and David E. Nye (2017) sum up the questions related to cities
in the chapter Energy, Consumption, and Sustainable Cities (Emett — Nye 2017) as
follows:
The fundamental issue in cities is the question of energy use. A radical change
in thinking about energy occurred in the 1970s: in the Western world, the amount
of energy consumed was the standard measure of progress, of the advancement of
civilization from the 19 century and it was evaluated mainly in terms of its role
in economic and social development (on this, see also the chapter on ecological
anthropology), whereas today high energy consumption is not seen as progress
but conversely, as a problem. This not only means the problem of decreasing and
ever more expensive energy, but also the inevitable fact that energy consumption
is inseparable from environmental problems. In the 1960s, pollution caused by
the extraction and use of non-renewable resources and the damage done by the
infrastructure became ever more apparent. In the 1970s, the energy crisis (peak
oil) and later the worries about nuclear energy (nuclear waste, disasters at Chernobyl
and Fukuyama) generated ever more serious dilemmas around the issue of energy.
Re-traditionalist movements opt for the radical cutback of energy consumption
and reject not only non-renewable energy sources but also modern green technology
as well. In cities, however, this position does not appear workable; the question to
be tackled should rather be how to make energy consumption “greener”, more
' Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP URB.TOTL.IN.ZS.