YES
Cars have serious carbon baggage, and if you live in a city, a vehicle is probably unnecessary. If you can’t walk to work, you can hop on the light-rail, streetcar, or bus. And when you’ve exhausted your city’s cycling trails, “put your bike on a bus and go for a spin,” says John Gordon, director of the Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices at Portland State University. Portland, Oregon is a prime example, says Gordon. It’s a green-minded “20-minute” city where people can get all the services they need within minutes of home. City buildings, built upward rather than sideways, are way more land and energy efficient than their country counterparts. And innovations such as passive-solar vegetation, and a $133 million vertical garden project planned for the downtown Portland federal building, are making the city even more eco-friendly.
NO
Nothing tastes better than a cherry tomato plucked from your backyard garden. Living outside the city affords land for produce, chickens, a compost heap, and other subsistence trappings. You’ve got mountains to climb, country roads to bike, and rivers to fish. Although services like water, electricity, and WiFi are environmentally more costly to deliver to population-sparse areas, experts say avoiding the industrial food complex will take a big chunk out of your “secondary” carbon footprint. “Society needs food and fiber, so someone needs to live on the farm and in the forest to provide those things,” says Chris Roehm, a farmer outside Portland. But, he adds, there’s a drawback to country living: the miles he racks up driving. “If I weren’t farming, I would move directly back to the close-in city neighborhood where I rode my bike 90 percent of the time.”
