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"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.
