Quality of Life & Reducing your Carbon Footprint

These two stories at NPR (Atlanta Family slashes carbon footprint and Life in the Burbs.... ) focus on Atlanta and why people make the choices to live where they do. One family chooses the suburbs with a big home and yard and a long commute. The other, chooses to live in an urban setting in a smaller space and with a minimal commute.

The suburban family has a big carbon footprint. The urban family, a small one. Neither of these families, like the majority of American families, chose to live where they do based on a "carbon footprint" they wish to have. They chose it because of their perceived notion of "quality of life".

My quality of life standards mesh with the family who chose the urban setting. While I chose to move to Palm Springs (a smallish community with little traffic and really no commute) from a suburban setting in the Bay Area with a hellish commute, I accomplished, I think, the same thing, except the reduced carbon footprint. I value my quality of life here. I love that I don't have to drive far to work. Of course, as a Realtor, I work all over, but I do try to keep my business local. I love that shopping is close by, that I can walk if I like to the grocery store, the drug store, the bank, the cleaners, the pet store, to restaurants, etc. My neighborhood (Los Compadres) is suburban in design, but is within walking and biking distance of so many things.

Sadly, our carbon footprint in the desert is high. Most people, including me, drive every day, everywhere they go. Luckily, it's not for great distances or in bumper to bumper idling traffic! On top of our driving culture, we have huge energy consumption mainly from air conditioning.

However, because Palm Springs is small, our suburban design and layout isn't so bad as the bedroom communities that spread out from America's large cities, where residents are forced to drive long distances to work, and spend hours each week in their cars. This is why I think there are more and more of us living in Palm Springs from places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle......

My goal, and hopefully that of our civic leaders, is to reduce our carbon footprint to maintain and improve this quality of life that so many of us enjoy. We should build and redesign to encourage more walking and biking, we should demand more solar power production on our rooftops, both residential and commercial, we should build more densly, but in a way that honors our past and protects our majestic mountian views, we should embrace our natural and cultural landscape by building and planting with materials that "belong", that give us a sense of place.

If we do these things, and even more, we can avoid becoming an endless sprawl or a place of dense developments and shopping centers. We can continue to grow and prosper and be a place that many will consider a great place to live and work, a place with a great quality of life...and a reduced carbon footprint.