num_pages: 368
description: Read David Owen's posts on the Penguin Blog.A challenging controversial and highly readable look at our lives our world and our future.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 percapita greenhouse-gas production and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasnt 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 doesnt 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 worlds 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.
language: English
title: Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability
publisher: Riverhead Hardcover