The Chris Moeller Archives

Greening for the city

Our next book endorsement is last year's "Green Metropolis" by David Owen, available through your local and online booksellers, as well as your neighborhood library. The author punctures holes into a few of the conventional wisdoms surrounding environmental sustainability, namely that crowded urban areas are ecological problems. Instead, he argues, they should be our model in future planning.

In the book, Owen promotes New York City as the nearest ideal in terms of green civic design in the United States, but that hypothesis is in fundamental opposition to generations of public hostility toward crowded cities. It is exactly this high density in population, though, that he says makes that city our "greenest."

New York City residents live so close to one another that the use of fossil fuel-burning automobiles long ago became an impracticality. As a result, NYC contains 2.7% of the human population of the United States, but their residents actually use only 1% of all greenhouse gases. The current per capita consumption of greenhouse gases in the Big Apple has not been matched in the country as a whole since the mid-1920s. Residents there are forced to walk or use public transportation instead of driving and parking; and living vertically, rather than sprawled out across the countryside, keeps energy costs down and less thermal exposure in buildings. It limits commercial consumption as well-- in regards to those non-essential goods we all enjoy but that NYC residents simply don't have as much room for. The average New York City household uses 4,696 kilo-watt hours of power each year, according to Owen's book, but that's compared to 16,116 for the average household in Dallas, TX.

Owen writes that hostility in the environmental movement towards urban living traces back to the agrarian ideals set forth by figures like Thomas Jefferson and Henry Ford, and particularly by the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Of course, U.S. cities in those days of their infancy suffered from much dirtier industrial air, and from epidemic diseases like cholera and yellow fever that ran rampant through filthy, unregulated, densely-populated communities. Human flight to the countryside was actually a reversal of the direction of natural human migration, and the result, over time, has been the explosion of sprawl cities, strip malls, wider and longer expressways, and the overall number of gas-thirsty motor vehicles on our roads.

If everybody lived with the same physical proximity between themselves and their fellow humans that Thoreau sought for himself, we'd have already cooked our planet long ago. Residents of New York State's Hudson Valley, as an example, may curse New York City and its residents every time they experience a summer "blackout" and "brownout" in their electricity, but per capita energy usage in NYC is several ballparks removed in the direction of "green" from that of the individual and sprawling Hudson Valley communities. Imagine the depleted resources and environmental havoc that would result if the population of New York City were spread out across the entire state of New York, rather than piled up on top of each other in metropolitan bliss.

Thoreau's endorsement of harmony with our natural world is his positive legacy, but it should be observed by his descendant environmentalists that it's that same idealism in regards to open space that has been so successfully usurped by automobile manufacturing companies, among other large polluters. To prove his point, Owens provides just a partial listing of the names of marketed "off-road" vehicles that are designed to keep you as far away as possible from your neighbors-- Wrangler, Explorer, Yukon, Blazer, Pathfinder, Expedition, Sierra, Outback, Outlander, Tahoe, Santa Fe, Jellystone. (I made up that last one.) They're selling the idea of wide open space as individual freedom, not communal conservation: This area of Earth is unspoiled so let's all move there. To Owen's mind, it was Thoreau's famous cabin in the woods that "set the American pattern of creeping residential development." After all, who has actually done more to harm the planet, Owen asks-- the now-multitude of "explorers" who have left their garbage strewn about the foothills of Everest and the Himalayas, or the people who have stayed home because they hate mountains?

New York City residents don't necessarily deserve credit for sacrificing more than we do. By and large, they aren't doing anything special to conserve the planet-- and they root for asshole baseball teams. Like most of us, most of them are simply doing what is the most convenient. It's safe to suppose that nearly all NYC residents would have cars if it were more practical to have them. People there simply have the advantage of living in a city that was beautifully designed for sustainability long before they were even born. (Except for Barbara Walters, am I right, people?) Most of the rest of us are junkies for gasoline, and the reason that we're junkies is because it's so easy for us to drive from one place to another. That's why the only ultimate cure for getting roasted to death by the sun, says the author of "Green Metropolis," is to make driving costlier and less pleasant in general.

According to Owen, the "green"-labeled initiatives that are the most counterproductive are the ones that are simultaneously making driving more convenient. For example, car pool lanes are a good idea in theory, but not if they're leading people that would normally use public transportation to get out on the road with their vehicles, and not if the construction of additional lanes for car pooling eases congestion in the other lanes, ultimately increasing volume again. Even a subway system like New York City's, a marvel of historic proportions in regards to green planning, is doing greater harm when it's extended beyond the city's limits and is making it easier for people to live further from the core. In those suburban and exurban communities, residents may be able to commute by train to work, but they're having to drive everyplace else.

Hybrid and compact vehicles are more fuel-efficient, of course, than the oversized sport utilities, but it's a meaningless trade if the driver of the new, smaller vehicle just has an excuse to drive more; and the "smart cars" have no place if they're being bought up by residents in the central city. These vehicles are still consuming energy on the road, and they also may have to be consistently plugged into the electrical grid for their charge. A golden calf is being slaughtered if a city block in Manhattan designed to allow for 80 parked cars now has room for 500.

All of the above numbers and insights are lifted directly from Owen's fine book. He doesn't state this specifically, but I would argue that the first rule of any meaningful environmental civic policy should be 'no new roads.' Observance of this commandment would save a load of money for taxpayers, as just one enormous benefit, and it would also make driving progressively less convenient, as another. It could be coupled with new tolls on highways and streets that go towards funding public transportation.

Any changes have to be done in accordance with supporting public transportation programs and walking neighborhoods. Well-meaning community expenditures on public transit are wasted when they're coupled with funding for new or widening roadways that make the public transit unnecessary. My town of Des Moines comes to mind on that point. Many of us that live in the city core would love to have greater public transport options, but as long as the city and state keep widening the freeway and the arteries, the buses and trains won't and couldn't be filled. Government policy in this-- and all things-- has to follow human nature, and human nature here is that the true "green" option can't win unless it's also the "convenient" option for the citizenry.

Owen says he has also suggested in meetings with groups like the Nature Conservancy, which purchases parcels of unspoiled land to protect against development, that they buy up downtown parking lots in cities and construct apartment dwellings. Each such purchase has the double advantage of promoting in-fill growth and making parking more scarce-- a constant annoyance for drivers. (Yes!) All of these types of positive actions will be rare, though, until we change our collective mindset about the merits of urban living and greater population density. Who's with me?

posted by CM @ 2:46 PM