This weekend, I saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I highly recommend it. For adults, anyway. It's probably too scary for young children.
And today I saw an essay that makes the argument that New York City is the Greenest City in the U.S.. Here are the first two paragraphs:
My 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 dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, 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 possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.
The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use.
Theorem: Sprawl is bad.
Logic: New York City is the opposite of sprawl.
Corollary: New York City is good.
That sounds flawed, but I found the essay convincing. The key is not that NYC's total environmental impact is minimal, but rather the impact of each individual person living there. Another excerpt:
Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we think of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than most other American regions of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green.
If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household, however, the color scheme would be reversed. My little town has about four thousand residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles, and there are many places within our town limits from which no sign of settlement is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight million people like us, along with our dwellings and possessions and current rates of energy use, into a space the size of New York City, our profligacy would be impossible to miss, because you'd have to stack our houses and cars and garages and lawn tractors and swimming pools and septic tanks higher than skyscrapers. (Conversely, if you made all eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they would require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.)
And finally, a humorous comparison of a sckyscraper to an "environmentally sound" building:
Bruce Fowle, a founder of Fox & Fowle, told me, "The Condé Nast Building contains 1.6 million square feet of floor space, and it sits on one acre of land. If you divided it into 48 one-story suburban office buildings, each averaging 33,000 square feet, and spread those one-story buildings around the countryside, and then added parking and some green space around each one, you'd end up consuming at least a 150 acres of land. And then you'd have to provide infrastructure, the highways and everything else." Like many other buildings in Manhattan, 4 Times Square doesn't even have a parking lot, because the vast majority of the six thousand people who work inside it don't need one. In most other parts of the country, big parking lots are not only necessary but are required by law. If my town's zoning regulations applied in Manhattan, 4 Times Square would have needed sixteen thousand parking spaces, one for every hundred square feet of office floor space. The Rocky Mountain Institute's showcase headquarters has double-paned krypton-filled windows, which admit 75 per cent as much light as ordinary windows while allowing just 10 per cent as much heat to escape in cold weather. That's a wonderful feature, and one of many in the building which people ought to copy. In other ways, though, the R.M.I. building sets a very poor environmental example. It was built in a fragile location, on virgin land more than seven thousand feet above sea level. With just four thousand square feet of interior space, it can hold only six of R.M.I.'s 18 full-time employees; the rest of them work in a larger building a mile away. Because the two buildings are in a thinly populated area, they force most employees to drive many miles-including trips between the two buildings-and they necessitate extra fuel consumption by delivery trucks, snowplows, and other vehicles. If R.M.I.'s employees worked on a single floor of a big building in Manhattan (or in downtown Denver) and lived in apartments nearby, many of them would be able to give up their cars, and the thousands of visitors who drive to Snowmass each year to learn about environmentally responsible construction could travel by public transit instead.
Picking on R.M.I.-which is one of the world's most farsighted environmental organizations-may seem unfair, but R.M.I., along with many other farsighted environmental organizations, shares responsibility for perpetuating the powerful anti-city bias of American environmentalism. That bias is evident in the technical term that is widely used for sprawl: "urbanization." Thinking of freeways and strip malls as "urban" phenomena obscures the ecologically monumental difference between Phoenix and Manhattan, and fortifies the perception that population density is an environmental ill. It also prevents most people from recognizing that R.M.I.'s famous headquarters-which sits on an isolated parcel more than a hundred and eighty miles from the nearest significant public transit system-is sprawl.
It's a much longer essay—I've only excerpted small pieces. I heartily recommend reading the original.
Posted by Billy at July 17, 2006 02:11 PM
