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The double-whammy of a warmer planet and a cooler economy has renewed my interest in reducing my consumption of resources and my impact on the world around me. To that end, I spent the last few evenings reading many posts at Low Tech Magazine ^, a site dedicated to identifying problems caused by modern technology and proposing low-tech solutions to them.
Some of the ideas proffered by the site made me consider some of the particular challenges I face. I live in the American Midwest, not far from a large metropolis, and conditions in the area seem a tough fit for a number of the site's proposals.
Climate alone gives us a difficult starting point. Our summers are generally hotter than those in Europe and usually very humid. We often deal with strong thunderstorms, hail, and high-wind events such as tornadoes. Winters are generally milder than northern Europe's, but temperatures can still dip below zero, and ice is not uncommon.
Lack of local infrastructure is a serious concern. There is only one light rail line in the entire metropolitan area, and from end to end it runs less than two miles. My own town has probably half a dozen bus lines, and they stop at a tiny fraction of the neighborhoods in the city. Almost none of the roads have bicycle lanes, and almost none of the shops in town have places to park bicycles.The few walking trails in town are mostly scenic, and therefore do not provide easy access to business centers or residential areas.
Urban sprawl exacerbates the problem. The tendency in this part of the country is to build out rather than up, even in the city. In my home county it's rare to find a building more than two or three storeys tall, but roads with built-up business parks and developments stretch for dozens of miles in each direction, making non-motorized transportation challenging at best.
Of course, the local culture is an outgrowth of these challenges, but the design of the city--and the impracticality of low-tech alternatives to high-tech problems--is a byproduct of the culture too. It's a vicious cycle: the city is spread out and has no decent public transit, so one spends money on a car, so one has no incentive to spend further money on taxes for a public transit system, so one doesn't get built, and existing space is taken up by many small buildings, so the city continues to spread out.
Low Tech Magazine mentions in one article that systemic change is needed along with individual change. To me, cultural changes are individual changes collected in aggregate, but when the environment and the local culture feed into each other so strongly, how can the cycle be broken in order to implement systemic change? It's a tough question, and one I don't have the answer to.
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[Last updated: 2023-03-09]