Benefits Between Roots
The things we can do in each of the roots of a living city to heal the city have their own benefits, but there are also many side-benefits between the roots. The following are some of the most important benefits:
Earth and Wind & Fire
Energy Savings
Building our soil naturally with compost saves energy (and therefore money) on several counts. Kitchen scraps and garden clippings that are thrown away must be hauled off to the landfill, whereas the only energy spent composting in our backyards or neighborhoods is our own physical energy, which gets us in better shape and makes us healthier, plus we’re building our soil for free. Fertilizer bought from the store is normally manufactured in a factory hundreds or thousands of miles away (maybe even overseas) so it not only takes energy to manufacture the fertilizer and its packaging, but also a lot of energy to haul it to the store so we can burn even more energy driving to the store to buy it and bring it home.
Earth and Water
Healthy Soil
Soil that is healthy is teeming with life, from earthworms to microscopic creatures. The easiest way to kill the soil is to take away the water, because pretty much everything that lives in soil depends on water to survive. There have been droughts throughout human history, but the civilizations that have done better have been those who have figured out how to use rainwater intelligently, rather than letting it all drain away.
Earth and Food
Virtuous Cycle
Healthy soil grows healthy food, and healthy food scraps help make good compost, which feeds the soil. And when food is grown nearby, we all have a much better idea what’s in it than when it comes from somewhere far away.
Earth and People
Landfill Reduction
Millions of tons of kitchen scraps and yard clippings are hauled to landfills around the country each year. There, they don’t just take up space; they also rot, giving off gases like that must be vented so they don’t cause a dump fire, or even an explosion. They also cause the surface of the landfill to settle in unpredictable ways. Composting kitchen scraps and yard clippings at home or in the neighborhood helps the city avoid these problems.
Wind & Fire and Water
Dampen Extremes
Climate change is making weather more extreme around the world. Some places are experiencing unusually severe drought, while historically fierce storms batter other places. Mountains of evidence now clearly show that the climate change we are experiencing today is driven by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Everything we can do to reduce carbon dioxide, including transitioning to clean renewable fuels in place of fossil fuels, will give us better chances of someday dampening the extremes of too much water or not enough that plague so many places today.
Wind & Fire and Food
Caloric Efficiency
“Caloric efficiency” is a strange term with a simple meaning: how many calories of energy does it take to produce a calorie of food? A calorie is a measure of energy, whether it’s energy we’re consuming to feed our bodies or energy we’re burning to run tractors, trucks, and food processing plants. If I grow food in my backyard using natural means (what my grandmother did), the only energy I use is muscle energy, and that makes me fitter and healthier. So I get a calorie of food at no cost except being in better shape and healthier. But every calorie of food produced in the industrial food chain requires at least 80 calories of energy from petroleum to cultivate, harvest, process, and ship the food… an amazing waste of energy!
Wind & Fire and People
Conservation
The fastest path to progress on energy use is to change the ways we live because that doesn’t depend on some future technology. Making existing places more compact, mixed-use, and walkable can also help transform them into places people love. And in places we can walk to work or walk to the grocery store require far less energy per person than those where everyone is forced to drive.
Car Poverty Avoidance
The average cost of owning and driving a car in the US rose above $9,000 per year in 2013. A family of four with two teen drivers living in an auto-dominated place where everyone has to drive to work, school, and other necessities spends $36,000 per year on cars. If they lived in a highly walkable place where everyone could walk to work and school, and could spend that money on a home instead, that money would let them make payments on a $600,000 house at today’s mortgage rates. Part of those savings, of course, are from gasoline. Another big financial benefit is that walking to daily needs makes us healthier, reducing medical costs and extending our lives, so we can work later into life if we choose.
Stability
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Water and Food
Incentive
Stormwater management is something most people do now simply because it’s the law. But those who grow food locally have added incentive to capture stormwater and use it to water their fruits and vegetables instead of letting it run away.
Water and People
Main Street Vitality
We must do a better job protecting our waterways from excess runoff, but we have been using the wrong measuring-stick: now, we use cubic feet per acre; it should be cubic feet per person. Stormwater laws today typically require that a building site discharge no more stormwater once the building and sitework is complete than it did when it was an open field or forest. The most common way of doing this is to build a stormwater retention pond. Left to standard engineering practice, they’re normally surrounded with chain link fences topped with barbed wire and are soon littered with styrofoam cups, plastic wrappers, and other debris. This might work in the suburbs where building sites are large enough you can hide them out back. But if you try to build a new Main Street today and don’t want to pay the really high price of underground stormwater detention, that means that every building on Main Street will be separated from every other building by an ugly stormwater retention pond, which would kill the Walk Appeal and therefore the vitality of the Main Street. If we look at stormwater in gallons per person instead of gallons per acre, an amazing thing happens: the more people there are living in a neighborhood, the less runoff there is per person. Once you get more than four homes per acre, the neighborhood performs better than untouched land even if you do nothing at all about the stormwater. And more people per acre means the neighborhoods and the Main Streets have much more vitality than if we spread everything out.
Neighborhood Beauty
Stormwater management elements like rip-rap, concrete flumes, curb inlets, and metal drains are unavoidably ugly. They’re also some of the more expensive parts of building a neighborhood. They’re necessary on a Main Street to preserve the vitality, but there may be enough room on other neighborhood streets for Light Imprint measures like a neighborhood rain pond, a block rain garden, or a rain pool. Not only are they easy on the eyes, but they’re easy on the wallet as well.
Allure
People are drawn to water, whether it’s the seaside, a river bank, a lakeside, or the edge of a stream, pond, or pool. Wherever there’s water in or near a neighborhood, make it a place people love and it will bring the neighbors together.
Food and People
Resilience
Food that comes from afar is subject to disruption from several sources. With stored grain worldwide at historic lows, it doesn’t take as much to cause a disruption. Spikes in fuel costs cause a surge in faraway food costs, which hits the poor the hardest. A country that supplies our food could decide they don’t like us and refuse to sell us their goods, like OPEC did with oil in 1973. Trucker strikes can disrupt the flow of food as well. As more of the world becomes desert because of climate change, current sources of food can dry up, and climate change destroys crops in other ways, including increased storms and flooding. And currency exchange rates can imperil food as well; a recent drop in the value of a pound caused grocery prices to go up 40% all across England. Food grown in the neighborhood or in the countryside around town is still susceptible to weather risks, of course, but is nearly immune to the other risks of faraway food. And if a local crop fails due to weather we can always buy food from far away, but if food from afar fails or gets really expensive and we’re not set up to grow food nearby, there’s a good chance of people going hungry.
Taste
Food that must endure two to three weeks of jostling in the back of a truck from Central or South America to get to our grocery shelves would be reduced to a pulpy mess if agribusiness used heirloom varieties like the ones your grandmother or great-grandmother grew from seed she had saved from the year before. When the food giants expanded beyond the US border looking for sources of more and more of our fruits and vegetables, they solved this problem by genetically engineering their produce to be unusually tough. If you doubt this, slice open a grocery store tomato and one your grandmother grew from seeds your family has saved down through the years and see for yourself. But it’s not just the toughness; it’s also the fact that most grocery store tomatoes taste almost completely alike. That’s because there’s only a small number of genetically engineered varieties compared to the countless local varieties. So the local food isn’t just more tender; it’s more interesting as well.
Nutrition
Topsoil around the world that has been burned out