I wonder if this is true. Rural living is less efficient per capita then cities. The distributed electricity and water and transportation are less efficient and they have a physically larger impact on the environment. Even the food they grow themselves requires a lot of external inputs which are shipped in via far flung transportation networks and are used less efficiently than they would be at a larger farm.
A cow contains 100 to 200 gallons of water, by my estimate.
In my poor rural neighborhood most people simply consume substantially less than the average urbanite, and they reuse as much as possible. Since everyone has a lot of space, they tend to keep everything around and repair stuff, make things from disused junk, repurpose materials from disused/broken structures, etc.
I've never lived in an urban setting where storage space was so readily available and eyesore messes tolerated that everyone could practice such extreme levels of reuse. I don't even have garbage service at my place.
My urban experiences have been exercises in rampant waste and consumerism.
There are folks who live an urbanite high-consumption lifestyle rurally, and those people are definitely burning a lot of energy getting everything brought to them continuously. But that seems to be the exception around me at least; those households stand out like a sore thumb, with a UPS truck visiting every day.
It also depends on the style of urban living we're talking about. People living in single-family houses and driving everywhere consume much more resources per person than those living in high-rise apartments and taking public transportation or walking. High population density, in general, means low per-capita consumption.
I'm not sure how this argument applies to people living completely off the grid and raising their own food. But many parts of the world have too many people to make that a practical option for more than a tiny minority.
Full caveat, I live on a homestead much like this story (except we still haven't gotten around to taking down the two dilapidated structures on our property). I sometimes think the story about high-efficiency urban living is myth. This is especially true when I think about the number of SUVs and trucks I see when I go to Boston, sigh.
Chicago and Boston are valid examples, of course. But I had more in mind cities like Seoul, Shanghai, Mumbai, Manila, Paris, and Dhaka.
The efficientcy is in the number of SUVs and Trucks that you don't see relative to the population. Even in a traffic jam of them you couldn't see an "equal" ammount of them because they wouldn't fit in the area in a per capita homogenized area. Well unless they were literally all stacked up.
Neither of those fall into what I'd consider a rural "homesteading" scenario.
In my experience rural living conditions involve such an inconvenient drive to town that you make shopping lists and coalesce needs for the infrequent trip. It's necessarily a bulk-mode operation with substantially improved efficiency over what you're describing which strikes me as the typical suburban American home.
Of course if rural folks are commuting to a city by car every day for work, it's not great.
Well no, those were both examples of urban living.
Those counter-points notwithstanding, your larger point is still valid -- but you are bringing in a pile of assumptions.
In other metrics, though, rural living could be more efficient. Someone homesteading can have much less issue with nutrient and topsoil runoff, while producing much higher volumes of human-consumable calories per unit area. Not saying they do by default, but they could.
Suburban living is the least efficient land use, though - large distances travelled daily by everyone, large per-unit quantities of water/wastewater/electric/transport infrastructure, large per-capita land usage, low-to-negligible production of useful stuff (solar energy or food)
If you grow edible plants instead of grass, there is a net positive in your carbon footprint.
If you want a new house, it usually comes with an HOA.
The author of the article noted they got their fertilizer from a neighbor. A lot of small farmers get dung of some sort from locals and spread it.
>The distributed electricity and water and transportation are less efficient
Many (most?) homesteaders are off-grid, so not sure this applies either. I think you might be conflating "rural" living with homesteading, which are different. That said, I imagine per capita efficiency is probably more efficient in cities as you said. It all kind of depends on what you do. If you are a rural homesteader and don't drive anywhere and don't fly anywhere, then that's already a big chunk of impact reduced.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_conc...