Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7856 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781594488825
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. While the conventional wisdom condemns it as an environmental nightmare, Manhattan is by far the greenest place in America, argues this stimulating eco-urbanist manifesto. According to Owen (Sheetrock and Shellac), staff writer at the New Yorker, New York City is a model of sustainability: its extreme density and compactness—and horrifically congested traffic—encourage a carfree lifestyle centered on walking and public transit; its massive apartment buildings use the heat escaping from one dwelling to warm the ones adjoining it; as a result, he notes, New Yorkers' per capita greenhouse gas emissions are less than a third of the average American's. The author attacks the powerful anti-urban bias of American environmentalists like Michael Pollan and Amory Lovins, whose rurally situated, auto-dependent Rocky Mountain Institute he paints as an ecological disaster area. The environmental movement's disdain for cities and fetishization of open space, backyard compost heaps, locavorism and high-tech gadgetry like solar panels and triple-paned windows is, he warns, a formula for wasteful sprawl and green-washed consumerism. Owen's lucid, biting prose crackles with striking facts that yield paradigm-shifting insights. The result is a compelling analysis of the world's environmental predicament that upends orthodox opinion and points the way to practical solutions. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley The deservedly respected journalist David Owen spent a lot of time in recent years patrolling the environmental beat, doing research for the excellent book we now have before us. Last year, for example, he attended an energy seminar at a scientific conference in New York, and he did not find it a cheer-inducing experience: "One side effect of attending such events is the feeling of despair that inevitably comes from hearing well-informed people speak about global environmental problems. The challenges are so great that knowledge, paradoxically, can be incapacitating: the more you learn, the harder you find it to believe that a noncatastrophic resolution is conceivable." This is also, unfortunately, an unintended side effect of reading "Green Metropolis." Owen's style, here as in his 13 previous books, is cool, understated and witty; it does not appear to be in his nature to be alarmist. But this is a thoroughly alarming book, perhaps all the more so because Owen is so matter-of-fact: The facts alone are so discouraging that no rhetorical flourishes are necessary to underscore their urgency. One's initial impression is that Owen approaches the environmental crisis from a positive angle. A former resident of Manhattan who has lived for many years in a rather remote Connecticut town, Owen finds in New York City, Manhattan in particular, a model that the rest of the country could profitably emulate. A city of "extreme compactness," 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," and "eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot," which is "ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County." It all derives from being a very crowded place: "Manhattan's density is approximately 67,000 people per square mile, or more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole and roughly thirty times that of Los Angeles. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, enables most of them to get by without owning cars, encourages them to keep their families small, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for the rest of America to sprawl into." In that paragraph, alas, are the two words that make the rest of Owen's chronicle so depressing: "cars" and "sprawl." You can't have one without the other, and the rest of the country has both in amounts so vast as to make a "noncatastrophic resolution" of the nation's (and thus the world's) environmental challenges almost entirely unlikely. "The real problem with cars is not that they don't get enough miles to the gallon," Owen writes. "It's that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging. Most so-called environmental initiatives concerning automobiles are actually counterproductive, because their effect is to make driving less expensive (by reducing the need for fuel) and to make car travel more agreeable (by eliminating congestion). What we really need, from the point of view of both energy conservation and environmental protection, is to make driving costlier and less pleasant." And if you can find an American political or business leader who's willing not merely to say that but to act on it, your eyes are a lot keener than mine. Americans love their cars and the independence they permit, though anyone who thinks it's truly independent to be stuck in a Washington commuter jam has a very strange definition of the term. Speaking of which, Washington does not fare well in Owen's analysis. It is indeed "a city of restrained proportions and stirring metropolitan vistas." But "ecologically . . . it's a mess," because Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's design turned out, once the automobile arrived, to encourage sprawl rather than urban density. Though Owen should have acknowledged that it is indeed possible to live a Manhattanite existence in the heart of the city -- from my apartment on Logan Circle I can, and do, walk to almost everything I need or want, and my car can stay in the driveway for weeks at a time -- the essential truth of his criticism is beyond debate. This is a city in which driving is encouraged and walking discouraged. It is also the city in which is concentrated much of the power to take more than token action on the environmental crisis. But on both sides of the political aisle there is virtually nothing except pandering to our love of cars and placating the various industries and special interests that profit from them, which means just about every industry and special interest in the country. Six decades ago, as the United States headed into World War II, Americans had been steeled by the Depression and were prepared for the sacrifices the war demanded. Now, by contrast, they have been made complacent and selfish by a half century of self-indulgence at an unprecedented level of extravagance. There is no reason to believe they are ready to change the way they live, even as the world grows ever closer to the day when the oil binge ends. Owen writes: "All the exasperatingly difficult environmental challenges we face today, large and small, are consequences of the explosive growth, during the past century or so, of the increasingly complex apparatus of modern civilization, and that growth has been engendered and nurtured and driven and amplified by oil, without which it could not have occurred. Most of the major environmental problems we currently face are the result of oil's prodigious abundance during the twentieth century; most of the problems we will face going forward will be the result of oil's increasing scarcity and cost during the twenty-first." Scientists are feverishly at work trying to figure out what can replace oil, which seeps into every corner of the national and global economies -- think plastic, for starters, and the prodigious waste of it in American packaging -- but as Owen points out, scientists working with oil got us into much of the fix we're now in. The environmental model that Manhattan offers -- "live smaller," "live closer," "drive less" -- is "an invaluable template for efficiently arranging a growing global population in a time of shrinking access to a broad range of natural resources, but how to apply that template remains a frustrating mystery, at least to me." No one can wave a wand and turn the environmental disasters of some cities across the country into instant Manhattans, with tall apartment buildings densely situated, efficient mass transit and zillions of pedestrians. The much more likely prospect is that we will just keep stumbling along, indulging ourselves and closing our eyes to reality until it crashes in on us -- sooner rather than later -- with highly unpleasant and probably calamitous consequences. yardleyj@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"David Owen advances the provocative argument that the asphalt jungle is greener than the places where most Americans live. A hard-hitting book that punctures many eco-balloons."
-Witold Rybczynski, author of City Life and Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at University of Pennsylvania

"David Owen always delights with his elegant insights and his challenges to conventional thinking. In this book, he does so again by puncturing the myth of ecological Arcadia and reminding us why living in cities is the best way to be green. It's a triumph of clear thinking and writing."
-Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein: His Life and Universe and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

"Green Metropolis is a bracing, important work of contrarian truth- telling. Old-fashioned cities aren't just more interesting, more exciting, more fun-they're also by far the most sensible and efficient way to organize modern life. We city-dwellers live in the places we are waiting for." -Kurt Andersen, author of The Real Thing and Heyday

Customer Reviews

Maybe if we paint the grass green... you know, with low VOC paint...
You have to read this book carefully, since at first glance it reads like a gigantic love letter to New York City, with the heart in "I (heart) NY" recolored green. And if you do read it that way, you're going to miss the point of what the author is saying.

The problem with green thinking is that there's a whole heck of a lot of self-delusion going on, and when it comes to urban planning, David Owen has done a lot of looking into it, pointing out that at the end of the day, a lot of "green" purchases and behaviors are attempts to rationalize consumption without actually reducing it. Along the way, he steps on the toes of the great pastoral myth of environmentalism by showing how anti-city bias in conservation thinking has often served to promote the very urban sprawl it's supposed to be fighting. And Owen is hardly a global warming denialist or ecology "skeptic" either -- in fact, the primary focus of the book is on managing carbon footprints and just how poorly that's done.

Owen's dirty little secret is something urban planners and ecological experts have been promoting for years with little heed from the general public -- that the density of cities like New York is key to creating a low-consumption environment, since distances between home, work, and other activities are relatively small and therefore cars are generally unnecessary. Owen looks at carbon footprint in per capita terms, showing how the average New Yorker uses something like one third of the total oil consumption of a rural Vermonter, and points out the absurdity of building a "green" corporate campus (his prime example being Sprint/Nextel's in Kansas) so far away from a city that virtually all employees have to drive to work. He even goes as far as to attack the locavore movement, noting that because of the ability to pool resources (i.e. load lots of produce onto one big truck), a container of raspberries going from California to NYC can have a smaller carbon footprint than the same container grown in upstate New York.

Now the book isn't perfect -- Owen leaves a lot of loose ends and really doesn't do a lot of theorizing about solutions beyond the broad templates he outlines about transit-heavy city life, and his dislike of urban agriculture of the sort proposed by futurists seems rather inflexible and underinformed; his points about excessive open space (particularly Central Park, which he finds oversized and underutilized) are sensible in terms of walkability, but urban agriculture as such is still in its infancy. He seems to avoid the issue of concentrated air pollution in urban settings, a curious omission when dealing with urban environmental matters. (And, most curiously, Owen doesn't seem to offer any opinions on the works of Paolo Solieri, the creator of the concept of the arcology and seemingly one of the most relevant of all architects to his point, although Frank Lloyd Wright comes in for a drubbing due to his unrelenting support of suburban expansion.) But the book shines at pointing out the absurdities of the modern environmental movement (in the process tending to prove a theory I've long held about the environment/ecology section at bookstores, that the signal to noise ratio is heavily tilted in favor of noise from both sides) and functions as a call to the environmental movement to stop seeing urban life as the enemy.

Live Simply, so that Others Might Live
This was a pleasant surprise.
When I read the first chapter of Green Metropolis, I was worried that my fears about this book might be confirmed. After all, the blurb says that the author is going to reveal how New York City is more sustainable than Snowmass, Colorado or Burlington, Vermont. Hmm, I thought, there's not much to that. People in NYC don't drive cars, they live on top and side-by-side of each other (so they share heating costs), and they have great transit. Why should any readers find it surprising that NYC is so sustainable?

I was kind of impatient, I suppose. I remember sitting in a hotel near the campus of Sprint, on about 110th St and Metcalf in Kansas City, Missouri (a national epicenter of sprawl!) and telling my sister that its not enough to say NYC is the ideal for sustainability. You can't turn this into Greenwich Village, right? In other words, that kind of insight is lacking because it offers no value for what policy should do about the problem of sprawl.

Moreover, I thought, why is David Owen singing the praises of NYC, when he moved from there to rural Northwestern Connecticut?

Owen must have known that, because this book seems to understand that its not enough to laud NYC. What this book does it go step-by-step through many of planning's existing antidotes to sprawl and reveal their limitations. This is a book about challenging the assumptions that govern current sustainability policy.

The problem, he says, is that New York was built not by policy makers with the right vision, but by lucky timing. It was good timing because most of the city was laid out before the car. What is even more important to realize, he says, is that it was only because of the inability of planners to exert their will upon NYC's urban form that it turned out so well. The best efforts of man didn't foul things up. Although zoning laws and modern planning had begun to take root as early as the 20s, professional planners didn't realize their will on NYC. Too many land decisions were already predetermined before zoning could force segregated land uses. New York succeeded in spite of the best intentions of policy.

Moreover, NYC continues to succeed mostly due to forces that are beyond the decision-making of consumers and policy makers. People choose transit because they don't have a better option. Given the choice, many New Yorkers might drive Smart ForTwo cars if they were available. Sure, there would be more fuel efficient cars on the road - but there would then be fewer walkers.

Owens works over so many of the hot ideas in sustainability - from traffic calming, to congestion pricing, to LEED, to HOV lanes, to locavorism, to new urbanism - and shows how each produces unintended impacts that offset much if not all of their value. LEED, for example, is undermined by its focus on becoming green by adding extra features to buildings. It is a dream for a builder, but is it really sustainable to build a 4,000 square foot house even if it has bamboo cabinetry and argon windows? Wouldn't it be more sustainable, he suggests, to just live more simply?

The problem that undermines efforts to make Kansas City sustainable are in many ways the same problems, albeit on a larger scale, that make it hard to build sustainability on the household level. Current policy focuses on making a better "bad:" i.e., low sulfur coal, hybrid cars, bamboo flooring. What would be better would be to shift more to the "goods:" walking, biking, and generally consuming less.

Once a suburb has been developed and infrastructure has been invested and built to service that new "place," the die is cast. People can build a solar panel, but they are still going to be driving just as far from work to home. You can have a Prius, but you are still driving it on roads. It's the miles, not the mileage. Its the low-density development that prevents people from walking or biking.

For individuals, it is much the same: once a bad decision has been made, even trying to improve on a "bad," is limited. Owen does own that house that is 1 mile from the nearest commercial entity. He could move back to NYC, but then someone else would move into his home and consume on the same scale. If anything, he reasons, its better for a work-at-home person to inhabit this space.

I think he recognizes the value of using market forces and incentives to change travel plans, but he seems to argue that the labor-saving capacity of oil is rarely equalized by policy. Oil is just too efficient, it seems. You have to deny its use - rationing its use only makes the auto mode more efficient - thereby reducing the chance that congestion will send a strong enough signal to travelers that they should just ride a bike.

I haven't been satisfied with Michael Pollan because he seems to ignore some of the critiques against his ideas. I.E. - if I consume "local", do I have to give up coffee, gasoline, and most anything made with foreign minerals? How about the 2 or 3 billion who will be left to go hungry when we eliminate agriculture at scale? I have appreciated the ability of Bill McKibben to critique the problems of our current lifestyle. Then again, I am not sure he has spoken adequately about their solutions.

Upon reading Owen, I am left with a feeling of the nuances and tensions within many of the questions surrounding the sustainability of people and cities. I think this book has a place for the bookshelves of a policy maker or in the syllabi of some college planning courses. Riverhead Press says this is a book about the environment. Really, it is a book about urban planning. The author makes reference to Jane Jacobs, to Christopher Alexander, to Robert Moses, and to many of the nation's great land-use planners.

Challenges preconceptions about the meaning of green
The author challenges a lot of notions about green - but ultimately falls flat when analyzing his own situation and the situation of others likes him, which deflates the argument he's been making all along and damages the strength of the book.

The author goes through many ways that a city, most specifically Manhattan, is much greener than the lifestyle most Americans enjoy. To sum it up - living in small spaces, where one can't accumulate much stuff, and taking mass transit to work is much greener than living in a spectacular house in the suburbs with every green amenity (turbines, water reclamation, etc.) available. The best parts of the book are his one by one dismissals of LEED features as impractical or just silly bureaucracy for most buildings. A large, sprawling corporate campus, like the Gap outside of San Francisco, can be hailed as a green mecca due to its renewable energy, etc. - but if they simply built in an office tower in San Francisco, it would be far greener. The comparisons and information included is thought provoking and has made me rethink the benefits of LEED and so-called green construction.

Unfortunately, his book has two problems - the first, well, there just aren't that many areas like Manhattan or San Francisco city for people to live in, and he doesn't suggest any real ways to promote developing and growing those areas. The second, bigger problem, alluded to previously - the author lives in an 18th century house in the middle of nowhere Connecticut. He lived in New York for years, but now does exactly what he excoriates others for doing. For all the talk of how wonderful the city is, he lives in an area more rural than most. His justification for this is essentially - he'd move back to New York, but someone else would just move to his house, so what's the big deal? Excuse me? Couldn't anyone use that justification for not living in the city?