Tools

You want to reduce your energy consumption, but what's the most effective way of doing it ? Here's some tools for working out what to do:

Also, do you know how much space you are taking up on the planet ? Use the Ministry for the Environment's ecological footprint calculator to find out.

Urban Sustainability

Urban Sustainability

What is Urban Sustainability?

Our definition of Urban Sustainability is:

"The long term viability of urban living"

Reurbanise believes it's important to realise that our urban lifestyle is going to change dramatically over the coming years and nothing we can do will enable us to preserve our current standard of living. This change will be primarily driven by an end to the cheap oil on which our current lifestyle is wholly dependent.

How will Peak Oil affect our urban lifestyle?

Cheap oil is a component of everything we do, so every aspect of our current lifestyle will be affected. However, the highest energy aspect of our lifestyle, and therefore the aspect that will be affected the most, will be our use of the car for personal transport.

The next most affected aspect of our lives will be basic commodities such as food and water. New Zealand is relatively fortunate to have abundant water in most parts of the country, but we have an increasingly dispersed food supply system made possible by long-distance trucking, based on cheap transport fuel. Our food production is also increasingly dependent on large inputs of fertilisers made primarily from natural gas, and on fuel for farm machinery. Food production in the future will become increasingly localised as transport costs increase, and increasingly small scale and labour intensive as the current large scale (and heavily fossil fuel dependent) methods are proved unsustainable.

It's worth looking at Cuba for an example of a society that has developed urban agriculture to cope with a shortage of fossil fuels for industrial agriculture. To be fair, this system was developed very quickly in response to a crisis and our oil supply will diminish more slowly, but we will have to develop these systems eventually if we wish to survive in our current urban environments.

What can we do?

The key to survival in our urban environment is to prepare for a lower energy future by using less energy now. We believe the most important things you can do now, in order of importance, are:

  • Use your car less, try walking, biking or taking public transport instead. Walking and biking use only renewable energy, and public transport uses a lot less energy than a car (per person).
  • Live closer to where you travel most of the time, probably your place of work.
  • Compost all of your garden and food waste. This is the first step towards greater food independence for you and your community, and avoids precious resources going into landfills and the energy wasted in the process.
  • Start a vege garden, plant some fruit trees, get involved with a community garden, learn to store and preserve the food you grow. As they were in the past in times of crisis, these skills will again be of great value in the coming years.
  • Buy goods and services as locally as possible. Locally made goods use less transport energy to get to you, and foster the skills needed in a localised economy. Global trade in everything except luxury goods and specialised services has no future.
  • Join a local sustainability or relocalisation initiative. Some good places to start are:

Some other interesting resources on urban sustainability: