Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability
by David Owen
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Published Sep 2009
368 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York, New York.
Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan - the most densely populated place in North America - rank first in public-transit use and last in per capita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.
These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.
"Starred Review. [A] compelling analysis of the world's environmental predicament that upends orthodox opinion and points the way to practical solutions." - Publishers Weekly
"Owen works the city-versus-countryside theme into the ground - ruralites may feel a little picked-on - but the author does an important service in pointing out that those who live in cities can be just as green as your garden-variety organic farmer-and even more so." - Kirkus Reviews
"Owen's engaging, accessible book challenges the idea of green and urban living. Recommended for readers interested in urban planning or environmental issues." - Library Journal
"David Owen always delights with his elegant insights and his challenges to conventional thinking. In this book, he does so again by puncturing the myth of ecological Arcadia and reminding us why living in cities is the best way to be green. It's a triumph of clear thinking and writing." - Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein: His Life and Universe and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
This information about Green Metropolis was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Owen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of a dozen books including Sheetrock and Shellac.
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