Posted by quapster 2 days ago
What differences in behavior do we see between city and rural?
Suburbs have more cars per capita, more driving in general, more asphalt,[0] more time commuting/being on the streets to reach common destinations, more exposure to smoke from fires, and sometimes even more exposure to pollutants and pesticides from farming (especially if they have golf courses. Golf courses use about 5x more pesticides than farmland per acre). Suburbs also have more suicides per capita than cities
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
My mom used to work in public health research, and one example that was hard to quantify was suspected cancer clusters around roads that were oiled gravel, where the oil was contaminated with industrial waste products. Basically, people who were outside in the summer near a road seemed to get lung cancer at higher rates due to road dust.
Issue was there just weren’t enough people or documentation of the supply chain to really prove it. They were able to stop the process of “donating” waste products to the highway departments.
In an urban environment, it’s easy. There are probably 500,000 people living along busy commercial corridors in NYC where you can reliably measure stuff like exposure to diesel particles or whatever.
I grew up in “nature” (aka a forest that emerged from not working farmland iykyk) and every ride to school, the grocery store, a friend’s house, or heaven forbid medical care or a restaurant visit involved 30-45 minutes of driving. That sucks.
From Seattle there are three national parks within an hour or two drive, because the planning laws were put in place to prevent suburbia up to the foothills of the parks.
and some of us prefer not sitting in cars, trucks, or tractors all day.
The horror! :-)
The horror! :-)
Not a very powerful effect.