Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability
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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 reflect 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 additional Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most vital 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 vital means of daily transportation.
These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t lower the hurt they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the hurt, while also building the problems they cause harder to see and to take up. 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 additional settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any additional Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.
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I have not read this book. My bias is in favor of Transition Towns approaches.
That said, I do not see any mention made of food production, just the observation that trucking food from California is cheaper than trucking food from upstate New York. (I question whether that is so even in the present. As for the future, reflect of peak oil and of roads crumbling from lack of maintenance.) Detroit’s conduct experiment with urban agriculture is promising, but New York real estate is still too expensive and densely packed to make that an option.
Generally, the issue of resilience (ability to recover from an external shock, such as food or energy interruption) is ignored. What is New York to do after three days of food interruption? For buildings privileged than, say, five tales, how are people going to get to their homes when electricity for elevators fails, or power to run the elevators becomes prohibitively expensive?
It is arguable that tiny towns and even tiny cities will be more successful than rural enclaves, but Manhattan?
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This is indeed an appealing book, but there are flaws. For instance, folks in NYC do not recycle like most suburban communities require. Most NYC residents are just as worldly as their suburban counterparts and they eat out more which requires all that food to be shipped in from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Last I checked few if any NYC restaurants compost their kitchen waste. Which may be why NYC has more rats at night than my rural area of the Sierras. NYC has more stores that sell non essentials than most rural area stores. How much electricity do persons tens of thousands o NYC building that are lit up inside or outside at night use?
Here in rural Calaveras County CA its rare to even see a street light much less a store who has a sign lit when clogged. And where does all that oily water when it rains on city streets go? How does that effect wildlife down stream? Where does all the dog poop NYC dog owners pick up and toss in the street side garbage cans go? Probably to some rural area where for NYC folks its out of sight and out of mind.
Yes, having more people in a smaller area like an apartment building can be better. But how many of persons apartment buildings lack water saving devises or are energy well-organized. Most newer homes outside the city are required to be energy well-organized.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book has some fantastic thoughts for city life to be a more green and sustainable being for people. That’s what it is in a nutshell. I could elaborate more but I would give too much away. If you’re into the green movement this book is for you.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
I like the CONCEPT of this book, but it is seriously outdated. About 20 years ago, I can see the key themes in this book – efficiency through urban living, the impacts of suburban development – being startling revelations. Now? Catch up! In addition, the book is so redundant, the leader probably could have said all he needed to and saved about 1/3 of the paper.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
What an brilliant book!
In some ways a like-letter to NYC, but mostly praise of urban living. The notion that urban people cast a smaller carbon trace rings right.
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This book covers most new and ancient tech, from solar power ( I want more,and have since the 70’s) to hybrid and electric cars, energy saving lightbulbs and a right green mentality.
I particularly liked the notion that NYC and additional large urban area’s were closer to a green ‘ideal’ than most of the ‘burb’s.
This one is not a like letter to the car industry either, which is appealing – even with the progress being made.
This is fantastic example of a book that you sit down to read, and it is so facinating that you consune it in one evening – agree or disagree with the concept it is one you will want to chat about with others. One of the very books I have read this year, lacking question.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5