Green Metropolis

Do cities have something to teach the country about being green? New Yorker columnist and author, David Owen, sure thinks they do.

In his recently released book, Green Metropolis, Owen attacks the purported anti-urbanism of the modern American environmental movement, arguing that big cities are far more sustainable than the suburbs or the countryside. In fact, Owen claims, New York City is the most environmentally sustainable and responsible community in the United States. Owen points to some obvious consequences of a highly concentrated, compacted population:

New Yorkers drive, pollute, consume, and throw away much less than do the average residents of the surrounding suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and farms, because the tightly circumscribed space in which they live creates efficiencies and reduces the possibilities for reckless consumption.

According to New York Times book reviewer, Elizabeth Royte, the book "challenges many cherished assumptions about easy-on-the-earth country living, though many of its revelations may not be revelatory to hardcore carbon counters, or to anyone who read Owen’s 2004 New Yorker article from which this book sprouted." Royte notes that the book "has a lot of fun at the expense of sentimental pastoralists" and she wonders about the small ecological measures these pastoralists take on a daily basis, giving the example of a "hybrid-driving country dweller with her triple-paned windows, backyard composter and geothermal heat pump?"

Fuhgeddaboudit, Owen practically shouts: she’s still driving to work, to school, to shops and the post office. He doesn’t care if she’s powered by French fry grease or the juice of photovoltaic panels: “Wasted energy is wasted energy no matter how it’s generated.”

Green Metropolis maintains that real sustainability is achieved only if Americans live smaller, live closer, and drive less. Owen focuses in large part on the automobile, "which not only burns damaging fossil fuels but encourages us to spread out and, paradoxically, destroy open space." He advocates making driving more expensive and more unpleasant in an effort to deter people from using vehicles, even suggesting that the creation of energy-efficient cars (Toyota Prius, we're talking about you!) is counterproductive since such vehicles allow people to drive further, cheaper. Traffic jams? Ecologically beneficial, claims Owen.

Many traditional efforts extolled by environmentalists--protecting open space, locavorism, backyard composting installing solar panels and triple-paned windows--simply do not pass muster under Owen's theory of sustainability. In a Times magazine interview, Owen claims that Americans are great at "green consumerism," buying things that minimize their carbon footprint, but that these efforts dodge the real sacrifice required to achieve a higher level of sustainability.

Time magazine: What about the changes we do make — hybrid cars, solar panels — do they help at all?

Owen: We are very good at solutions that involve buying things. "Oh, I'll buy a hybrid." "Oh, when I redo my kitchen I'll use bamboo flooring." But when it comes to actually cutting back, to real deprivation and sacrifice, it's like, "No, forget that."

Most interesting of all, perhaps, is that Owen completely fails to practice what he preaches by residing in (what he would deem) ecologically-unsustainable small-town Connecticut. In an interview, that strikes me as slightly disingenuous, Owen argues that moving from his rural home would provide no change in the carbon footprint of the human race:

There’s a difference between changing one’s own circumstances and changing the circumstances of the world. If my wife and I moved back to Manhattan tomorrow, our personal carbon footprint would shrink, but the carbon footprint of the human race would be unchanged, because in order for us to move we’d have to sell our house and cars and everything else to other people, and life would go on as before.

One critic believes that there is "an important story there, one that suggests either he does not fully believe what he wrote or that he believes it but also believes that other things are more important."

What's more, in addition to living in precisely the type of community he bemoans, Owen actually drives his car the mere three miles to his nearby golf course. I guess when it comes to actually cutting back, to choosing a bicycle over a vehicle for a short trip down the road, an action that might amount, to some of us, as a real, albeit small, sacrifice, it's like, "No, forget that."