Is the American Dream Sustainable?

What Is the American Dream?

The American Dream traditionally includes a single-family house in the suburbs, at least two vehicles, and sometimes, a boat or a camper. There may be other variations, but I want to focus on this particular vision. This American Dream was sold to my grandparents, my parents, and my generation (I'm 52) as "the Ideal." In many areas of the United States, it is still promoted as the Ideal for the generations after mine to achieve and perpetuate.

This American Dream is a natural offshoot of the frontier vision of mostly white settlers and pioneers whose belief in Manifest Destiny propelled them in their push westward to claim untamed wilderness from Native Americans to "civilize" the land and make it their own. The Spirit of American independence is part and parcel of this American Dream. The promise is to have your own piece of the American pie.

To be clear, I do believe that this American Dream is now available to all regardless of race, national origin, creed, sexuality, or what have you. At the same time, I recognize that, depending on the circumstances, this American Dream may not play out for everyone according to my belief. What I want to hone in on today, however, is whether this should be the American Dream we aspire to when ultimately it is an unsustainable model for housing and urban development? In a word, No.

In the spirit of transparency, my wife and I own a house in a nice neighborhood. We have two ICE vehicles. They are small and get pretty good gas mileage, but they're still ICE vehicles. We don't own a boat or a camper. In our 30 years of marriage, we have owned two houses, this one since 2003. We have worked hard for our less-than-a-quarter-acre piece of Suburbia. Knock on wood, we have achieved our middle-class piece of the American Pie. My wife came from the mountains in Laos where she lived in a thatched-roof house as a child, and I came from a lower-middle-class background. Together, we live better than our parents did at our respective ages. All of this is great, so what is the big deal? Why am I questioning my good fortune?

Taking into consideration more than my own self-interest, and focusing just on scalability to include those in the world's population who may desire it, this American Dream is unsustainable worldwide for the following reasons:

• Car-centric focus: You have to own or use a car to go just about anywhere. Imagine the emissions jump if all the world's population owned and used ICE vehicles.
• Size: The average size of a newly-built American home is 100 times larger than one built in the 1950s, an average of 2,584 sq. feet. More square feet requires more energy.
• Landscaping: Home Owners Associations (HOAs) often require the homeowner to have certain landscaping, including grass, to ensure the neighborhood maintains a green-lawn aesthetic. Even if you aren't in an HOA, there can be peer pressure in some neighborhoods to conform, to keep the property values up. More ornamental grass means more water use to keep it green. You also have the emissions from the gas lawnmower or riding lawnmower, and other gas-powered lawn-care tools.
• Inequity: Is it really fair that the richest 10% of the world's population are responsible for almost half of total lifestyle consumption emissions, and of that 10%, 18% of that is North America's portion? At the same time, is it fair for developed nations to tell developing nations they can't use fossil fuels at our scale?
• Not Scalable: If the remaining 90% of the world's population produce equivalent emissions with the fossil-fuel-based model of housing and urban development, then the earth is headed for a 3 degrees Celsius future.

In this post, I will delve deeper into a couple of these reasons. Perhaps in a future post, I will speak to the others. Keep in mind that I'm thinking out loud. I'm not trying to shame anyone but myself maybe. Often we go through life without questioning the fairness and sustainability of the systems we daily operate in. Many of us Americans just take our prosperity for granted and consider it a right, even if our elevation suppresses others. We should all keep an open mind.

Americans Love Their Cars, Planet Be Doomed

Recently, I've been following NotJustBikes, StrongTowns, and ClimateTown on YouTube. The former two channels focus on sustainable, people-centric housing and urban planning, while ClimateTown seeks to convince people about the reality of Climate Change using humor. My interest was piqued while watching the ClimateTown video about why the suburbs are bleeding America dry. That led to me checking out the other two channels. Each of these channels' conclusions about the state of city planning in North America confirmed what I had long been frustrated with but hadn't formulated into words. Everything is built around the idea that you will need a car to get around. You will need a car to go get a carton of milk because the nearest shopping center is several miles away. These YouTube channels explain better and in a more entertaining way than I can that since the early 20th century, city planners and the auto industry collaborated (you could say "conspired") to build out the car-prioritizing suburban sprawl that is endemic to North America. Check them out.

Does America First Have to Mean That Everyone Else Is Last?

Despite our flaws as a country, I love America. I feel blessed to live in a country many people want to come to, whether to visit or to stay. At the same time, I sometimes question whether I was blessed to live here just to contribute to the GDP and participate unthinkingly in the consumerist lifestyle. The truth is that my gain, based as it is on fossil fuels, is someone else's loss. If you pollute the stream on your property and it affects those downstream, are you not culpable?

But I, as an individual, cannot be blamed either. After all, even if I did everything Earth Hero suggests to get my personal carbon footprint down, I couldn't reach net-zero as an American, simply because of the system I'm a part of. It prioritizes fossil fuels and suppresses efforts to replace that with alternatives, all while greenwashing and gaslighting the general population.

One of the LDS scriptures says "the poor shall be exalted, in that the rich are made low" (D&C 104:16). What if "America First" meant that we walked the walk and implemented energy technologies such as solar and wind on a grand scale such that we were examples of what could be done? Then, developing countries could see that such technologies work and they could adopt clean energy and prosper to a degree unimagined and out of reach before.

Consider Utah, where the average annual precipitation where I live is 16 inches. We get many sunny days during the year. Solar on homes, parking garages, schools, and office buildings combined with battery-backup storage could create micro-grids of electricity. And that's even without converting some of the unused areas of the state into solar array farms. Utah could cut its ties to coal by using solar instead.

Using solar and wind technologies especially democratizes energy so that each family or micro-grid community can be self-sufficient and not beholden to the existing energy monopolies. America could be first to be an example of what's possible.

Can We Redefine the American Dream?

But I was talking about housing, wasn't I? And where does that leave us who own single-family homes?

I could sell out and move into a smaller place. I could also stay put and invest in making my current home more sustainable so that I'm contributing as little as possible to the Climate Change in other countries, at least for the sake of my conscience.

In Utah, the housing market has been on fire the past few years, only leveling off recently. People are moving here from California, Texas, and other places. The new homes I see going up in my area are mostly large single-family homes with barely any yard. So they're saving on water, while favoring size. There are also some multi-family units going in up the way.

Why can't these homes come with solar already installed? Why aren't the roads laid out with bike lanes with more protection than a white stripe painted on the asphalt? And if they're going to skimp on yards per household, why didn't they plan for a plot of land for a community garden?

In the end, my American Dream is to have a sustainable home using renewable energy, even in Suburbia. I can bike as much as possible and keep to the safe roads. Otherwise, I can plan my trips so that I don't use much gas. I could look into getting hybrid or electric vehicles. But I really would prefer to safely bike places.

If I want to change the landscape of where I live, I may have to move, but I'm not prepared to do that yet. Choices. Choices. Choices.

What's your sustainable American Dream?