(View entire post here)David Owen is our guest blogger during the week of September 14. If you have any questions for David Owen, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability:
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 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.
About David Owen
David Owen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of a dozen books. He lives in northwest Connecticut with his wife, the writer Ann Hodgman, and their two children.
Green Metropolis
David Owen - Author
Book: Hardcover | 9.25 x 6.25in | 368 pages | ISBN 9781594488825 | 17 Sep 2009 | Riverhead | 18 - AND UP
$25.95 - add to cart
David Owen, Green Metropolis, environment, sustainability, urban living, green living
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Resource depletion and inner city living
One of the commonest but least understood contradictions of Green advocacy, is this. In the advent of depleted resources and scarce, expensive energy, most inner city jobs will simply cease to exist. We might condemn the extravagance of the advanced US economy, yet we completely fail to recognise that millions of bureaucratic and paper-shuffling jobs simply cannot be supported by a leaner, simpler, "Green" economy. All those workers have to be fed, clothed and housed; and these things have to be provided by millions of other humans for whom inner city living is impossible.
Not to mention the sheer unaffordability of Manhattan for the most people. Not only do the inhabitants of Manhattan have jobs that would not exist without the extravagant, complex US economy, they earn the highest incomes in that economy. Manhattan actually represents the same sort of elitism as the ancient castle in which the nobility lived, surrounded by peasants who did the dirty work necessary to sustain the inhabitants of the castle in their utopian existence. When the peasants were forced by enemy action, to abandon their low-density living, the castle could not survive for long.
Furthermore, inner city living itself will become impossible in the brave new world of scarce resources. The same factors that will make free use of private vehicles less feasible will also apply to public transport. If we really do have to confront such a crisis, we will be forced to resort to freely mixed uses of land. The transport necessary for the support of modern living, particularly for the supply of food and necessities, will no longer exist; neither will the supplies of affordable electricity.
In the brave new world of depleted resources, what makes sense? Living in a wholly separate house with its own plot of surrounding land, where you can burn biomass to heat your home, cook on a barbecue, hang washing on a line, grow your own vegetables and fruit trees, collect rainwater, compost your own waste and recycle "grey water", keep fowls or even a sheep or two, and have solar panels all over your roof and a wind turbine in the back yard; and buy produce from nearby small farms, vineyards and cottage industries? Where does living in high density inner city blocks of flats fit in to this picture?