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.
Tonight, being the Fourth, we had fireworks here in Champaign-Urbana. Maya was not interested in going, but Georgia was—the cousins were going to be there. So, even though Suzanne and Husayn and Amia were visiting, we piled our gear (and Georgia) into the bicycle trailer and headed over to campus to meet Zivar (my sister), Mom, and Zivar's three girls.
I didn't know what to do with the cell phone (we were coordinating our rendezvous with technology this year, since somehow in the last twelve months all three of us had been hooked up), so I gave it to Georgia. As soon as we started down our little street towards the park, it rang.
ring-ring
Georgia, can you answer that? Press the green button.
(Georgia has never felt comfortable answering a phone.)
ring-ring
Hello?
(Georgia had answered the phone! She didn't sound shy or scared or anything.)
We're on a bike. I'll get him. Billy, its Grandma Amy!
Umm, I can't answer it right now. Can you talk to her? Tell her where we are.
(We were crossing Broadway into the park, which we would cross on our way to campus.)
(very calmly) He can't answer it right now. He's riding a bike.
Tell her you're in a bike trailer.
I'm in a bike trailer.
Georgia reported that they were just starting out toward the planned fireworks rendezvous; I directed her to tell them we were too, which she did.
Bye!
Press the red button to hang up.
Okay, I did it.
Isn't that the first time you really talked on a phone?
Yeah!
I tell you, going on an adventure—even a little one like a bike ride to fireworks—brings out hidden strengths. Georgia was excited and confident, and she had the phone and knew that she was the only one who could answer it. So she did, and if she was shy or scared, I saw very little of it; she overcame it very quickly.
First phone call: cell phone in a bike trailer. Sign of her times. She's a junior cadre in the People's Technological Republic of Urbana.
We met up with Grandma and the cousins who were camped about 15 feet from the fence marking the no-man's-land around the fireworks launch site. We could just lie on our backs and watch them explode above us. Zivar was the first to have cardboard tumble down and land on her leg, scorched but cooled. Grandma's kind of crazy.
Georgia huddled with Nadine and watched excitedly. Zivar reported
I asked the girls how they were doing. They said, "It's scary. Hee hee hee."
On the way home, Georgia described the fireworks as "scary, dramatic, and exciting." I didn't even know she knew the word dramatic.
The scene: Maya, Teresa, and Daddy are taking a walk. The sun has just set, and it is getting dark. Daddy pushes the two girls in a double stroller, with Teresa in front and Maya in back.
The sound of firecrackers in the distance has made Maya nervous, and she has been worried that the firecrackers are at the playground that the trio is walking towards. Daddy has done his best to assure her that they are in the other direction, and their sound seems to confirm this.
Firecrackers: pop ... pop pop poppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppop poppop poppop pop
Maya: Can fireworks kill people?
Daddy: These firecrackers? No, no, they—they aren't very dangerous. They're very small, this big (holds fingers close together). They could go off in your hand, and they wouldn't hurt you. Well, they wouldn't hurt very much anyway.
Maya: Oh.
(Maya thinks about it for a little while.)
Maya: Can fireworks kill food?
I'm not sure whether she wanted to know:
