Green Metropolis David Owen (Riverhead Books)
To be fair, this sort of shortsightedness isn’t a purely local phenomenon, or a governmental one. Journalist and author David Owen says most of us have been lulled into believing we’re just a few rooftop gardens, hybrid cars, and locally grown meals away from having this environmental thing licked, when a real solution, the kind that might still avert catastrophe, is going to require radical shifts in our thinking and culture. “Something—many things—will have to change, in most cases sooner rather than later,” Owen writes in his provocative new book, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability. “The cherished secret hope of most Americans—that some sudden technological breakthrough will enable our children and grandchildren to live the way we live now, except with smaller cars and larger recycling bins—is patently a fantasy.”
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With Green Metropolis, Owen, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is intent on bringing us back to earth and all its ecological troubles. And he particularly wants to give us a close look at New York City, which he argues (sorry, Mayor Daley) is the greenest burg in the U.S.
Owen stresses that there’s no way out of this mess except to slow the rate of sprawl. Suburban and exurban commuters can trade in their SUVs for hybrids, but their improved gas mileage won’t make up for the fossil fuels used to build more police stations and sewer lines and Targets way outside the urban center. As Owen puts it, “the critical energy drain in a typical American suburb is not the Hummer in the driveway; it’s everything the Hummer makes possible—the oversized houses and irrigated yards, the network of new feeder roads and residential streets, the costly and inefficient outward expansion of the power grid, the duplicated stores and schools, the hundred-mile commutes.”
He’s also off the mark in suggesting that individual choices have no impact. It would be great to halt or reverse sprawl, but until that happens, and even after it does, switching from gas-guzzlers to hybrids might give us fewer emissions to contend with since more than a fifth of all U.S. greenhouse gases come from cars and trucks. Owen is right to point out that recycling, say, plastic bottles isn’t an antidote to our overconsumption of them in the first place, but he’s wrong to suggest that the solution doesn’t include reducing and recycling. The EPA just released a report that found that 42 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions are linked to “materials management,” from extracting raw materials to manufacturing and disposing of products. Cutting down on emissions at every stage of that process would obviously make a difference. (Yet Chicago and many other cities still lack comprehensive waste reduction or recycling policies.)
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