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The environmental lessons that New York and other dense cities offer are not necessarily easy to apply--and, even to city dwellers, they can often be difficult to discern--but the most important of them can be summarized simply:

Live smaller: The average American single-family house doubled in size in the second half of the twentieth century, and the size of the average American household shrunk. Oversized, under-occupied dwellings permanently raise the world's demand for energy, and they encourage careless consumption of all kinds. In the long run, big, empty houses are no more sustainable than SUVs or private jets, no matter how many photovoltaic panels they have on their roofs. As the cost of energy inevitably rises in the years ahead, and as the long-term environmental and economic consequences of our accustomed levels of wastefulness become clearer and more dire, we are going to need to find ways to reduce the size of the spaces we inhabit, heat, cool, furnish, and maintain. (A notable countertrend: while the typical American single-family house was doubling in size, rising real estate values in New York City were reducing the size of the living space of the average Manhattan resident, thereby making it more efficient.)

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Synthetic fibers and other plastics are made from oil--a fact that seventy-two percent of Americans in 2007 didn't know, according to an online survey--and our world, increasingly, is made of plastic. Preferring items made from natural materials is a strategy often recommended as environmentally sensitive, but forsaking pantyhose, Under Armour, eyeglasses, cell phones, personal computers, running shoes, snowboards, sleeping bags, and all our other oil-based possessions poses the same unhappy dilemma that promoting ethanol does: it diverts agricultural capacity and resources (all those new rubber plantations and flood-irrigated cotton fields!) away from the production of food. The world is suffering food and water shortages already; should vegans reconsider fur coats?

Near the southwestern end of Lake Mead, 20 miles from the Las Vegas Strip, an earthen causeway runs between the shore and Pyramid Island. Two cantilevered piers extend like wings from the causeway's sides. There used to be a "No Fishing" sign at the end of one of the piers, but it served no purpose beyond stating the obvious: the lake's volume has shrunk by nearly 60 percent since 1998, and the piers overhang dry land. The lake's rapid decline is mainly the result of an ongoing drought in the Southwest and of reduced snowfall throughout the watershed of the Colorado River, which feeds it. A section of the lake to the south of the causeway used to be reserved for scuba diving; today, you can explore it in hiking boots.

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Ethanol has been viewed as the motor fuel of the future for more than a century--Henry Ford, anticipating eventual petroleum shortages, designed the Model T to run also on it--but it also has many disadvantages, both economically and environmentally, and it is not the energy panacea it is often presented to be. U.S. ethanol production is still minuscule, relatively speaking. In 2006, it amounted to less than 5.5 billion gallons. Alcohol, when burned, yields only about two-thirds as much energy as gasoline--a fact that explains why your car gets better mileage on pure gasoline than it does on any ethanol blend--those 5.5 billion gallons provided the energy equivalent of 3.5 billion gallons of regular unleaded, or about enough to keep all of America's gasoline-powered engines running for something like two weeks. Yet producing even that modest amount required 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop that year, along with billions of dollars' worth of ill-considered federal subsidies and import restrictions, and contributed to higher prices at American gas stations and grocery stores. It also boosted consumption of natural gas: corn cultivation depends heavily on nitrogen fertilizers, which are manufactured primarily from natural gas, at the rate of approximately 33,000 cubic feet of gas per ton of fertilizer, accounting for approximately 5 percent of the world's annual gas production--and exacerbated food shortages all over the world. Global food prices rose 83 percent between 2005 and 2008, mainly because of increases in direct energy and fertilizer costs but also partly because of the diversion of foodstuffs, in the United States and elsewhere, into the production of biofuels. (The price of corn alone rose 124 percent between early 2006 and early 2008, from $250 a metric ton to $560.)

 

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To most people, traffic jams look like an ecological disaster. And they are one, but not for the reasons that people assume. Here's why: Traffic jams are not an environmental problem; they are a driving problem. If reducing congestion merely makes life easier for those who drive, then the improved traffic flow actually increases the environmental damage done by cars by raising overall traffic volume, encouraging sprawl. and long car commutes. It also reduces the disincentives that make drivers think twice about getting into their cars. Traffic jams are actually beneficial, environmentally, if they reduce the willingness of drivers to drive and, in doing so, turn car pools, buses, trains, bicycles, walking, and urban apartments into attractive options. Treating congestion, rather than driving, as an environmental issue often leads to transportation policies that, from an environmental point of view, are flawed. Almost always, when traffic engineers and others talk about reducing congestion what they are really talking about is making traffic flow more efficiently, and that means increasing the overall volume of cars--an obvious environmental negative.

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Buying locally grown food can put interesting, wholesome meals on people's dinner tables, but spreading populations across arable regions at densities low enough to make even part-time agricultural self-sufficiency feasible would be an environmental and economic disaster. Locavorism is appealing as an environmental strategy because it permits its practitioners to believe they're doing good for the world by doing well for themselves, and to recast their own consumption and nutrition preferences as contributions to humanity. But the distance that a particular food item travels between its grower and its ultimate consumer is not an accurate measure of the amount of energy that was required to put it on the table, or of any other environmental impacts; far more significant factors are how the food item was grown, how it was irrigated, which pesticides were applied to it, how it got where it was going, and what else was traveling with it.

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When the price of a barrel of oil first reached $110, in early 2008, National Public Radio ran a news story in which a reporter spoke with a young woman who owned a Chevrolet Tahoe, which she said she used mainly to drive (alone) between home, work, and school. "I kind of regret getting me an SUV," she said, and added that she hoped the price of gas wouldn't rise above $3.50 because, if it did, "I'm just going to have to go on the bus, I think." She laughed when she said that, as though it were an amusing absurdity, but she had pinpointed the dilemma. Moving her from a car to a bus would be a good outcome for the environment, not only because it would shrink her personal fuel consumption and reduce, by one car, the outward pressure that causes inefficient suburbs to metastasize, but also because it would help to supply the critical mass of users on which successful, cost-effective transit systems depend. By contrast, moving her from her current gas guzzler to a more sensible car would be a relative environmental loss, because her reduced fuel cost would merely relieve the economic discomfort that had caused her to think about public transit in the first place.

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My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years we lived quite contentedly in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn't have a lawn, a clothes drier, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bill worked out to about a dollar a day.

The utopian community was Manhattan. Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. In fact, by the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States. The average Manhattanite consumes 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. Eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County.  New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use. The average New Yorker (if one takes into consideration all five boroughs of the city) annually generates 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases, a lower rate than that of residents of any other American city, and less than 30 percent of the national average, which is 24.5 metric tons; Manhattanites generate even less.

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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.