Author Archives: Josh N.

Joshua Cousins receives teaching award

Joshua Cousins was selected by the faculty and administration of SNRE to receive The Superior Teaching Award. Established in 1993, this annual award is made to one graduate student in the School of Natural Resources and Environment in recognition of their outstanding contributions to teaching during the academic year.

Joshua Cousins receives two research awards

Joshua Cousins recently received a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship to support his final year of research and writing. The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship supports outstanding doctoral students working on dissertations that are unusually creative, ambitious and risk-taking. Joshua was also awarded the Trent R. Dames Civil Engineering History Fellowship at The Huntington Library for his research project entitled “Of Floods and Droughts: The nature of technology and the transformation of stormwater in Los Angeles, 1862-Present”. The fellowship provides two months of support to conduct archival research at The Huntington.

Newell speaks at Arizona State University on the Political-Industrial Ecology of urban water supply

Joshua Newell speaks at The School of Sustainability, Arizona State University

“In this talk, Newell will use a political-industrial ecology approach to more fully delineate the urban water supply metabolism of Los Angeles, which sprawls for thousands of miles across the American West. He will reflect on the potential of the urban metabolism concept to provide an interdisciplinary architecture for the fields of urban ecology, political ecology, and industrial ecology.”

The Carbon Footprint of our Urban Areas

This is my first blog post and I want to take this opportunity to reflect on how the scholarly literature on urban sustainability, as well as planning and policy practice, has mostly dealt with cities as geographically bounded spaces. This perspective shapes how we think sustainability as it relates to cities (as well as strategies to foster sustainable transitions).  Research in this domain, for example, has emphasized how buildings, land use patterns, and transportation systems affect the sustainability of cities. These are clearly important foci. However, consumer products and their consumption are largely ignored in urban sustainability discourse and practice, despite the enormous volume of materials and embodied energy used in their manufacture, distribution, and disposal, and the geographically variable impacts of their supply chains.

Emerging research, however, points to the enormous environmental and social implications of consumption by urban dwellers.  In an interesting paper (“Implications of urban structure on carbon consumption in metropolitan areas”) recently published in the journal, Environment Research Letters, two scholars from Finland (Jukka Heinonen and Seppo Junnila) concluded that urban density played a relatively insignificant role in the carbon footprint of the two metropolitan areas that they studied. This finding runs counter to the prevailing belief that dense metropolitan areas have lower per capita carbon emissions than the lower density surrounding areas. They came to this conclusion using a hybrid input-output Life Cycle Assessment method to calculate a consumption-based carbon footprint of the two metropolitan areas. The two authors argue that income level can better explain the reason for the variation and they point to the large embodied energy in consumer products in the overall footprint.

While I take issue with some of the methodological approaches used to calculate the consumption-based urban footprints in this study, I foresee a slew of articles on the crucial role of consumer products in the overall carbon footprint of our urban areas. Recently, I reviewed a manuscript for the same journal that quantified the carbon footprint of the urban metabolism for multiple cities and it also points to the large role of product consumption by urban dwellers.

Stay tuned!

Josh