Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
Interesting book review by Catherine Tumber in The Wilson Quarterly:
Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
by David Owen
A review by Catherine Tumber
From the moment Henry David Thoreau drove a post into the shores of Walden Pond, the American environmental movement declared its hostility toward cities — those sooted handmaidens of industrial despoliation into which, by 1920, half the American population was smooshed. The argument against urban congestion was moral, aesthetic, and increasingly grounded in science. Yet in spite of the hygienic improvements of Progressive-era municipal reforms, the birth of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and the more recent recognition that auto-dependent suburban sprawl poses grave environmental hazards, cities remain the bane of environmentalists. Today’s movement to "green" cities with more open parkland, urban agriculture, and ecologically minded building design belongs to a long tradition.
Contrary to environmentalism’s anti-urban bias, David Owen argues, New York City — the ur-metropolis itself — is among the greenest human settlements on the planet, measured in terms of its carbon footprint. "The average New Yorker," he points out, "annually generates 7.1 tons of greenhouse gases, a lower rate than that of any other American city, and less than 30 percent of the national average." And the beauty of it is that New Yorkers don’t even have to try — or to care. Simply by not driving, and by living on top of one another in small apartments stacked in tall buildings, the denizens of Gotham do more for the environment than the most strenuously eco-friendly composter can imagine.
For those unfamiliar with the environmental argument for urban density, Green Metropolis (which developed from a 2004 article Owen wrote for The New Yorker) is a fair place to start. Owen devotes a good part of his book to showing that high-tech green fixes — developing an electric-car industry, constructing Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified buildings, and going off the grid with residential solar panels and other technologies — offer false comfort, as long as they perpetuate our dependence on automobile transportation. Such measures do little more than flatter the vanity of architects, engineers, and high-end, conspicuously green consumers, while providing a convenient marketing edge for a host of new products and real estate ventures. Michael Pollan-inspired locavores also come in for a drubbing. In reducing their "food miles," Owen argues, they ignore agricultural efficiencies of scale while turning over precious urban real estate to plants rather than people.
The other prong of Owen’s argument is that …
