See, I'm more and more convinced that the idea we as individuals, or little pocket communities, or small towns can lead the way to sustainability on our own is sort of delusional and unworthy of ourselves. Certainly the idea that some people can disconnect and live happy transition lives while society crashes around them betrays a profound misreading of history: all those other un-transitioned people aren't going to just go away and leave us to our straw-bale buildings and arugula patches.
If we want to live sustainable lives, we need to make sustainable places, and in the modern world, where metropolises drive the economy and culture, that means making sustainable cities. We may not be able to do that everywhere in the time we have; but the idea that we can thrive without doing it many places is delusional. Fail to make cities resilient at a broad scale, and we're talking the breakdown of social order, which means all other plans are pointless.
In order to make cities sustainable, we need to understand the proper scale of urban sustainability, which is regional. The same mistaken vision that leads us to focus on problems close at hand often leads us to define the solutions as small-scale and immediately local. This, again, betrays the fact that larger systems are often hidden from our view.
What I mean is this: a great many North American green types, if handed a box of crayons and asked to draw a sustainable life, would sketch out something that looks much like a 19th century farm, but with telephone wires and easy access to a commercial center. Meaning, they'd interpret sustainability at an atomized individual household level: can this household grow its own food, harvest its own rainwater, what have you. It'd be a vision influenced by thoughts of self-sufficient, combined with a very suburban sense of having access to what cities make, without being in a city.
Reality, though, is that low-density suburban sprawl is profoundly unsustainable, and no amount of gardening will make it work. For a whole variety of reasons, when you look at the whole system much denser communities are more sustainable.
I'd argue that the proper scale at which to design resilience is not at the household, but in a mesh of urban districts (incorporating energy innovations and transit-orientation) and regional watersheds, foodsheds, transportation systems and energy sources. (If the wrongly-idealized vision of sustainability is the suburban farmhouse, this might be something more like a high-tech Italian hill city: dense and surrounded by forests, fields, wildlands and windfarms.)
We want density, we want a lot more density. Compact cities are the key to sustainable transportation. Suffused with technology, they're they key to post-ownership prosperity. Urban infrastructure is used by more people, making it more efficient to operate and more cost-effective to redevelop along new lines. If we're talking primarily about ecological footprints, sustainable farm systems are more important than urban farmland: better lots of density surrounded by real farms, than lots of land covered with homes and bits of garden (of course, we can have density that includes some gardening as well -- I plan to go water some sprouts right after I finish this -- as long as we don't mistake lawns for an essential biological service). In every way I know of, cities can be made more far sustainable than sprawl... including sprawl that's surrounded by trees, powered with solar and lived in by well-meaning people. Cities are able to provide prosperity for more people at a fraction of the impact, if rebuilt along bright green lines
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