| Sourced From H |
A friend has now decided that she wants to move to the country – “proper rural” is what she’s after.
She’s one of those people who believe that the countryside is purer, cleaner, greener and better for the soul than the city. Putting my cards on the table here, I’m a townie. I’ll flirt with the notion of a rural move on a sunny day in July, but a shower of rain and a trip to check out the facilities and services, or lack of them, in the nearest village always bursts the bubble. Still, I can accept that this points to a serious failing in me and I am only too happy to encourage her, thinking selfishly of the potential for holiday breaks.
And so we find ourselves down in Tamara Drewe country, meandering along the muddy, wooded and undoubtedly charming lanes around Beaminster in Dorset, to rendezvous with estate agents and view chocolate box homes that all seem to be called Rose or Honeysuckle Cottage. It doesn’t take long to figure out that the main hazard of these properties is traffic. Country people drive everywhere. In the country these days, you can forget the rural self-sufficiency of Cider with Rosie, where every village had a school, a minister, a post mistress and a grocer and you hitched a lift in a passing pony and trap to the nearest market town.
Every time country folk need a pint of milk, or a newspaper, or want to do anything at all, then they hop into the car. Net effect? Otherwise tranquil properties are blighted by the regular swoosh and drone of passing traffic. Your average Honeysuckle Cottage is much noisier than many residential city streets.
In the estate agents’ particulars, there are occasional tantalising mentions of bus services to the nearest market town. On examination, this means once a week, or once a day if you’re lucky. I am reminded of the advert in Tamara Drewe: “Far from the Madding Crowd. Working retreat for writers. Easy access M96.”
In Scotland, of course, our countryside is generally quieter and less populated even than sleepy Dorset, but a similar mentality applies. The countryside is the territory of people who think of a car journey that lasts an hour in much the same way that city people see a bus journey lasting 10 minutes.
So here’s the irony. We city dwellers are doing our bit for the environment. We walk. We use public transport. We cycle. When we do drive, we have to slow down over speed bumps and dodge other disincentives such as parking wardens. But country people are glued to their cars and militant about the fact that they can’t do anything else because there is no other option. This is undoubtedly true, but it does raise the question of whether rural living in the 21st-century countryside can ever be considered green. All that rural smugness about getting away from the grime and bustle of the city, all that sanctimonious guff about raising children in a more wholesome environment, all that fantasising about living a life that is somehow more spiritually uplifting, one that eschews all the bad habits of urban life, is not only convincing and almost Victorian in its values, it is also environmentally unsustainable.
The fact of the matter is that living in the countryside seems to be used as a dispensation from having to take on board any environmental concerns whatsoever. It gives you licence to drive everywhere, charging along country roads in your 4×4 at breakneck speed. You don’t need to trouble yourself with remembering what recycling box goes out on which day of the week, because many rural areas don’t have any separated-out collections for recycling anyway.
In country areas, the oft-used term “food miles” takes on a new meaning. A minority of country people do keep their own hens and grow their own veg, in keeping with that familiar rural idyll. They may even plant an apple tree or two. But many more of them will clock up hundreds, driving through the countryside to shop at Tesco.
If you’re talking carbon footprints, then counter-intuitive though it may seem, the urban one is much lighter than the rural one. Barely a year goes by without another study demonstrating that city dwellers actually pollute less than those in rural areas. One such piece of research published in the journal, Environment and Urbanisation, concluded that although cities are often painted as polluting and energy-guzzling, they actually generate just two-fifths or less of the planet’s carbon emissions. People in rich countries like ours who live in the country, along with suburban commuters, have much higher greenhouse gas emissions than people of the same income level living in a city.
The reality is that even in London, the dirtiest, most populous, most traffic-clogged city in the UK, the per capita greenhouse gas emissions are around half those of the UK average. When the International Institute for Environment and Development did its environmental audit, it identified the rural northeast of England, Yorkshire and the Humber as having the highest carbon footprints in the UK. I doubt that they got round to looking at the carbon footprint of those living in the Highlands or Dumfries and Galloway.
I’ll wager that it’s heavier still. This picture is international. The carbon footprint of the New Yorker, for instance, is less than a third of the US average. It’s the same story in Barcelona.
Why is urban greener? If you live in the country, then you will tend to live in a larger home that takes more to heat and your car use will be higher.
In cities, where large populations are packed onto public transport, where homes are smaller and more heat is shared in flats or terraced buildings, the environmental burden is reduced.
The people we need in the countryside are those who work the land to produce food. It seems unlikely that the planet can sustain a rural population of those who don’t.