Living in the city - for the sake of environment

An environmentalist's dream is to live in unpolluted countryside far away from all the terrible problems of cities. However, if one thinks from the environmental point of view, living in compact cities is the choice one should take. Compact cities are the best choice for environment for many reasons, some of them outlined below:

1. In cities one can go from place to place walking, by bike or with the use of effective public transport. Owning a car is not necessary to get from place to place, and as a result of this the use of fossil fuels can decrease drastically. If people lived in the cities, transport between places would not require the present intensive car traffic, and thus roads would need less maintenance: the change from private cars to public transport between cities would also be the environmentally right thing to do. There are naturally places which individuals or families would want to see, which are not in the routes of public transport. To enable doing this, public vehicles, which people can use, should be made available (naturally electric cars).

2. Effective water cleaning with reasonable costs can only be done in compact cities. Effective water cleaning plants are only possible with proper sewage systems. With big water and other trash treatment units one would be able to generate most of the energy required for heating/cooling buildings in the city. Only a fraction of the sewage would be going to the environment unmodified as compared to the situation today.

3. Compared to today, recycling could be done much more effectively. If most of the metals were reused, the need for mining would decrease drastically. I don't think this would even be more expensive than mining and processing of the stone to metals - it would just require a change in attitudes. The same is actually true for the reuse of cloth.

4. Effective energy production and distribution could be best done in compact cities. They could be energized largely individually with the help of solar and wind power, and with the heat generated during waste treatment.

5. Instead of the massive tourism and other air traffic, modern technology could make connections between people possible without travel. I do not think that there can be such a thing as ecotourism. Going to see environmentally unique places means that their unique features diminish. This is a real problem for example for tourism to Finland. Finland markets itself as a place, where tourists can be in undisturbed nature with few other people. If the marketing is effective, there will be a lot of people seeing areas which have been disturbed by earlier tourist herds.

Utopy? Maybe, but that is the direction we need to take. By living in the cities we can reduce the human impact to the environment.