First, are you distinguishing between small town and the surrounding areas? I’ve been in nice small towns where you could bike or walk everywhere you need to go. Sure, there aren’t as many places to go as the city, but there are some kinds of places you’d never get in the city. In the surrounding areas, I know people who find it normal to go to town once a week to pick up supplies and stay at home otherwise.

Yes, if you want city living in a small town–and this seems to be what you call “standard of living”–it will be difficult.

“Economies of scale makes it cheaper to deliver food” is bullshit, esp. if as Hedgehog says, farms diversify. What is this based on? Big cities are by necessity further from their sources of food, as they’d have to be entirely surrounded by farmland in order to grow enough food to meet their priorities. Where do you make up for the extra shipping of food this requires? The vastly greater food wastage (have you ever checked out the Trader Joe’s dumpsters?) The extra shipping of water? As Cadillac Desert also points out, single cities regularly reshape a vast swathe of the landscape around them in order to get water there.

I’m not saying that we should depopulate the cities and move everybody out to small towns (although I think that in many cases as smaller farms become more economical again, you will see urban-to-rural migration, as in Cuba and Venezuela). And, obviously, we both agree that there’s a vast amount that both small towns and cities can do to become more environmentally efficient. But to go from there to trying to depopulate small towns seems crazy to me.  

Posted by Dan

Historically, we’ve done the opposite. First settling the West was linked with conquering nature and establishing American glory. [Cadillac Desert talks about how this sort of thinking justifed many of the large dams built in the West.] Now “small town America” is supposed to be some repository of moral values.

Throughout, policy is based on nationalist sentiment and not what makes sense economically (as evidenced by depopulation and poverty despise massive subsidies) or environmentally.

Oh, one last environmental argument. For larger wildlife, esp. kinds with small populations, like predators, it’s essential to have huge areas over which to roam. Thus, even a community of 100 people can be incredibly disruptive environmentally if they’re connected to the road system (cf. settlers in Gaza). Perhaps this is what the linked Nature article was talking about (I still haven’t read it…) By contrast, 100 people could fit in two floors of a small apartment building in NYC.

In rural America, people often have to drive tens of miles to get to everyday destinations like school, the grocery store, friends’ houses, etc.. Going to the doctor, or a movie theater, or whatever can mean much more driving. In Manhattan, there are dozens of everything within walking distance, and even taking a cab is more efficient than in the countryside.

Economies of scale also make it cheaper to deliver food and other goods, though sadly I have no statistics on this.

Finally, eating locally is to some extent an independent question; people in NYC could choose to eat only food that’s seasonally available from the Northeast. The fact that they (and people in Iowa) choose not to doesn’t mean that big cities are less efficient than rural towns. 

Posted by aram harrow

If it weren’t for small-town America, how would the urban people eat? Will 10,000 people share a P-Patch? As petroleum-based agriculture gets more and more expensive, farming is probably going to become more labor intensive. This was Cuba’s experience as the cheap-Soviet-oil era ended.

Small towns aren’t the problem, it’s sprawling suburbia. Fucking Route 9 and the Natick malls. 

Posted by Dan

Conversely, small-town America is very viable economically, culturally, and environmentally, so long as it grows more of its food in the nearby fields, rather than producing everything for agribusiness and reimporting it. There is nothing inherently problematic about small towns, in fact they are more efficient than cities in many ways — they can compost their waste nearby, they don’t need massive fossil inputs to maintain everyday life, etc. The problem is how they have developed for the past 50 years toward increasing dependence on the global and petrol economy.  

Posted by hedgehog

this would happen naturally with gas that was $20/gallon, though, so my opinions here are probably unnecessary. 

Posted by aram