Thinking of building in the Country? Don't. At least stop and think about it critically.
A slew of new developments are marketing to New Yorkers fleeing the city under the guise of sustainable country homes. Find out how you can actually contribute to health and environment by how and where you live.
What's sustainable about for-profit companies destroying 150 acres of farmland and selling inexpensive houses?
This has been happening for ages and is responsible for some of the worst environmental destruction Americans have wrought. We're now seeing it under the guide of "health." Past generations have used the exact same language to brand ex-urban developments. The difference now is that internet bandwidth has increased our ability to spread even further, making the destruction and fossil fuel usage even more extensive.
There is exhaustive proof that tampering with pristine sites not only destroys the immediate surroundings, but disrupts larger ecosystems, eventually making "nature" an archipelago of disconnected wildlife islands, decreasing biodiversity. The truth is that we don't even understand the impact of what we destroy. We know that a massive die-off of bees is bad for pollination, but what about underground networks of communication between trees, removal of soils filled with microbes that took centuries to form? When you disrupt these systems, the unintended consequences are great and the science is beginning to grapple with the consequences as we make it too late to attend to them.
If you don't believe in the city, ask yourself why? Is it fear? Were you born in the suburbs? Why not go back there, invest in an existing community? You may find that your suburban past is now a more diverse and interesting place to revisit. You may find that you can make a change there.
We have made this mistake before- suburban sprawl and "white flight" are harbingers of racial inequality and environmental destruction. Bandwidth gives us the opportunity to work anywhere. But who does it serve?
We are separated from our communities and tied into new ecosystems controlled by tech companies. You are now an avatar, a virtual entity, participating in the same mass-scale environmental destruction that your grandparents and parents generation did.Re-use, recycle, renovate, think about it. Re-invest and reinvigorate existing developments, communities and ecosystems.
Our escapist impulses don't have to contribute to further environmental destruction of a finite earth. Within our lifetimes we will see mass migration of climate refugees away from uninhabitable equatorial and low lying regions. These people weren't "priced out" of Brooklyn. Their homes are made uninhabitable by our collective actions- they will be starved out of Syria and flooded out of Bangladesh.
