University of Indonesia, Depok, 2008
This is the Story of Stuff
The video has been around for awhile but its always worth taking the time to watch.
From
How to Measure a City’s Metabolism
By Samuel K. Moore
First Published June 2007
Taking stock of London’s appetites
Urbanites, even in poor cities, tend to have the money to consume more than their rural brethren, Rees says, so cities tend to have outsized ecological footprints. However, he notes, public transportation, efficient heating, streamlined services, and other things that are economical in cities but not elsewhere can ease urbanization’s impact on the environment. “Cities do enable-if we organize them properly-the displacement of private cars in favor of public transportation, cogeneration, recycling, and remanufacturing,” he says. “In general, high-income cities increase the ecological footprint because of rising incomes and rising consumption, but we could-through intervention in the economy, appropriate planning, densification, and tax policies-turn it around. But so far we are choosing not to do so.”
The number of urbanites has tripled since the early 1960s and now represents half of the world’s 6.5 billion population, which approximately doubled during that time. Meanwhile, our global footprint has more than doubled since the early 1960s, when it took up half the planet’s renewable resources. It now exceeds the Earth’s resources by about 25 percent, meaning that we are degrading the planet’s ability to support us. If you think of those resources as a bank account, we are no longer living only off the interest. We are spending capital.
So far, the largest urban area to have its footprint measured systematically is London. The results appeared in a report titled City Limits, released in 2002. London doesn’t qualify as a mega city but, with a living and working population of more than 7.4 million, it’s the largest city in the European Union. Although the authors, at the Oxford-based firm Best Foot Forward, didn’t know the contents of every London-bound truck, they were able to gather and analyze a surprisingly rich set of data. They found that London’s ecological footprint was 49 million global hectares-293times its geographical area and equivalent to two United Kingdoms. On a per-person basis, Londoners took up 6.6global hectares, putting them on a par with the Swiss and making them twice as frugal as the average American, but still more than three times as voracious as what the Earth can provide. …> go to article
What of Jakarta? Bandung? Semarang? Surabaya? Yogyakarta?
