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Green Metropolis

What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability

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Green Metropolis

Written by: David Owen
Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
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About this listen

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 City.

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, David 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 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.

©2009 David Owen (P)2009 Tantor Media
Architecture Environment House & Home Marketing & Sales Sociology Sustainable & Green Living City New York Sustainability United States Transportation
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What the critics say

"Owen's lucid, biting prose crackles with striking facts that yield paradigm-shifting insights." (Publishers Weekly)
"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." (The Washington Post)

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