Destructive Patterns Of American Suburban Lifestyle

Destructive Patterns of American

Suburban Lifestyle

Since the dawning of mankind, humans have sought out to better the methods by which they live. Different from animals, humans are never satisfied with what they have or how their society functions. It is this continual lust for greater personal gain that has frequently lead human society into problematic situations.

Even in ancient times drawing back to the great Mayan civilization in Mexico and Central America, the want to create buildings and personal items more extravagant than necessary was prevalent. Ancient Mayans maintained the practice of constructing lime floors in their buildings and courtyards. Not only were lime floors used to cover much of the ground, they were built and rebuilt on top of one another creating unnecessarily thick flooring. “It would be like saying your sidewalk needs to be two meters thick,” said Hansen, a world-renowned archaeologist who observed these findings (Ehrlich 113). Not only was this excessive use of lime a waste of the mineral, it had farther reaching detriments to the health of the surrounding environment. Near by fields were terraced for the raising of crops such as corn, squash and other vegetables. Unfortunately these fields became covered with a thick layer of clay sediment rendering the fields unusable for crops. Surrounding hills had been completely deforested in the need for firewood to feed the Mayan lime kilns and left all the clay soil free to wash down the hills and into the crop fields. It is type of careless behavior that has forever caused humanity problems with its local environments.

Over consumption is the issue that causes all of these problems. What you may be asking is what exactly is over consumption? In all simplicity, over consumption is using more material goods and doing more harm to the environment than is essential for survival. The sad fact of the matter is that a very small minority of the people on this planet account for the vast majority of its over consumption. For example, the United States accounts for five percent of the world’s population, however it consumes twenty five percent of the world’s energy. On average, one American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, thirteen Chinese, thirty-one Indians, one hundred and twenty eight Bangladeshis, three hundred and seven Tanzanians, or three hundred and seventy Ethiopians (WOA!!).

The vast difference between the United States and other countries has given rise to an ever-increasing disparity in the gap between the U.S. and poorer countries. People in the United States use much more than they need to survive while, in third world countries, people are using less than they need and are barely getting by. The reality that “each baby born in the United States on average will cause 15-150 times more environmental damage than a baby born in a very poor country” is a sad truth of life (Ehrlich 115). This all leads to the notion that in this paper I will be arguing that the population growth and suburban spread of the United States will be the eventual downfall of the natural environment and ultimately of mankind itself.

There are many issues concerned with this immanent threat and the reasons why it is a major concern. It is a problem that the vast majority of American citizens consider “non-existent” or at least that’s what they would like to think. Before one can understand why our American suburban lifestyle is so destructive, one must understand how we came to living this way of life and the consequences it brings.

Our country has gone through many stages and eras in its evolution. Each era is different in the problems it faced and the methods used to overcome them. Along with problematic issues that the American people faced, each era caused environmental damage in its own unique ways. Responsible for heading our society down the road of ecological irresponsibility was the time occurring from 1815 to 1914. During this time, several events occurred causing irreversible effects, first was the industrial revolution. The revolution began in England in the late 18th century, however it made its way over to the United States shortly after. It was the start of our destructive and fast paced modern way of life. Items could be manufactured more quickly by machines and therefore created a greater need to harvest raw materials. With the use of coal and fossil fuel powered machines gathering more raw resources at faster rates, came the added environmental damage caused by doing so. Large areas of forest were clear-cut, cropland was over planted, and minerals were stripped from the earth. Pollution from machines and the factories used to produce goods during this time were the first causes that lead to damaging the Earth beyond its own natural ability to recover. These factors have lead to the depletion of the ozone layer and global climate change. Since 1750, before the industrial revolution, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by 31 percent, from 289 parts per million to 367 ppm today. This concentration has not been exceeded during the past 420,000 years, and probably during the past 20 million years. (WMO)

Since the industrial revolution, American society has grown with leaps and bounds. New technologies have changed the ways in which we live and therefore made life much different than it was a hundred years ago. Although some might argue that life has taken a course of being more care free and easy, it has also been greatly complicated. Previous to this modern chaotic way of life, roles in society were fairly simple. Either you lived in the countryside and were a part of the agricultural way of life or you lived in a densely populated urban area and worked in factories or commercial jobs in the big cities. However, in post World War II years, after the homeward arrival of America’s troops, a new type of American society emerged. This way of life was the creation of the ever-expanding American suburbs.

The suburban dream began, arguably, at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. “Highways and Horizons,” better known as “Futurama,” was overwhelmingly the fair’s most popular exhibit (Leinberger). The exhibit’s main feature was a scale model, covering the size of a football field, displaying what American cities and towns would look like in 1960. It portrayed a place with wide-open highways and neighborhoods where every family would have their own cars and live in stand-alone houses complete with attached garages. At the time, this fascinated the American society,