Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability Hardback - 2009

by David Owen

A challenging, controversial, and highlyreadable look at our lives, our world,and our future. In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinkingabout the environment, David Owen argues thatthe greenest community in the United States is notPortland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but NewYork, New York.Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecologicalnightmares, as wastelands of concrete andgarbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residentsof compact urban centers, Owen shows, individuallyconsume less oil, electricity, and water thanother Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discardless trash, and, most important of all, spend farless time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan-the most densely populated place in North America-rank first in public-transit use and last in percapitagreenhouse-gas production, and they consumegasoline at a rate that the country as a wholehasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the mostwidely owned car in the United States was the FordModel T. They are also among the only people in theUnited States for whom walking is still an importantmeans of daily transportation.These achievements are not accidents. Spreadingpeople thinly across the countryside may makethem feel green, but it doesn't reduce the damagethey do to the environment. In fact, it increases thedamage, while also making the problems they causeharder to see and to address. Owen contends thatthe environmental problem we face, at the currentstage of our assault on the world's nonrenewableresources, is not how to make teeming cities morelike the pristine countryside. The problem is how tomake other settled places more like Manhattan,whose residents presently come closer than anyother Americans to meeting environmental goalsthat all of us, eventually, will have to come to termswith.