A few weeks ago in his blog Dot Earth, New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin called for a "slow blog" movement. As a fan of the related concepts like Slow Food and Slow Cities (Città Slow), I felt a little thrill of recognition -- there's a movement I'm already in!

As a Slow Blogger, I'm not necessarily worried about over-hasty propagation of political buzz (though that is one side benefit). Rather, I find that ideas for posts often take a little while to germinate and sprout in the rich mulch of my daily information intake. This week's sprout is a little conceptual: it's about scale.

The inspiration came from two smart and passionate guys: Michael Armstrong, of the Office of Sustainable Development here in Portland, Oregon; and Christoffer Hansen of Post Carbon Institute's Energy Farms program. I saw Armstrong speak at a forum called "Global Warning--what can planners do about it?" at the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. His presentation addressed what Portland has done about reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the kinds of changes that will need to happen to make continued reductions once the low-hanging fruit is gone. His five major points about solutions: they must be Comprehensive, Integrated, Attractive, Aggressive, and work at an appropriate Scale. But what's an appropriate scale?¹

Throughout the modern era, "economies of scale" has referred to the efficiencies of larger and larger projects and endeavors. But larger scales can also create their own inefficiencies --- consider, for example, the increased inefficiency of a large suburban area compared to a compact town. An article in The Guardian (UK) described the inefficiencies of their large-scale, centralized electricity generation system: due solely to losses in transmission, in some places "only 37% of a homeowner's utility bill actually goes to producing the energy itself." It went on to explain how some communities in the UK have achieved great improvements by creating smaller, more local energy generation networks.

Indeed, one of the great benefits of renewable energy sources is that they are scaleable. You can make use of solar power or wind power at both large and small scales -- unlike, say, oil or uranium, which require massive industrial infrastructure to procure, refine and convert into usable energy. Small-scale energy generation can also be distributed across locations, creating a certain resilience through redundancy -- much like the Internet². If electricity is being fed into the grid from solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, and who-knows-what-other sources, losing any portion of those sources will not take down the whole system.

Also, resources that would not be useful on a grand scale can become useful on a smaller scale: Armstrong used the example of energy generated at Portland's Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant from methane³, which would otherwise be a waste product. "If you've got a resource, use it where you've got it," he said -- all of the energy generated goes to powering the processes at the plant.

Armstrong also mentioned stormwater as one example of an area in which the scale of the solution is important. Managing stormwater on a city-wide scale requires massive infrastructure and turns the rain into a wastewater problem. But dealing with stormwater on a building-by-building level may not be feasible for many properties; some intermediate design scale -- like the city block or the neighborhood -- might be more appropriate, even though it requires more cooperation among more stakeholders.

This talk about scale came back to me during a conversation with Chris Hansen from Post Carbon's Energy Farms program in Willits, California. (The Energy Farms program experiments with agricultural methods to find models that can help sustain both farms and communities in the face of climate change and peak oil.)

When thinking about energy scarcity, food production, and relocalization, many people can get carried away with romantic, back-to-the-land images of homesteader independence and hand labor. Chris is no romantic - he's serious. He's done hand threshing, and his advice is to use a machine. While it may be possible for an individual to scrape along on subsistence farming, the reality is that all of us live within society, and a society of our scale cannot afford not to cooperate. Scale considerations are important to deciding what will work and what will not, all tied up in a calculus of energy, nutrients, work, and soil health.

"People should be growing food in cities," Chris said. "Vegetables. But not grains. The only way to grow grains that makes any sense from an energy point of view is on pieces of land that are much larger than you can get in the cities." Vegetables can grow in small lots or planters, without a lot of specialized equipment. They often require refrigeration to ship or become damaged in transit, and moreover are made largely of water so they're heavier to transport. Vegetables make sense to grow in modest urban plots to help ensure greater community food security. Outside the city, where there's room to work at a larger scale, is where the production of other staples is appropriate. But both scales are needed.

In governance, the traditional granularities of scale have been town (or city or township), county, state (or province). But regional governance, as exemplified by the Portland metro area's Metro, may be a better way to plan for issues like transportation or watershed protection. As transportation costs and wasted resources become more dear, greater attention to appropriate scales may well offer better solutions and prevent harmful ones.

1. I should note that some of the examples here are from Armstrong's presentation, and some are my own extrapolations.
2. Look for more about distributed energy generation next week, in our interview with Dan Orzech of Earth Rising Ventures.
3. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than the highly-publicized CO2, so using it to generate energy -- replacing energy generated elsewhere -- and then using that energy locally is a real win. Many cities capture methane from landfills and wastewater treatment plants to burn as a local electricity source.
Photo credits: Parked sunflower and CSA sunflowers by Laurel Hoyt
Sunnyside Piazza photo by Jacob Reiff
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