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Veen Netr polis Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability DAVID OWEN 1 Rivermecl Books s member of Penguin Group RIGA) Inc. New York 2009 EFTA00281356 One Mere Like Manhattan y wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York state. For seven years we lived quite contentedly in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn't have a lawn, a clothes dryer, or a car. We.did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new pos- sessions of significant size. Our electric bill worked out to about a dollar a day. c The utopian community was Manhattan. Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an EFTA00281357 MORE LIKE MANHATTAN GREEN METROPOLIS than that of residents of any other American city, and less than ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and 30 percent of the national average, which is 24.5 metric tone; diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of Manhattanites generate even less. America it's a model of environmental responsibility. In fact, by "Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is the most significant measures, New York is the greenest com- obviously an environmental disaster—except that it isn't," John munity in the United States. The most devastating damage that Holtzclaw, who recently retired as the chairman of the Sierra humans have done to the environment has arisen from the burn- Club's transportation committee, cold me in 2004. "If New ing of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practi- Yorkers lived at the typical American sprawl density of three cally prehistoric by comparison with other Americans, including households per residential acre, they would require many times people who live in rural areas or in such putatively eco-friendly as much land. They'd be driving cars, and they'd have huge lawns cities as Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado. The average and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then they'd Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a be overwatering their lawns, so that runoff would go into whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most streams." The key to New York's relative environmental benig- widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T.' nity is its extreme compactness. Charles Komanoff, a New York Thanks to New York City, the average resident ofNew York state City economist, environmental activist, and bicycling enthusi- uses less gasoline than the average resident of any other state, ast, told me, "New Yorkers trade the supposed convenience of and uses less than half as much as the average resident of the automobile for the true convenience of proximity. They are Wyoming. Eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents able to live without the ecological disaster of cars—which is travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's caused not just by having to use a car for practically every trip, ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the but also by the distance that you have to traverse. Bicycling, rate for workers in Los Angeles County.' New York City is more transit, and walking support each other, because they are all a populous than all but eleven states; ifit were granted statehood, made possible by population density." Manhattan's density is it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use, not only be- approximately 67,000 people per square mile, or more than cause New Yorkers drive less but because city dwellings are eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole and roughly smaller than other American dwellings and are less likely to con- thirty times that of Los Angeles. Placing one and a half million tain a superfluity of large appliances.' The average New Yorker people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces (if one takes into consideration all five boroughs of the city) an- their opportunities to be wasteful, enables most of them to get nually generates 7.1 metric tons ofgreenhouse gases, a lower rate 3 2 EFTA00281358 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN by without owning cars, encourages them to keep their families end of our driveway, I can walk several miles through woods to small, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inher- an abandoned nineteenth-century railway tunnel, while crossing ently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apart- only one paved road. ment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for the rest of Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consump- America to sprawl into. tion of electricity went from roughly 4,000 kilowatt-hours a My wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, and I had our first year, toward the end of our time in New York, to almost 30,000 child, Laura, in 1984. Ann and I had grown up in suburbs, and kilowatt-hours—and our house doesn't even have central air- we decided that we didn't want to raise Laura in a huge city. A conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and couple of months after she learned to walk, we moved to a small another one soon after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. town in the northwest corner of Connecticut, about ninety (If you live in the country and don't have a second car, you can't miles north of midtown Manhattan. Our house was built in the retrieve your first car from the mechanic after it's been repaired. late 1700s. During a rainstorm one night soon after we moved The third car was the product of a mild midlife crisis; it evolved in, I stuck my head into the attic and ran a flashlight over the into a necessity as soon as Laura and our son, John, became old underside of the roof. The decking boards had been made, two enough to drive.) Ann and I both work at home, and therefore hundred years before, from the broad trunks of old-growth commute by climbing a flight of stairs, but, between us, we American chestnut trees, a species that was wiped out by an manage to drive more than 20,000 miles a year, mostly doing imported blight in the first half of the twentieth century, and ordinary errands.' City dwellers who fantasize about living in some of them were almost as broad, as sheets of plywood. The the country usually picture themselves hiking, kayaking, gather- rafters, which were hand-hewn, were joined not by iron nails but ing eggs from their own chickens, and engaging in other robust by wooden pegs. Carved near the ends of some of the rafters outdoor activities, but what you actually do when you move out were large Roman numerals, which had been placed there as of the city is move into a car, because public transit is nonexis- assembly aids by the anonymous eighteenth-century builder. tent and most daily destinations are too widely separated to The house is across a dirt road from a nature preserve and is make walking or bicycling plausible as forms of transportation. shaded by tall white-pine trees, and after the storm had ended I Almost everything Ann and I do away from our house requires could hear a swollen creek rushing past at the bottom of the hill. a car trip. The nearest movie theater is twenty minutes away, and Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional black bear feed them- so is the nearest large supermarket. Renting a DVD and later selves in our yard, and wildflowers grow everywhere. From the returning it consumes almost two gallons of gasoline, because 4 $ EFTA00281359 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN Blockbuster is ten miles away and each complete transaction bipolar disorder, and the antibacterial compound tridocarban, involves two round trips. Quite often, we use a car when taking which is an ingredient ofhousehold soaps and cleaning agents! our dogs for a walk, so that the walk can begin somewhere other Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to than our own yard. The office of our Manhattan pediatrician protect what we haven't ruined already, to conserve what we was in the lobby of our apartment building, an elevator ride haven't used up, to restore as much as possible of what we've away; the office of my Connecticut dentist is two towns over, a destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that round trip of thirty-two miles. When we lived in New York, heat civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children's escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment lifetimes and beyond. above ours; nowadays, many of the BTUs produced by our very To the great majority ofAmericans who share these concerns, modern, extremely efficient oil-burning furnace leak through densely populated cities look like the end of the world. Because our two-hundred-year-old roof and into the dazzling star-filled such places concentrate high levels of human activity, they seem winter sky above. to manifest nearly every distressing symptom of the headlong growth of civilization—the smoke, the filth, the crowds, the cars—and we therefore tend to think of them as environmental THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IS A CHRONICLE OF DE- crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City gen- struction: people arrive, eat anything slow enough to catch, sup- erates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces plant indigenous flora with species bred for exploitation, burn more solid waste than any other American region of comparable whatever can be burned, and move on or spread out. No sensi- size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in tive modern human can contemplate that history without a relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an shudder. Everywhere we look, we see evidence of our reckless- intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of ness, as well as signs that our destructive reach is growing. For deepening green. someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on But this way of thinking obscures a profound environmental a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is no longer truth, because if you plotted the same negative impacts by resi- the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, 175 miles away.' Tap dent or by household the color scheme would be reversed. New water in metropolitan Washington, D.C., has been found to Yorkers, individually, drive, pollute, consume, and throw away contain trace amounts of caffeine, ibuprofen, naproxen sodium, much less than do the average residents of the surrounding sub- two antibiotics, an anticonvulsive drug used to treat seizures and urbs, exurbs, small towns, and farms, because the tightly circum- 6 7 EFTA00281360 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN scribed space in which they live crates efficiencies and reduces cars and garages and lawn tractors and swimming pools and the possibilities for reckless consumption. Most important, the septic tanks higher than skyscrapers, and you wouldn't be able city's unusually high concentration of population enables the to build roads and gas stations fast enough to serve us, even if majority of residents to live without automobiles—an unthink- you could find places to put them. Conversely, if you made all able deprivation almost anywhere else in the United States, other tight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they than in a few comparably dense American urban cores, such as would require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New the central parts of San Francisco and Boston. The scarcity of England states plus Delaware and New Jerseys Spreading people parking spaces in New York, along with the frozen snarl of traffic thinly across the countryside may make them feel greener, but on heavily traveled streets, makes car ownership an unbearable it doesn't reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, burden for most, while the compactness of development, the it increases the damage, while also making the problems they fertile mix of commercial and residential uses, and the availabil- cause harder to see and to address. ity of public transportation make automobile ownership all but New York City is by no means the world's only or best ex- unnecessary in most of the city. A pedestrian crossing Canal ample of the environmental benefits of concentrating human Street at rush hour can get the impression that New York is the populations and mixing uses. Many large old cities in Europe— home of every car ever built, but Manhattan actually has the where the main population centers arose long before the auto- lowest car-to-resident ratio of anyplace in America. mobile, and therefore evolved to be served by less environmentally The apparent ecological innocuousness of widely dispersed disastrous means of getting around—are less wasteful than New populations—as in leafy suburbs or seemingly natural exurban York, and the most energy-efficient and least automobile- areas, such as mine—is an illusion. My little town has about dependent cities in the world include a number of Asian ones, 4,000 residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles among them Hong Kong and Singapore. But New York is a (just eight fewer square miles than San Francisco), and there are useful example because it is familiar both to Americans and to many places within our town limits from which no sign of settle- people in the developing world, and because it proves that afflu- ment is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight million ent people arc capable of living comfortably while consuming people like us, along with our dwellings, possessions, vehicles, energy and inflicting environmental damage at levels well below and current rates of energy use, water use, and waste production, current U.S. averages. And—as is the case with all dense cities— into a space the size of New York City, our profligacy would be New York's efficiencies are built-in and therefore don't depend impossible to miss, because you'd have to stack our houses and on a total, sudden transformation of human nature. Even for EFTA00281361 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN people who live in sparsely populated areas far from urban cen- virtually no hint of what had been before. The earliest outposts ters, dense cities like New York offer important lessons about of metropolitan civilization, such as it was, were confined to the how to permanently reduce energy use, water consumption, car- island's southern tip, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- bon output, and many other environmental ills. turies settlement spread northward at an accelerating pace. In Thinking of crowded cities as environmental role models re- 2007, Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist who was completing quires a certain willing suspension of disbelief, because most of a three-dimensional computer re-creation of precolonial Man- us have been accustomed to viewing urban centers as ecological hattan, told Nick Paumgarten, of The New Yorker, "It's hard to calamities. New York is one of the most thoroughly altered land- think of any place in the world with as heavy a footprint, in so scapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in short a time, as New York. It's probably the fastest, biggest land- which the terrain's primeval contours have long since been oblit- coverage swing in history."10 Picturing even a small part of that erated and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on long-lost world requires a heroic act of the imagination—or, side streets, the rocks in Central Park) are essentially decorations. as in Sanderson's case, a vast database and complex computer- Quite obviously, this wasn't always the case. When Europeans modeling software. first began to settle Manhattan, in the early seventeenth century, Given the totality of what has been erased, contemplation of a broad salt marsh lay where the East Village does today, the area New York's evolution into a megalopolis inspires mainly a sense now occupied by Harlem was flanked by sylvan bluffs, and of loss, and ecology-minded discussions of the city tend to have Murray Hill and Lenox Hill were hills. Streams ran everywhere, a forlorn aft. Nikita Khrushchev, who visited New York in the fall and beavers built dams near what is now Times Square. One of 1960, found the scarcity of foliage in the city depressing by early European visitor described Manhattan as "a land excellent comparison with Moscow, saying, "It is enough to make a stone and agreeable, full of noble forest trees and grape vines," and sad."" In environmental triage, New York is usually consigned another called it a "terrestrial Canaan, where the Land floweth to the hopeless category, worthy of palliative care only. Environ- with milk and honey."9 mentalists tend to focus on a handful of ways in which the city But then, across a relatively brief span of decades, Manhat- might be made to seem somewhat less oppressively man-made: tan's European occupiers leveled the forests, flattened the hills, by easing the intensity of development; by creating or enlarging filled the valleys, buried the streams, and superimposed an un- open spaces around structures; by relieving traffic congestion yielding, two-dimensional grid of avenues and streets, leaving and reducing the time that drivers spend aimlessly searching for 10 11 Vi EFTA00281362 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN parking spaces; by increasing the area devoted to parks, green- reinforces the view that urban life is artificial and depraved, ery, and gardening; by incorporating vegetation into buildings and makes city residents feel guilty about living where and how themselves. they do. But such discussions miss the point, because in most cases A dense urban area's greenest features—its low per-capita en- changes like these would actually undermine the features that ergy use, its high acceptance of public transit and walking, its create the city's extraordinary efficiency and keep the ecological small carbon footprint per resident—are not inexplicable anom- impact of its residents small. Spreading buildings out enlarges alies. They arc the direct consequences of the very urban char- the distance between local destinations, thereby limiting the acteristics that are the most likely to appall a sensitive friend utility of walking and public transportation; making automobile of the earth. Yet those qualities are ones that the rest of us, no traffic move more efficiently enhances the allure of owning cars matter where we live, are going to have to find ways to emulate, and, inevitably, reduces ridership on the subway. Because urban as the world's various ongoing energy and environmental crises density, in itself, is such a powerful generator of environmental deepen and spread in the years ahead. In terms of sustainability, benefits, the most critical environmental issues in dense urban dense cities have far more to teach us than solar-powered moun- cores tend to be seemingly unrelated matters like law enforce- tainside cabins or quaint old New England towns. , ment and public education, because anxieties about crime and school quality are among the strongest forces motivating flight to the suburbs. By comparison, popular feel-good urban eco- THIS WAY OF THINKING SEEMS COUNTERINTUITIVE TO projects like adding solar panels to the roofs of apartment build- most Americans, including most environmentalists. Ben Jervey, ings are decidedly secondary, even irrelevant. Planting trees in The Big Green Apple, a well-intentioned but frequently mis- along city streets, always a popular initiative, has high environ- leading guide to "eco-friendly living in New York City"—a con- mental utility, but not for the reasons that people usually as- cept that Jervey himself treats as oxymoronic—repeatedly misses sume: trees are ecologically important in dense urban areas not the point about New York. After growing up in a small town in because they provide temporary repositories for atmospheric Massachusetts," he writes in his preface, "I went off to pastoral carbon—the usual argument for planting more of them—but Vermont to study and then work, all the while developing an because their presence along sidewalks makes city dwellers more appreciation and concern for the fragile state of the world's ecol- cheerful about dwelling in cities. Unfortunately, much conven- ogy. But as easy as it is to don a green hat up in Vermont, the tional environmental activism has the opposite effect, since it beast that is New York City has the tendency to tear that noble 12 13 EFTA00281363 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN lid off and throw it into a puddle of mud. Upon arriving in the Jervey is by no means alone. The prominent British environ- big city I struggled to reconcile the environmentally concerned mentalist Herbert Girardet—who is an author, a documentary mind-set that comes so effortlessly in a place like Vermont with filmmaker, and a cofounder of the World Future Council—treats my new urban lifestyle. Of course sustainable living is easier in large cities mainly as environmental catastrophes. "The bulk of a Vermont township, where local produce is plentiful and every the world's energy consumption is within cities," he has written, backyard is equipped with a compost bin."u "and much of the rest is used for producing and transporting But this is exactly wrong. "Sustainable living" is actually goods and people to andfrom cities.'" He proposes dramatically much harder in small, far-flung places than k is in dense cities. reducing urban energy consumption and making city dwellers Jervey cites New Yorkers' "overactive dependence" on fresh water less dependent on agricultural and other inputs from outlying as an example of their supposed wastefulness, and he marvels areas, while improving overall energy efficiency through techno- that the city's total use "amounts to well over one billion gallons logical innovation. He has observed that cities cover just 3 or 4 per day."" A billion is a big number, to be sure, but Ncw York percent of the earth's land area while accounting for 80 percent City's population is more than thirteen times that of the entire of the world's consumption of natural resources—as though state of Vermont, so the city's total consumption figures in any population density were an ecological negative, and as though category will appear overwhelming in any direct comparison. It's there were no meaningful distinction to be made between dense per-capita consumption that is telling, though, and by that mea- urban cores and lightly populated suburbs. Urban dwellers, by sure Vermonters use more water than Ncw Yorkers do. They also his way of thinking, are environmental freeloaders, parasitically use more than three and a half times as much gasoline-545 drawing sustenance from the countryside, while people living at gallons per person per year versus 146 for all New York City lower densities are more nearly at harmony with nature.'6 Girar- residents and just 90 for Manhattan residents—with the result det is a victim (and perpetuator) of the same optical illusion as that, among the fifty states, pastoral Vermont ranks eleventh- Jervey. highest in per-capita gasoline consumption while New York New Yorkers themselves seldom fully appreciate the environ- state, thanks entirely to New York City, ranks last. The average mental virtues of their own way of living. On Earth Day 2007, Vermonter also consumes more than four times as much elec- the city announced an ambitious two-decade environmental tricity as the average Ncw York City resident, has a larger carbon initiative, called PIaNYC, which includes dozens of far-reaching footprint, and generates more solid waste, backyard compost proposals, among them the planting of more than a million bins notwithstanding.14 trees, the collection of tolls from most private and commercial 14 15 EFTA00281364 - 7,47.grze-sk. 4- - GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN vehicles using the most traffic-clogged parts of Manhattan dur- in terms of proportions can only be misleading, since there's no ing the busiest times of the day, the imposition of a surcharge way to decrease the percentage attributable to one element with- on the bills of the city's electrical customers, and other mea- out increasing the percentage attributable to others: they're sures.17 Actually implementing the plan has encountered the pieces of the same pie. Bringing down overall emissions levels is usual difficulties (shortly before Earth Day 2008, the state leg- a worthy goal, but the mayor's emphasis was misplaced. The islature killed the toll-collection scheme, which is known as proportion of greenhouse-gas emissions attributable to buildings "congestion pricing"), but one of the most striking features of is higher in energy-efficient old European cities, too. the entire plan is how little recognition it gives to the numerous Equally misguided is the plan's proposal to add a surcharge ways in which New York City's environmental performance is to New Yorkers' electrical bills, since New York City residents, already exemplary, even extraordinary, at least in comparison with an average of4,696 kilowatt-hours per household per year, with the rest of the United States. Shortly before the plan was already consume less electricity than the residents of any other made public, the mayor's office released a study showing that the part of the country. (The average Dallas household, by contrast, city's buildings arc responsible for 79 percent of its greenhouse- uses 16,116 kilowatt-hours, more than three times as much.)19 gas emissions—an ominous statistic, the study suggested, since Many news reports about the study focused on the fact that New the national average for buildings is just 32 percent. Daniel L York City is responsible for almost 1 percent of all thc green- Doctoroff, a deputy mayor and the city official in charge of the house gases produced by the United States, and suggested that plan, said, "We know we have to dramatically rethink the way this share was shockingly huge—but they overlooked, or men- we work with buildings"—probably an understatement, since tioned only in passing, the fact that the city contains 2.7 percent the mayor's announced goal was to cut greenhouse-gas emissions of the country's population, meaning that its carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2030.1$ is already remarkably low in comparison with that of other Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions is a fine idea, but in the American communities. Mandating large reductions in catego- case of the city's buildings the mayor's office obscured a far more ries in which New Yorkers already lead the nation is like trying important point. The proportion of emissions attributable to to fight obesity by putting skinny people on diets. buildings in New York City is high because the number of cars, Thinking of New York City's environmental record as some- which are the main source of greenhouse emissions in the rest thing that might instruct and inspire others, rather than treating of the country, is extremely low in relation to the city's popula- it as a candidate for emergency intervention, requires a major tion: it's a sign of environmental success, not failure. Thinking conceptual leap for many, even for those who deal directly with 16 17 EFTA00281365 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN the city's relationship to the environment. In 2004, I called New treated in large measure as sanctuaries from urban depravity. The York City's Department of Environmental Protection and told modern environmental movement arose, in the 1960s and a member of that agency's staff that I was interested in talking 1970s, when a growing sense of ecological crisis, first inspired to an expert about what I felt were ways in which New Yorkers nationwide by Rachel Carson's extraordinarily influential book are better environmental citizens than other Americans are. At Silent Spring=' combined with other social forces, including the first, she thought I was joking; later, I think, she decided I was civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, and nuts. "Why don't you call the Parks Department?" she said, the power of OPEC, to create a sense among large numbers finally, happy to be rid of me. of mainly young people that just about everything wrong with the United States was urban in essence, and could be combated only by establishing, or reestablishing, a direct connection to THE HOSTILITY OF MANY ENVIRONMENTALISTS TOWARD "the land." American environmentalists in every age have tended densely populated cities is a manifestation of a much broader to agree with Thomas Jefferson, who, in 1803, dismisscd "great phenomenon, a deep antipathy to urban life which has been cities" as "pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties close to the heart of American environmentalism since the be- of man."22 ginning. Henry David Thoreau, who lived in a cabin in the Jefferson made that disparaging remark in a letter to Dr. Ben- woods near Concord, Massachusetts, between 1845 and 1847, jamin Rush, a fellow signer of the Declaration ofIndependence. established an image, still potent today, of the sensitive nature Daniel Lazare, in America's Undeclared War: What's Killing Our lover living simply, and in harmony with the environment, be- Cities and How We Can Stop It, cites that letter as a key docu- yond the edge of civilization. Thoreau wasn't actually much of ment in the history of what he identifies as an enduring national an outdoorsman, and his cabin was closer to the center of antagonism toward urban life. Recently, I asked Lazare whether Concord than to any true wilderness, but for many Americans he detected that same antagonism in the modern American en- he remains the archetype—the natural philosopher guiltlessly vironmental movement. "Unquestionably," he said. "Green ide- living off the grid. John Muir, who was born twenty years after ology is a rural, agrarian ideology. It seeks to integrate man into Thoreau and founded the Sierra Club in 1892, viewed city liv- nature in a very kind ofdirect, simplistic way—scattering people ing as toxic to both body and soul." The National Park Service, among the squirrels and the trees and the deer. To me, that established by Congress in 1916, was conceived as an increas- seems mistaken, and it doesn't really understand the proper re- ingly necessary corrective to urban life, and national parks were lationship between man and nature. Cities are much more effi- 18 I9 EFTA00281366 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN dent, economically, and also much more benign, environmentally, spoiled coffee beans, which had been left to rot on the wharf and because when you concentrate human activities in confined seemed to Rush to be the most likely cause of the disease? Jef- spaces you reduce the human footprint, as it were. That is why ferson's letter made specific reference to that epidemic, which the disruption of nature is much less in Manhattan than it is in killed 4,000 Philadelphians (and caused Jefferson himself to flee the suburbs. The environmental movement is deeply stained the city, along with many other government officials and most with a sort ofMalthusian current. It's anti-urban, anti-industrial, of the city's wealthier inhabitants, including most of its physi- agrarian, primitivist. Manhattan seems to be a supremely un- cians). "When great evils happen," Jefferson wrote to Rush, "I natural place because of all the concrete and glass and steel, but am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from the paradox is that it's actually more harmonious and more be- them as consolations to us, and Providence his in fact so estab- nign, in terms of nature, than ostensibly greener human envi- lished the order of things, as that most evils are the means of ronments, which depend on huge energy inputs, mainly in the producing some good. The yellow fever will discourage the form of fossil fuels. In order to surround ourselves with nature, growth of great cities in our nation"—a providential result, in we get in cars and drive long distances, and then build silly his view. He acknowledged that cities "nourish some of the el- pseudo-green houses in the middle of the woods—which are egant arcs," but stated that "the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, actually extremely disruptive, and very, very wasteful." and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & To be sure, there has always been plenty to loathe about freedom, would be my choice."24 New York City, he wrote urban living. The history of large cities all over the world is a twenty years later, "seems to be a Cloacina* of all the depravities history of filth and squalor and disease. Benjamin Rush placed of human nature."35 himself at tremendous personal risk in 1793, a decade before The early stirrings of industrialization magnified this sense Jefferson's letter, while attempting to combat a yellow fever epi- ofurban catastrophe. Human populations all over the world had demic in Philadelphia, which was then both the nation's capital always dumped their waste into the same lakes and streams from and, with a population of 55,000, its largest city. No one in which they drew their drinking water, and the local consequences those days knew how yellow fever was transmitted, but there was became more dire as the settlements grew, and as steady ad- no local shortage of plausible explanations. The streets of Phila- vances in human ingenuity outpaced awareness of the dangers delphia, like the streets ofmost cities, were reeking, open sewers, and that particular summer the air had been made especially 'Cloacina was the goddess of the Roman sewer system. The name comes from the rank by the arrival from the Caribbean of a large shipment of Latin word for "sewer or "drain? 20 21 EFTA00281367 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN posed by the effluents of prosperity. A source of drinking water in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eat- for some early Manhattanites was Fresh Water Pond, also known ing one another as they do there."28 as the Collect, a deep, seventy-acre spring-fed body of water just Europeans viewed the same evolution with a similar sense of north of where Canal Street lies today. By 1800, though, the horror. In 1847, a Scottish visitor to England concisely sum- pond had become, according to various observers, "a shocking marized the dark side of that country's industrial progress, when hole . . . foul with excrement, frog-spawn and reptiles," a "very he described the Irwell River as it flowed out of Manchester: sink and common sewer," and a heavily used dump for brewer- "There are myriads of dirty things given it to wash, and whole ies, tanneries, and other toxin-generating commercial enter- waggon-loads of poisons from dye-houses and bleach-yards prises; within fifteen years it had to be filled in 26 Throughout thrown into it to carry away; steam-boilers discharge into it their the city, the streets were mired in animal and human waste, seething contents, and drains and sewers their fetid impurities; and the air was thick with smoke and insects, and the shallow till at length it rolls on—here between tall dingy walls, there wells that provided drinking water for the city's residents were under precipices of red sandstone—considerably less a river than incubators of disease. a flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies, whether animal In 1832, cholera struck New York, killing 3,515, and its or vegetable, and which resembles nothing in nature, except, focus was the notorious neighborhood called Five Points, a foul perhaps, the stream thrown out in eruption by some mud- slum that had arisen on the site of the filled-in Fresh Water volcano." The proposed solution was to reverse the direction Pond. (The same neighborhood provided the setting for Martin of human migration—in effect, to create sprawl. In 1898, Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs of New York) The epidemic inspired Ebenezer Howard, a British urban planner and the originator of the same sort of panic and heroic but futile intervention that the open-space-oriented development scheme known as the gar- had characterized Philadelphia's response to yellow fever four den city movement, wrote, "It is wellnigh universally agreed by decades earlier. A city newspaper reported, "The roads, in all men of all parties, not only in England, but all over Europe and directions, were lined with well-filled stage coaches, livery America and our colonies, that it is deeply to be deplored that coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic-stricken, people should continue to stream into the already over-crowded fleeing the city, as we may suppose the inhabitants of Pompeii cities, and should thus further deplete the country districts." fled when the red lava showered down upon their houses."27 It's Howard, in support of this idea, quoted the cleric Frederic Wil- no wonder that Jefferson felt, as he wrote to James Madison liam Farrar, who had described large cities as "the graves of the in 1787, "When we get piled upon one another in large cities as physique of our race." Howard called the countryside "the sym- 22 23 EFTA00281368 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN bol of God's love and care for man," and concluded that what McCarthy, in Auto Mania, points out that the names of SUVs Britain needed was "the spontaneous movement of the people almost always reinforce this wilderness fantasy: Blazer, Yukon, from our crowded cities to the bosom of our kindly mother Pathfinder, Explorer, Expedition, Sierra. Among the advertising earth, at once the source of life, of happiness, of wealth, and slogans for my car, a Subaru all-wheel-drive station wagon called of power.'" an Outback, is "My other car is a pair ofboots" and "It loves the This idea—that city life is hopelessly demented and that the outdoors as much as you do.")31 Preaching the sanctity of open solution to urban problems is to spread out—has been with us spaces helps to propel development into those very spaces, and ever since. It's the motivation for building suburbs, and it's still the process is self-reinforcing because, as one environmentalist seductive; it's why I live where I live. But it's also a prescription said to me, "Sprawl is created by people escaping sprawl." Wild for strip malls and expressways and tremendous waste, and it's landscapes are less often destroyed by people who despise the basis for the helter-skelter residential development which has wild landscapes than by people who love them, or think they turned out to be America's true manifest destiny. The Sierra do—by people who move to be near them, and then, when oth- Club has a national campaign called Challenge to Sprawl, the ers follow, move again. Thoreau's cabin, a mile from his nearest goal of which is to arrest the mindless conversion of undevel- neighbor, set the American pattern for creeping residential de- oped countryside into subdivisions and SUV-clogged express- velopment, since anyone seeking to replicate his experience ways. But in a paradoxical way the Sierra Club itself has been a needed to move a mile farther along. Jefferson, too, embodied major contributor to sprawl, because the organization's anti-city the ethos of suburbia. Indeed, he could be considered the proto- ethos, which has been indivisible from its mission since the time type of the modern American suburbanite, since for most of his of John Muir, has fueled the yearning for fresh air and elbow life he lived far outside the central city in a house that was much room which drives not only the preservation of wilderness areas too big, and he was deeply enamored ofhigh-tech gadgetry and but also the construction of disconnected residential develop- of buying on impulse and on credit, and he embraced a self- ments and daily hundred-mile commutes. It also contributed to perpetuating cycle of conspicuous consumption and recreational the popularity of SUVs and pickup trucks, both of which have home improvement. The standard object of the modern Amer- been marketed by their manufacturers as "off-road" vehicles, ican dream, the single-family home surrounded by grass, is a designed to carry their nature-loving occupants into the great mini-Monticello. outdoors, even though just 6 percent of SUV owners ever actu- Anti-urbanism still animates American environmentalism, ally operate their vehicles in four-wheel-drive mode. (Tom and is evident in the technical term that is widely used for 24 25 EFTA00281369 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN sprawl: "urbanization." This is unfortunate, because thinking of not exist, and Pierson describes this massive engineering project freeways and strip malls as "urban" phenomena obscures the as "larceny." Her arguments persuaded Anthony Swofford, who ecologically monumental difference between Manhattan and reviewed the book in The New York limes. He wrote, "The story Phoenix, or between Copenhagen and Kansas City, and fortifies ofNew York City's water grab is astonishing, nearly unbelievable the perception that population density is an environmental ill. in its scope and greed," and he described the creation of the city's In 2006, Melissa Holbrook Pierson, a writer who lives in a water system, as recounted by Pierson, as "rural slaughter for the smallish town in the Hudson River Valley, in upstate New York, survival of the city."32 published a book called The Place You Love Is Gone, a deeply felt But this is wrong. If New York City could somehow be dis- paean to the lost American landscape, the one obliterated by mantled and its residents dispersed across the-state at the density sprawl. At one point, driven by what she refers to as "lacerating of Pierson's current hometown, what remains today of pastoral nostalgia," she describes the nightmare transformation ofAkron, New York state would vanish under a tide of asphalt. Dense Ohio, where she grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. "I urban concentrations of people, along with the freshwater reser- can't help it ifI want to live in the past!" she writes. "It's my past, voirs and other infrastructure necessary to support them, are not the time forty years ago when there was still some wide-open the enemies of the images she dings to. It is the existence of space into which to insert some dreaming, and still some dark- Manhattan, not the nostalgia of Baby Boomers, that makes the ness at night over it." She even manages to weep a little over Catskills possible, and it's small-town residents, not subway- Hoboken, New Jersey, where she lived, mostly unhappily, as a riding apartment dwellers, who foster strip malls." You create young adult. Her bitterest emotions, though, she reserves for open spaces not by spreading people out but by moving them New York City, which she accuses of having destroyed a pastoral closer together. Pierson does write, near the end of her book, paradise in order to create the extensive upstate reservoir system that "it is the thousands of acres of uninhabited, forested land that supplies its drinking water—of "rubbing its chin in con- in the buffer zones of the New York City watershed that have templation of turning faraway valleys into pipes to service its preserved wilderness in the midst of an inexorably creeping water closets." The city's early-twentieth-century planners, an- urbanization."' But she doesn't acknowledge the role ofher own ticipating the population growth to come, condemned farms form of nostalgia in the creation of the thing she hates. Many and rural hamlets far from the city in order to build the extraor- more acres of upstate pastoral paradise were destroyed by the dinary chain of reservoirs without which New York City could steady spread of towns like hers than by the creation of the water 26 27 EFTA00281370 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN supply system that makes it possible for New York City to exist. were not narrowly segregated by wealth. Society, she decided, Building the city didn't fill the Hudson Valley with parking lots; has a critical mass. Spread people too thinly and sort them too fleeing the city did. finely, and they cease to interact; move them and their daily activities closer together, and the benefits cascade: their neigh- borhoods grow safer, they become more attuned to one anothcr's THE SIGNIFICANCE OF POPULATION DENSITY WAS ELU- needs, they have more restaurants and movie theaters and mu- cidated brilliantly in 1961 in a landmark book called The Death seums to choose from, and their lives, generally, become more and Lijc of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs." Jacobs up- varied and engaging. Jacobs's focus was on the vibrancy of city ended many widely held ideas about how cities ought to be put life, but the same urban qualities that she identified as enhancing together, and she has been celebrated ever since as an urban- human interaction also dramatically reduce energy consumption planning iconoclast and visionary, but she could be viewed just and waste. Placing people and their daily activities close together as easily as a pioneering environmentalist. Indeed, Jacobs's book doesn't just make the people more interesting; it also makes may be most valuable today as a guide to reducing the ecological them greener. damage caused by human beings, even though it scarcely men- Unfortunately, her catalogue of the failures of modern tions the environment, other than by making a couple of passing urban planning also still applies, almost fifty years later, with references to smog. little modification, all across America: "Low-income projects The central idea ofJacobs's book is that density and diversity that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and gen- are the engines that make human communities work. She lived eral social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to in Greenwich Village at the time," and she had come to realize replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly mar- that the qualities she found most appealing about city life could vels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy be traced to the fact that she and her neighbors lived very near or vitality of city" life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate to one another, that their tightly spaced apartment buildings their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers were of varying sizes and configurations, that residences were that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that closely mixed with businesses, and that she and her neighbors are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering place than others. Commercial centers that are lack- 'She and her family moved Co Toronto in 1968, primarily our of opposition to the luster imitations ofstandardized suburban chain-store shopping. Vietnam War. She died in 2006. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no 28 29 EFTA00281371 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities!'36 These nels, the loss of which would make the city uninhabitable. Epi- flaws, she argued persuasively, are not unavoidable; they are demics, from the Black Death down, have inflicted their highest merely the products of our ongoing failure to understand what death tolls on dense urban populations, which, for the same we really want. reasons, are highly vulnerable to biological weapons. Rising sea Of course, living in densely populated urban centers still has levels won't be a direct problem in my little town, which is more many drawbacks, even though city streets, nowadays, are no lon- than thirty miles from the coast, but even a small rise could ger ankle-deep in horse manure. New Yorkers at all income levels cripple Manhattan's sewer system, which malfunctions during live in spaces that would seem cramped to Americans almost rainstorms even now. The most powerful earthquake known to anywhere else. A friend of mine who grew up in a townhouse in have occurred in the continental United States—the so-called Greenwich Village thought of his upbringing as privileged until, New Madrid quake, a series of four huge shocks that struck what in prep school, he visited a classmate from the suburbs and was is now southeastern Missouri in 1811 and 1812—rerouted the staggered by the house, the lawn, the cars, and the swimming Mississippi River and could be felt on the East Cant, yet it pool, and thought, with despair, You mean I could live like this? killed fewer than a hundred people because the area above Riding the subway can be depressing even to a committed transit the epicenter was so sparsely settled. An earthquake of compa- supporter, and during the summer it is often distressingly dirty rable magnitude occurring today along any known fault in Los and hot. Ann's and my apartment was fourteen floors above Sec- Angeles or San Francisco would kill hundreds of thousands ond Avenue, yet the noise from the street was so loud, even in and create a public-health disaster beyond comprehension. the middle of the night, that we both slept with earplugs. Jo:cers Nevertheless, barring a massive reduction in the earth's pop- in Manhattan have to weigh the benefits of exercise against the ulation, dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible dangers of inhaling bus and taxi fumes while they run. remedies for some of the world's most discouraging environ- Density, for many of the same reasons that it makes people mental ills, including climate change. To borrow a term from more efficient, makes disasters more efficient, too. On 9/11, the the jargon of computer systems, dense cities are scalable, while airplane that crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside killed sprawling suburbs and isolated straw-bale eco-redoubts are not. the occupants of the plane, while the two planes that struck the Anti-urban naturalists like Thoreau and Muir make poor guides World Trade Center killed thousands and could have killed tens for anyone struggling with the increasingly urgent problem of of thousands if the circumstances had been slightly different. how to support billions of mobile, acquisitive, hungry human New York City's water supply enters the city through three tun- beings without triggering disasters that can't be contained. The 30 SI EFTA00281372 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our as- also drove early development inward and upward. The sault on the world's nonrenewable resources, is not how to make American cities with the next highest per-capita rates of transit our teeming cities more like the countryside. The problem we use, San Francisco and Boston, are similarly constrained, since face is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, both are situated on island-like peninsulas, while the cities with the whose residents currently come closer than any other Americans high- est rates of automobile use —places like Atlanta, Phoen to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will ix, and Kansas City—are the ones that, throughout their history, have to come to terms with. have faced the fewest natural and political barriers to low-de nsity horizontal expansion. The densest parts of Chicago are those abutting the western shore of Lake Michigan, which NEW YORK'S EXAMPLE, ADMITTEDLY, IS DIFFICULT FOR acted like a dam against the flux of population growth. Hong others (or even New York itself) to imitate, because the city's Kong is remarkable population density is the result not of conscientious doubly insular, both geographically and geopolitically. A second lucky accident was that Manhattan's street plan planning but of a succession of serendipitous historical acci- was created by merchants who were more interested in dents. The most important of those accidents was geographic: economic efficiency than in boulevards, parks, or empty spaces New York arose on a small island rather than on the mainland between buildings. In 1807, the state legislature appointed a local edge of a river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a com- physical barrier to outward expansion. Manhattan is like a typi- mission to "lay out streets, roads, public squares of such extent cal seaport turned inside out—a city with a harbor around it, and direction as to them shall be most conducive to the public good," and the commissioners hired John Randel, Jr., a rather than a harbor with a city along its edge. The deep water young surrounding Manhattan and linking it to the ocean made the surveyor, to create a detailed map of the island, most of which was still essentially wilderness. Randel and his assista city easily accessible to large ships, and insularity gave the city nts spent years meticulously measuring and documenting Manha more shoreline per square mile than other ports, major advan- ttan's then complex topography—although on the plan he subm tages in the days when one of the world's main commercial ac- itted to the commission, in 1811, the suggested street plan tivities was moving cargoes between ships. (The sailing vessels runs as it does now, in perfectly straight lines, forming a regular lying at anchor along Manhattan's shoreline in that era were so gridiron, as though the hills and streams did not exist. "The natura numerous that they created, according to one description, "a l ge- ography of the island was originally to be a factor in circumferential forest of spars."37) Manhattan's physical isolation devising a street system," Robert T. Augustyn and Paul E. Cohen write in 32 33 EFTA00281373 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN Manhattan in Maps, "but there is little evidence in the . . . num- would later become in most other parts of the United States. bered parallel and perpendicular streets and avenues delineated The city, early in the twentieth century, was actually an origin a- on Randers map that the topography of the island was even a tor and early adopter of zoning regulations—developm ent rules consideration.*3° The plan adopted by the commissioners re- intended to create sharp divisions between what, by then, had tained this feature, without which Manhattan's extreme density come to be viewed as incompatible human activities, by confin- would have been harder to achieve. The plan also included only ing residential, commercial, and industrial uses in non -overlap- a handful of parks and public squares, all of them small. The ping districts—but many parts of the city were alread y such a commissioners view regarding parks was that "vacant spaces" dense and fertile jumble as to be relatively impervious to the were made unnecessary by "those large arms of the sea which scheming of urban planners, a trait the city shared with the embrace Manhattan Island," thereby providing what they felt to older cities of Europe. The liveliest and greenest parts of New be an adequate supply of fresh air and obviating the need to York today arc the ones that least conform to received American sacrifice developable real estate to recreation." No one today ideas about what should go next to what. In the rest of the would lay out such a large inhabited area with such a paucity of country, zoning schemes that were conceived and implemente d open space, but the relentlessness of the street plan is actually early in the twentieth century arc among the most signifi cant one of the keys to the city's continuing vitality—and to its green- causes of sprawl, and among the most enduring impediment s ness. One of Jane Jacobs's many arresting observations is that to public transit, since in many cases they make even moderate parks and other open spaces, if poorly planned, can actually density impossible. In such municipalities, John Holtzclaw has make cities less livable, by creating deadends that prevent people written, "zoning requires front and side yard setbacks, wide from moving freely between neighborhoods and by decreasing streets and two or more off-street parking places, reducing den- adjacent activity, a subject to which I'll return in chapter 4.'° sities and separating destinations. Many suburbs prohibit side- Manhattan's crush of architecture is paradoxically humanizing, walks and convenient nearby markets, restaurants, and other because it brings the city's commercial, cultural, and other offer- commerce. These government mandates force destinations far- ings closer together, thereby increasing their accetsibility. It also ther apart, lengthening trips, such that nonautomotive modes makes the city greener, primarily by greatly reducing depen- become less viable."' dence on automobiles. A fourth accident was the fact that by the early 1900s most A third accident was that residential and commercial devel- of Manhattan's lines had been filled in to the point where not opment were more thoroughly mixed in New York than they even Robert Moses, the metropolitan area's "master builder," 34 35 EFTA00281374 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN could redraw them to accommodate the automobile.42 Before to design the capital. LInfant was notoriously hard to get along cars, people lived dose to other people to survive; with cars, with, and he was fired after little more than a year, in 1792, but proximity became less important—indeed, it became undesir- many ofmodern Washington's most striking features arc his: the able. Henry Ford, who viewed urban life with as much distaste broad, radial avenues; the hublike traffic circles; the sweeping as Jefferson had, called the city a "pestiferous growth" and public lawns and ceremonial spaces. thought of his cars as tools for liberating humanity. In 1932, Washington is commonly viewed as the most intelligently John Nolen, a prominent Harvard-educated urban planner beautiful—the most European—of large American cities, and it and landscape architect who embraced Ford's notion of urban is, indeed, a city of restrained proportions and stirring metro- liberation-by-automobile, said, "The future city will be spread politan vistas. Ecologically, though, it's a mess aid not truly Eu- out, it will be regional, it will be the natural product of the au- ropean at all. The city was designed in part to make true density tomobile, the good road, electricity, the telephone, and the impossible; and because the federal government grew more slowly radio, combined with the growing desire to live a more natural, than the national economy, there was no pressure to abandon biological life under pleasanter and more natural conditions."" that early ideal. IjEnfant's expansive avenues were easily adapted This is the very formula for sprawl, and most of the country has to automobiles, and the low, widely separated buildings (whose followed it. height is limited by law) stretched the distance between destina- New York City's apparent urban antithesis, in terms of auto- tions: keeping civilization low makes it wide. There arc many mobile use, is metropolitan Los Angeles, whose metastatic out- pleasant places in Washington to go for a walk, but it is actually ward growth has been virtually unimpeded by the lay of the difficult to get around the city on foot. The wide avenues are hard land, whose early settlers came to the area partly out of a desire to cross, the huge traffic circles are like obstacle courses, and the to create space between themselves and others, and whose main grandiloquent empty spaces thwart pedestrians. Many parts of development began late enough to be shaped mainly by the Washington, furthermore, are relentlessly homogeneous. Digni- needs of cars. But a more telling counterexample is Washington, fied public buildings abound on Constitution Avenue, but good D.C., whose basic layout was conceived at roughly the same luck finding a dry cleaner, a Chinese restaurant, or a grocery time as Manhattan's. The District of Columbia's original plan store. The D.C. subway system is modern, clean, and extensive, was created by an eccentric French-born engineer and architect but no one with a car feels compelled to take the train because named Pierre-Charles CEnfant, who befriended General Wash- there's always a place to park. The city's horizontal, airy design ington during the Revolutionary War and asked to be allowed has also pushed development far into the surrounding country- 36 37 EFTA00281375 cdimerismaipmmira GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN side. One of the fastest-growing counties in the United States is handled paint brushes were promoted as better for the planet Loudoun County, Virginia, at the rapidly receding western edge because they were not made of plastic."' In 2008, Discovery of the Washington metropolitan area. When cities are built on a Communications launched Planet Green, an environmentally "human" scale, they virtually force the creation of vast suburbs, oriented cable-television channel, whose "exclusive automobile with miles of freeways, long commutes, traffic jams, and shop- sponsor" was General Motors.° The cover story of the March— ping malls. The District of Columbia was a thing of beauty when April 2008 issue of Correctional News, a magazine for people the region surrounding it was relatively empty of human beings, who run prisons, was "Greening the Big House: Sustainability but the city, as governed by its own design and land-use rules, is in Corrections."6 If you write to the makers of Annie's macaroni structurally unable to absorb its own growth. The sprawl of met- and cheese (a family favorite), they'll send you a "BE GREEN, ropolitan Washington is not a perversion of Ltufant's plan; it's Help the Earth Live" bumper sticker for your car, to let others the logical result. know "that you're an Earth advocate, and that you care about what happens to our wondrous blue and green planet."" Most of the products, technologies, and practices popularly ONE OF THE MOST ABUSED WORDS IN THE ENGLISH touted as sustainable are not sustainable at all. Driving a gas- language in recent years, without a doubt, has been "sustain- electric hybrid automobile is more environmentally benign, mile able." Like "solution"—a vaporous buzzword ubiquitous in for mile, than driving a Hummer, but hybrids are not sustain- corporate slogans—it signifies both anything and nothing. able, because they require petroleum and the world's supply of Hundred-thousand-dollar kitchen renovations are described as petroleum is finite. Buying locally grown food can put interest- sustainable if the doors of the new cabinets are veneered with ing, wholesome meals on people's dinner tables, but "locavorism" bamboo; concept cars are called sustainable if their seats are is not sustainable as a strategy for feeding the world, or even made with soy-based foam. A similar fog of meaninglessness northwestern Connecticut, because spreading populations across characterizes almost any recent marketing effort with an envi- arable regions at densities low enough to make agricultural self- ronmental theme. An article in The New York Times in 2007 sufficiency feasible would be an environmental and economic provided a humorous catalogue of contradictions from the disaster. A private mini-hydroelectric plant powered by a rushing shelves of Home Depot, which was running a green promotion stream may enable its owner to disconnect from the public it called Eco Options: "Plastic-handled paint brushes were touted power grid, but such power plants are not sustainable for anyone as nature-friendly because they were not made of wood. Wood- but their owners, because the earth's population could not sur- 38 39 c-r.="5..rnss ee _n missa„ airi ' mpeagt.a...' _ - EFTA00281376 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN vive in any arrangement of dwellings which would enable every In 1997, in Kyoto, Japan, representatives of most of the residence to generate its own electricity. In the very long run, of world's countries, after two and a half years of sometimes highly course, life itself is unsustainable, no matter what we human contentious negotiations, adopted a protocol intended to reduce beings do or fail to do, because the sun will eventually burn out. global production of greenhouse gases. The United States signed Over time spans shorter than cons, though, uncertainties the original agreement but pulled out in 2001, becoming one abound. The way we Americans live now is clearly unsustain- of only two of the original signatories to refuse to ratify the able, since we are rapidly depleting the natural resources on plan, which went into effect in 2005. (The other holdout was which we've built our turbocharged way of life. The cherished Kazakhstan.) America's intransigence has infuriated many envi- secret hope of most of us—that some sudden technological ronmentalists, at home and elsewhere, but in practical terms the breakthrough will enable our children and grandchildren to live impact of our refusal to sign has been zero. So far, the most ef- the way we live now, except with smaller cars and larger recycling fective way for a country to cut its carbon output has been to bins—is patently a fantasy, at least until the physicists get nu- suffer a well-timed industrial implosion, as Russia did after the clear fusion sorted out. collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. The Kyoto benchmark The crucial fact about sustainability is that it is not a micro year is 1990, when the smokestacks of the Soviet military- phenomenon: there can be no such thing as a "sustainable" industrial complex were still blackening the skies. By the time house, office building, or household appliance, for the same rea- Vladimir Putin ratified the protocol, in 2004, Russia was already son that there can be no such thing as a one-person democracy certain to meet its goal for 2012. The countries with the best or a single-company economy. Every house, office building, and emissions-reduction records—Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithu- appliance, no matter where its power comes from or how many ania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the of its parts were made from soybeans, is just a single small ele- Czech Republic—were all parts of the Soviet empire and there- ment in a civilization-wide network of deeply interdependent fore look good for the same reason. Ted Nordhaus and Michael relationships, and it's the network, not the individual constitu- Shellenberger, in their 2007 book Break Through: From the ents, on which our future depends. Sustainability is a context, Death ofEnvironmentalism to the Politic of Possibility, write, not a gadget or a technology. This is the reason that dense cities "Germany and Britain have reduced their emissions, but most set such a critical example: they prove that it's possible to arrange of those reductions were due to the collapse of the British coal- large human populations in ways that are inherently less waste- mining industry in the 1980s and the collapse of East German ful and destructive. heavy industry and power generation after the reunification of 40 41 EFTA00281377 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN Germany. Little of the reduction in Britain or Germany is at- consumption in the United States fell almost 6 percent in 2008. tributable to regulatory actions taken by the European Union or That was the result not of a sudden greening of the American national governments in the effort to reduce greenhouse-gas consciousness but of the rapid rise in the price of oil during the emissions. Greenhouse-gas emissions throughout the rest of first half of the year, followed by the full efflorescence of the cur- Europe and the rest of the developed world have either remained rent economic mess. steady or increased."" What would it take, short of utter economic collapse, for a Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and its experience is sug- prosperous First World population to reduce its carbon output gestive because its economy and per-capita oil consumption are and other environmental impacts permanently? The standard similar to those of the United States. Canada's Kyoto target is a prescription is familiar: less reliance on fossil fuels, more reliance 6 percent reduction from 1990 levels. By 2006, however, despite on renewable energy (and uranium), increased efficiency, re- the expenditure of billions of dollars on climate initiatives, its duced waste, more buses, fewer incandescent lightbulbs, more greenhouse-gas output had increased to 122 percent of the goal. recycling. These and other elements, to be sure, will become in- And Canada's post-Kyoto record looks even worse if you include creasingly important parts of our lives with every month that LULUCF (land use, land-use change, and forestry), a calcula- passes, but decades of experience have shown that the measur- tion intended to reflect the greenhouse impact of timber harvest- able results of our conscious efforts to use less are seldom as ing, land clearing, and similar activities; including LULUCF, the significant as forecast, and that reductions in waste are typically increase in Canada's emissions was more than twice as high. In offset or exceeded by increases in consumption. 2006, Canada's environmental minister described his country's Thesc discouraging realities make urban density even more Kyoto targets as "impossible."" significant as an environmental tool. Cutting back overall U.S. The explanation for Canada's difficulties isn't complicated: the per-capita greenhouse emissions to New York City's current level world's principal source of man-made greenhouse gases has always would require a national reduction of 71 percent—a feat that been prosperity. That relationship is easy to see, now that the not even the wildest Kyoto optimist thinks is remotely achiev- global recession has flipped it onto its back shuttered factories able. Yet New York's record is not the result of a massive, expen- don't spew carbon dioxide; the unemployed drive fewer miles and sive environmental campaign; it's the result of New Yorkers turn down their furnaces, air conditioners, and swimming-pool living the way New Yorkers have always lived. The city's efficien- heaters; struggling corporations and families cut back on air cies, like the efficiencies of all dense urban cores, are built into travel; even affluent people buy less throwaway junk. Gasoline the fabric of the place, and they don't depend on an unprece- 42 43 EFTA00281378 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN dented commitment to sacrifice and compliance by environmen- explain why per-capita energy consumption was so much lower tally concerned citizens. In fact, New Yorkers themselves, when in Europe than in the United States, said, "It's not a secret, and informed that their per-capita energy consumption is the lowest it's not the result of some miraculous technological break- in the United States, usually express surprise. They don't gener- through. It's because Europeans are more likely to live in dense ate less carbon because they go around snapping off lights. cities and less likely to own cars." In European cities, as in Granted, directly comparing New York's greenhouse emis- Manhattan, in other words, the most important efficiencies are sions with those of the rest of the country is unfair to much of built-in. And for the same reasons. the rest of the country, because the city couldn't exist without This is not necessarily a message that Americans like to hear, massive agricultural, industrial, and other inputs from far beyond or that environmentalists like to give. The Sierra Club's website its borders, and is therefore responsible for emissions occurring features a slide-show-like demonstration that illustrates how vari- elsewhere. But all other American communities are subject to ous sprawling suburban intersections could be transformed into this same interdependence, and, even if they weren't, New York's far more appealing and energy-efficient developments by imple- example would still be significant because the city proves that menting a few modifications, among them widening the side- tremendous environmental gains can be achieved by arranging walks and narrowing the streets, mixing residential and commercial infrastructure in ways that make beneficial outcomes inescapable uses, moving buildings closer together and closer to the edges of and that don't depend on radically reforming human nature or sidewalks (to make them more accessible to pedestrians and to implementing technologies that arc currently beyond our capa- increase local density), and adding public transportation—all bilities or our willingness to pay. At an environmental presenta- fundamental elements of the widely discussed anti-sprawl strategy tion in 2008, I sat next to an investment banker who was initially known as Smart Growth. In a 2004 telephone conversation with skeptical when I explained that Manhattanites have a signifi- a Sierra Club representative involved in Challenge to Sprawl, I said candy lower environmental impact than other Americans. "But that the organization's anti-sprawl suggestions and the modified that's just because they're all crammed together," he said. Just so. streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant features He then disparaged New Yorkers' energy efficiency as "uncon- with Manhattan—whose most salient characteristics include wide scious," as though intention trumped results. But unconscious sidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings, efficiencies are the most desirable ones, because they require and an extensive network of subways and buses. The representative neither enforcement nor a personal commitment to cutting hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he back. I spoke with one energy expert, who, when I asked him to would prefer that the program not be described in such terms, 44 45 EFTA00281379 GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN since emulating New York City would not be considered an values in New York City were reducing the size of the liv- appealing goal by most of the people whom the Sierra Club is ing space of the average Manhattan resident, thereby mak- trying to persuade. The truth, though, is inescapable. In a world ing it more efficient.) of nearly 7 billion people and counting, sustainability, if it can • Live closer:The main key to lowering energy consumption be achieved, will look a lot more like midtown Manhattan than and shrinking the carbon footprint of modern civilization like rural Vermont. is to contract the distances between the places where peo- The environmental lessons that New York City offers are not ple live, work, shop, and play. Unfortunately, the steady neretnrily easy to apply—and, even to New Yorkers, they can enlargement of the American house was accompanied by often be difficult to discern—but the most important of them the explosive growth of low-density subdivisions and sat- can be summarized simply: ellite communities linked by networks of new highways and inhabited by long-distance commuters. Living closer • Live smaller.• The avenge American single-family house to one's daily destinations, Manhattan-style, reduces ve- doubled in size in the second half of the twentieth cen- hicle miles traveled, makes transit and walking feasible as tury, and the size of the avenge American household forms of transportation, increases the efficiency of energy shrunk. Oversized, under-occupied dwellings perma- production and consumption, limits the need to build nently raise the world's demand for energy, and they en- superfluous infrastructure, and cuts the demand for such courage careless consumption of all kinds. In the long environmentally doomed extravagances as riding lawn- run, big, empty houses are no more sustainable than mowers and household irrigation systems. The world, not SUVs or private jets, no matter how many photovoltaic just the United States, needs to pursue land-use strategies panels they have on their roofs. As the cost of energy in- that promote high-density, mixed-use urban develop- evitably rises in the years ahead, and as the long-term ment, rather than sprawl. environmental and economic consequences of our accus- • Drive less: Making automobiles more fuel-efficient isn't tomed levels of wastefulness become clearer and more necessarily a bad idea, but it won't solve the world's energy dire, we are going to need to find ways to reduce the size and environmental dilemmas. The real problem with cars of the spaces we inhabit, heat, cool, furnish, and main- is not that they don't get enough miles to the gallon; it's tain. (A notable countertrend: while the typical American that they make it too easy for people to spread out, en- single-family house was doubling in size, rising real estate couraging forms of development that are inherently waste- 46 47 EFTA00281380 GREEN METROPOLIS fid 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 Two 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 Liquid Civilization and less pleasant. And that's as true for cars that are pow- ered by recycled cooking oil as it is for cars that are powered by gasoline. In terms of the automobile's true environmental impact, fuel gauges are less important than odometers. In the long run, miles matter more than miles per gallon. As we make can more efficient, we must com- pensate by making driving less so—a goal both harder to very serious discussion of the environment—every book, attain and less likely to be embraced by drivers them- every documentary, every television news report, every mag- selves. azine article, every lecture, every dire warning—is ultimately about oil, whether it specifically mentions oil or not. All the None of these imperatives will be easy to implement. But exasperatingly difficult environmental challenges we face today, New York and the world's other dense cities point the way. Those large and small, are consequences of the explosive growth, dur- cities' long-term value as role models has yet to be widely em- ing the past century or so, of the complex apparatus of modern braced, partly because many of the benefits of urban density are civilization, and that growth has been engendered and nurtured counterintuitive, and partly because most Americans, including and driven and amplified by oil, without which it could not have most environmentalists, are more likely to think of places like occurred. Most of the major environmental problems we cur- Manhattan as exasperating environmental problems than as tan- rently face are the result of oil's prodigious abundance during talizing sources of environmental solutions. New York is the the twentieth century; most of the problems we will face going place that's fun to visit but you wouldn't want to live there. What forward will be the result of oil's increasing scarcity and cost could it possibly teach anyone about being green? during the twenty-first. 48 EFTA00281381