Good points here. Minor quibble is that the most of horses' land consumption comes from energy production (pasture), while cars' production, storage, and maintenance contribute non-negligibly to their physical footprint, partly b/c the land cost of their energy is so low. The actual footprint of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant dramatically undercounts the land surface area required by the cars it might power.
Following this point, I'd guess that a substantial portion of the land cost of New England transportation was just relocated, e.g. to iron mines in Australia. It might be interesting to estimate the actual space taken up by the typical car's production, energy, maintenance, and storage. I'm sure it would still be significantly lower than that required by a horse, but by how much? More importantly, how does the comparison look when you start to factor in other costs? For instance, disasters related to energy production--both weather events exacerbated by climate change and industrial accidents like oil spills--are horrible for conservation. Deepwater Horizon alone caused a ~45,000 square mile oil slick, which is about 2/3 the surface area of New England.
It would be interesting to compare the full system-level effects of cars and horses but probably not feasible for me right now.
The comparison becomes very complex as you go deeper. Like cars, horses have their own unique burdens. Horses produced ungodly amounts of urine and feces, which were difficult to dispose of in cities, especially as artificial fertilizer reduced the value of manure. Horses can only be worked once they are a few years old, and they need stables, stablehands, and veterinarians. The emissions are also hard to compare given land use changes, methane emissions from horses, and the difference in the amount of work a horse can do over its life compared to a car.
The most important advantage of cars (and other mechanical systems) is that they open up room for innovation and improvement. Unlike horses, cars (and the systems that support them) have become vastly more efficient and less obtrusive, dangerous, and environmentally harmful and will likely continue to improve. Cars today are very fuel-efficient, oil spills are getting rarer, we invented catalytic converters, new electric car batteries might eliminate the more harmful mining, etc.
You also raise a few interesting questions I've been considering lately:
- What are the tradeoffs between efficiency and pollution?
- Which ecosystems and landscapes are more/less worth preserving?
Yeah, it's usually possibly to complicate things by considering more detail and/or expanding your definition of the system in question. That said, I think it wouldn't be too much work to get a better approximation for the amount of land used by the auto industry per car. You could start with something like ((parking lot surface area in US) + (total mining surface area in the world*rough estimate of percent of this consumed by the US auto industry) + (analogous estimate for oil & gas land use))/(# of cars in the US). This is super imperfect and probably more like an underestimate than an overestimate, but would make for a fairer comparison with the 4 acres/horse-year thing.
I agree that second-order considerations, for instance that moving to an engineered transportation paradigm opens up more room for innovation, are likely to be more important than the naïve resource calculations. But it's still important to ground the conversation by considering the bottom line w.r.t. things like resources. If the advantages of adopting automobiles to some degree relied on their future improvement, how much would they need to improve to actually make them beneficial? Again, I don't think the comparison is actually that close in this case. Maybe on a thematic level, if this piece is saying "technological progress is actually good for conservation," I'm trying to complicate that story by showing how the argument might go wrong if you adjusted the parameters a little bit.
Highly interested in question #2 there. If we were better at providing quantitative estimates of long-run land + ecosystem value, it might be easier to have grounded conversations about conservation. Complicated causal relationships, like those involving environmental crises, are super critical to consider, although I'm not sure that fully incorporating them into metrics of value right off the bat would be the best approach.
Enjoyed the article -fascinating to see what has changed in our generation. It brought home how much a way of life altered and the reader could almost smell horses and hay and forests (happily not cars). The Bierstadt painting is fantastic. Great find.
Preposterous. How much land has been consumed by roads and oil refineries, just off the top of my head? How much land been cleared for auto plants and junkyards? And let's not talk about carbon dioxide from emissions, rubber particles from tires, or plastics that end up in our bodies and oceans. How much pollution from all that concrete and asphalt? How much additional global warming heat from those surfaces absorbing sunlight? How about toxic runoff into streams, rivers and lakes from tires and oil? Claiming the automobile has somehow helped preserve nature is likely the dumbest thing I will read today.
Roads, parking lots, mines, and factories take up a negligible amount of land compared to the agricultural needs of horses and other livestock. There seems to be a lot of confusion there, so I will likely write a follow-up post laying out those numbers. Pollution is a genuine concern, but it is out of scope for this piece, which is about land use.
Oct 27, 2023·edited Oct 27, 2023Liked by Malcolm Cochran
Pollution was also a major cost of the horse-drawn era, mainly in cities. The pollution resulting from widespread equine transport was a significant factor in pre-20th-century large cities' reputation as dirty smelly places with unsafe water supplies.
During the 1880s New York City (meaning at that time just Manhattan) had between 150,000 and 200,000 working horses and had around 15,000 of them drop dead in its streets per year. Each of those huge deteriorating carcasses was eventually (never the same day it died) hauled away. And replaced in service by another horse, rinse and repeat.
Horses are huge polluters. If you hike from a trailhead that's a popular place for horse riders -- in Marin County, Five Brooks comes to mind -- you'll be amazed by the revolting mounds of dung. But these areas, now very few, are the closest we get to the mess that was any block of a city 110 years ago.
Actually got a vivid little picture of it last summer on a family vacation: we visited Mackinaw Island for the first time. It's a lovely and unique place and we enjoyed it a lot. It was instructive however to observe tangible impacts of all transport (including freight, trash, etc) being horse-drawn, and then picture that applied to 19th-century urban densities rather than a small resort village.
You'd better back your opinions up with credible facts, science, research, links. This article is just terrible. To act as if the car is anything but destructive is ludicrous.
Good points here. Minor quibble is that the most of horses' land consumption comes from energy production (pasture), while cars' production, storage, and maintenance contribute non-negligibly to their physical footprint, partly b/c the land cost of their energy is so low. The actual footprint of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant dramatically undercounts the land surface area required by the cars it might power.
Following this point, I'd guess that a substantial portion of the land cost of New England transportation was just relocated, e.g. to iron mines in Australia. It might be interesting to estimate the actual space taken up by the typical car's production, energy, maintenance, and storage. I'm sure it would still be significantly lower than that required by a horse, but by how much? More importantly, how does the comparison look when you start to factor in other costs? For instance, disasters related to energy production--both weather events exacerbated by climate change and industrial accidents like oil spills--are horrible for conservation. Deepwater Horizon alone caused a ~45,000 square mile oil slick, which is about 2/3 the surface area of New England.
Also, sound and light pollution are annoying.
It would be interesting to compare the full system-level effects of cars and horses but probably not feasible for me right now.
The comparison becomes very complex as you go deeper. Like cars, horses have their own unique burdens. Horses produced ungodly amounts of urine and feces, which were difficult to dispose of in cities, especially as artificial fertilizer reduced the value of manure. Horses can only be worked once they are a few years old, and they need stables, stablehands, and veterinarians. The emissions are also hard to compare given land use changes, methane emissions from horses, and the difference in the amount of work a horse can do over its life compared to a car.
The most important advantage of cars (and other mechanical systems) is that they open up room for innovation and improvement. Unlike horses, cars (and the systems that support them) have become vastly more efficient and less obtrusive, dangerous, and environmentally harmful and will likely continue to improve. Cars today are very fuel-efficient, oil spills are getting rarer, we invented catalytic converters, new electric car batteries might eliminate the more harmful mining, etc.
You also raise a few interesting questions I've been considering lately:
- What are the tradeoffs between efficiency and pollution?
- Which ecosystems and landscapes are more/less worth preserving?
Yeah, it's usually possibly to complicate things by considering more detail and/or expanding your definition of the system in question. That said, I think it wouldn't be too much work to get a better approximation for the amount of land used by the auto industry per car. You could start with something like ((parking lot surface area in US) + (total mining surface area in the world*rough estimate of percent of this consumed by the US auto industry) + (analogous estimate for oil & gas land use))/(# of cars in the US). This is super imperfect and probably more like an underestimate than an overestimate, but would make for a fairer comparison with the 4 acres/horse-year thing.
I agree that second-order considerations, for instance that moving to an engineered transportation paradigm opens up more room for innovation, are likely to be more important than the naïve resource calculations. But it's still important to ground the conversation by considering the bottom line w.r.t. things like resources. If the advantages of adopting automobiles to some degree relied on their future improvement, how much would they need to improve to actually make them beneficial? Again, I don't think the comparison is actually that close in this case. Maybe on a thematic level, if this piece is saying "technological progress is actually good for conservation," I'm trying to complicate that story by showing how the argument might go wrong if you adjusted the parameters a little bit.
Highly interested in question #2 there. If we were better at providing quantitative estimates of long-run land + ecosystem value, it might be easier to have grounded conversations about conservation. Complicated causal relationships, like those involving environmental crises, are super critical to consider, although I'm not sure that fully incorporating them into metrics of value right off the bat would be the best approach.
Enjoyed the article -fascinating to see what has changed in our generation. It brought home how much a way of life altered and the reader could almost smell horses and hay and forests (happily not cars). The Bierstadt painting is fantastic. Great find.
Thanks! A fun article about something I rarely see talked about.
Preposterous. How much land has been consumed by roads and oil refineries, just off the top of my head? How much land been cleared for auto plants and junkyards? And let's not talk about carbon dioxide from emissions, rubber particles from tires, or plastics that end up in our bodies and oceans. How much pollution from all that concrete and asphalt? How much additional global warming heat from those surfaces absorbing sunlight? How about toxic runoff into streams, rivers and lakes from tires and oil? Claiming the automobile has somehow helped preserve nature is likely the dumbest thing I will read today.
Roads, parking lots, mines, and factories take up a negligible amount of land compared to the agricultural needs of horses and other livestock. There seems to be a lot of confusion there, so I will likely write a follow-up post laying out those numbers. Pollution is a genuine concern, but it is out of scope for this piece, which is about land use.
Pollution was also a major cost of the horse-drawn era, mainly in cities. The pollution resulting from widespread equine transport was a significant factor in pre-20th-century large cities' reputation as dirty smelly places with unsafe water supplies.
Fact - I watched a woman curse and kick her shiny Lexus. Cars saved many horses from mistreatment.
During the 1880s New York City (meaning at that time just Manhattan) had between 150,000 and 200,000 working horses and had around 15,000 of them drop dead in its streets per year. Each of those huge deteriorating carcasses was eventually (never the same day it died) hauled away. And replaced in service by another horse, rinse and repeat.
Horses are huge polluters. If you hike from a trailhead that's a popular place for horse riders -- in Marin County, Five Brooks comes to mind -- you'll be amazed by the revolting mounds of dung. But these areas, now very few, are the closest we get to the mess that was any block of a city 110 years ago.
Actually got a vivid little picture of it last summer on a family vacation: we visited Mackinaw Island for the first time. It's a lovely and unique place and we enjoyed it a lot. It was instructive however to observe tangible impacts of all transport (including freight, trash, etc) being horse-drawn, and then picture that applied to 19th-century urban densities rather than a small resort village.
You'd better back your opinions up with credible facts, science, research, links. This article is just terrible. To act as if the car is anything but destructive is ludicrous.
You'd better back your opinions up with credible facts, science, research, links.