Synopses & Reviews
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 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.
Review
"Owen...does an important service in pointing out that those who live in cities can be just as green as your garden-variety organic farmer." Kirkus Reviews
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"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
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"Owens offers a fresh, lucid, irreverent, and realistic view of how we live and what environmental improvement we can actually achieve." Booklist
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"Owen's style...is cool, understated and witty; it does not appear to be in his nature to be alarmist. But this is a thoroughly alarming book." Washington Post
Review
"For those unfamiliar with the environmental argument for urban density, Green Metropolis (which developed from a 2004 article Owen wrote for The New Yorker) is a fair place to start. Owen devotes a good part of his book to showing that high-tech green fixes — developing an electric-car industry, constructing Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified buildings, and going off the grid with residential solar panels and other technologies — offer false comfort, as long as they perpetuate our dependence on automobile transportation." Catherine Tumber, The Wilson Quarterly (Read the entire )
Synopsis
In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, Owen argues that the greenest community in the U.S. is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York City.
Synopsis
From the acclaimed New Yorker writer, a thought-provoking, innovative, and challenging new approach to protecting our environment.
Most Americans think of cities as ecological nightmares-wastelands of concrete, garbage, diesel fumes and traffic jams-but residents of urban cores actually consume less oil, electricity, and water than hybrid- driving Vermonters do, and they have smaller carbon footprints. Essentially, they're forced to. In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen offers an invaluable environmental template for a global population that is growing as natural resources shrink. Green Metropolis will change the way people think about the environment.
About the Author
David Owen is a staff writer for the New Yorker, a contributing editor to Golf Digest, and a frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly. His other books include The First National Bank of Dad, The Chosen One, The Making of the Masters, and My Usual Game. He lives in Washington, Connecticut.