Are Cities and Nature Opposed?

A friend from high school shared this picture on facebook this evening:

She added that this was why she hated cities and followed up with a comment about how a Walmart near her had replaced a lot of trees with a vast parking lot and lots of trash. While I appreciate the sentiment, the image and my friend’s comments have it all wrong.

To start, the image tries to bluntly tie a direct link between cities and the demise of nature. This disregards an important point - the most sustainable human habitation occurs in the compact, urban form of small to mid-size cities. There are efficiencies in traditional settlement patterns that were a byproduct of eras without access to cheap energy. This is the reason that compact, walkable places generally have lower per capita carbon footprints than less dense areas.

After poking around the facebook page and then the site that my friend shared the picture from, I think that it is likely they would advocate for a simpler, rural lifestyle. This is a worthy endeavor, but it is one that simply doesn’t scale and rural living isn’t for everybody. Even in eras with much smaller worldwide populations, people still found it necessary and desirable to live in community with one another. It is necessary both economically and socially. Traditionally cities were great centers of culture, education, vitality, and productivity - they were the economic engines of their times. In our current era of burgeoning populations, it isn’t feasible for billions of people to live a simple rural lifestyle.

This is where some environmentalists get it all wrong. Ironically, the image creator chose to use the dense downtown environment as the foil for the eradication of the pristine nature. These two are not opposed. It isn’t the dense downtown that is eradicating nature - it is sprawling suburbia. Cities are not the enemy but the answer. The best way to preserve natural habitat is to fight for a human scaled, walkable, compact human habitat.

My friend wasn’t all wrong. Her tirade against our standard way of development, while misdirected, was appropriate. The Walmart project doesn’t represent cities but rather a hybrid monster that is neither urban nor rural. The sprawling monster of suburbia devours land at unprecedented rates while forcing upon us a lifestyle that isn’t healthy for either us or our world. But this monster is not the city. It something altogether different. The city and nature can exist in harmony. In fact, some might say that both together is the very definition of heaven.