A Connecticut suburbanite extols the environmental virtues of dense big cities.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. By David Owen. Riverhead Books, 2009.  357 pages; $25.95. www.amazon.com.

Do fence me in

North America’s most environmentally friendly community is located on an island 90 miles northeast of Philadelphia.  The inhabitants of this ecotopia consume half as much electrical energy per capita as the average American and “consume gasoline at a rate the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the 1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T.” If every American lived the way they do, we could reduce our greenhouse emissions by 70%.

The island is, of course, Manhattan. New Yorkers expend less energy on transportation than their fellow Americans because they can walk, use public transportation and bicycle. They expend less energy on heating because they usually live in apartments and houses with adjoining walls. New Yorkers are just as greedy, selfish and shortsighted as most consumption-happy moderns, but their environment promotes conservation and actively discourages energy-intensive options, like automobile ownership.

Many city dwellers understand the environmental advantages of dense, concentrated metropolises. I bought this book, in fact, because I wanted to enjoy the guilty pleasure of reading something that supported my own biases. But David Owen, a writer for The New Yorker, supplies us with facts most of us aren’t aware of and systematically demolishes the defenses raised by inhabitants of the great sprawl most Americans live in.

City dwellers live longer

Owen isn’t himself a New Yorker. He lived in Manhattan for several years when he and his wife were first married, but he has spent most of his life in suburban Connecticut. He understands the attractions of the spread-out lifestyle, and he can provide concrete examples of all the ways it forces people to burn energy and destroy natural landscapes. He can back up his assertions with personal observations when he quotes studies that conclude city dwellers spend more time outdoors, get more exercise, weigh less, and enjoy longer lives than their non-urban contemporaries. (New Yorkers, believe it or not, live about nine months longer than the national average.)

Owen doesn’t hold much hope for the future. He doesn’t think the American lifestyle is sustainable but he knows change will require major alterations in the economic and technological arrangements we’ve developed over the last 60 years. His best suggestion, offered almost in passing, is that we should make cities more attractive, so more Americans will want to live in them.

What to do?

Owen isn’t arguing that we should make big cities more like suburbs— say, by adding parking spaces and reducing density.  Instead we should increase the appeal of cities by reinforcing their natural strengths (such as their cultural and communal life), and attacking their weaknesses (like poor public school systems).

The next time you send a check to your favorite arts organization, give yourself an extra moment of satisfaction. The polar bears owe you a thank-you note, too.♦


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