Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

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Read David Owen’s posts on the Penguin Blog.
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.
ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1594488827
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Hardcover
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 17, 2009
Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781594488825
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594488825
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.8 x 1.24 x 8.58 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #2,446,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1,260 in Sociology of Urban Areas #2,473 in Environmental Science (Books)
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Customers find the book interesting and thought-provoking, with one noting it serves as an eye-opener about our lifestyle. They appreciate its informative content, with one customer highlighting its thorough research and insight. The writing style receives positive feedback, with one customer particularly appreciating the author’s approach.