David Owen - Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are theKeys to Sustainability

Table of Contents

ALSO BY DAVID OWEN

Sheetrock & Shellac (2006)

Copies in Seconds (2004)

The First National Bank of Dad (2003)

Hit & Hope (2003)

The Chosen One (2001)

The Making of the Masters (1999)

(also published as Life Under a Leaky Roof ; 1998/2000)

Lure of the Links (coeditor; 1997)

My Usual Game (1995)

The Walls Around Us (1991)

The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning (1988)

None of the Above (1985)

High School (1981)

Riverhead Books a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York 2009

My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and nave 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 didnt have a lawn, a clothes dryer, 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 bill worked out to about a dollar a day.

The utopian community was Manhattan. 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 its a model of environmental responsibility. In fact, by the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States. The most devastating damage that humans have done to the environment has arisen from the burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric by comparison with other Americans, including people who live in rural areas or in such putatively eco-friendly cities as Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasnt matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T.; Manhattanites generate even less.

Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously an environmental disasterexcept that it isnt, John Holtzclaw, who recently retired as the chairman of the Sierra Clubs transportation committee, told me in 2004. If New Yorkers lived at the typical American sprawl density of three households per residential acre, they would require many times as much land. Theyd be driving cars, and theyd have huge lawns and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then theyd be overwatering their lawns, so that runoff would go into streams. The key to New Yorks relative environmental benig nity is its extreme compactness. Charles Komanoff, a New York City economist, environmental activist, and bicycling enthusiast, told me, New Yorkers trade the supposed convenience of the automobile for the true convenience of proximity. They are able to live without the ecological disaster of carswhich is caused not just by having to use a car for practically every trip, but also by the distance that you have to traverse. Bicycling, transit, and walking support each other, because they are all made possible by population density. Manhattans density is approximately 67,000 people per square mile, or more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole and roughly thirty times that of Los Angeles. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, enables most of them to get by without owning cars, encourages them to keep their families small, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for the rest of America to sprawl into.

My wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, and I had our first child, Laura, in 1984. Ann and I had grown up in suburbs, and we decided that we didnt want to raise Laura in a huge city. A couple of months after she learned to walk, we moved to a small town in the northwest corner of Connecticut, about ninety miles north of midtown Manhattan. Our house was built in the late 1700s. During a rainstorm one night soon after we moved in, I stuck my head into the attic and ran a flashlight over the underside of the roof. The decking boards had been made, two hundred years before, from the broad trunks of old-growth American chestnut trees, a species that was wiped out by an imported blight in the first half of the twentieth century, and some of them were almost as broad as sheets of plywood. The rafters, which were hand-hewn, were joined not by iron nails but by wooden pegs. Carved near the ends of some of the rafters were large Roman numerals, which had been placed there as assembly aids by the anonymous eighteenth-century builder. The house is across a dirt road from a nature preserve and is shaded by tall white-pine trees, and after the storm had ended I could hear a swollen creek rushing past at the bottom of the hill. Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional black bear feed themselves in our yard, and wildflowers grow everywhere. From the end of our driveway, I can walk several miles through woods to an abandoned nineteenth-century railway tunnel, while crossing only one paved road.

Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consumption of electricity went from roughly 4,000 kilowatt-hours a year, toward the end of our time in New York, to almost 30,000 kilowatt-hoursand our house doesnt even have central air-conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and another one soon after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. (If you live in the country and dont have a second car, you cant retrieve your first car from the mechanic after its been repaired. The third car was the product of a mild midlife crisis; it evolved into a necessity as soon as Laura and our son, John, became old enough to drive.) Ann and I both work at home, and therefore commute by climbing a flight of stairs, but, between us, we manage to drive more than 20,000 miles a year, mostly doing ordinary errands. City dwellers who fantasize about living in the country usually picture themselves hiking, kayaking, gathering eggs from their own chickens, and engaging in other robust outdoor activities, but what you actually do when you move out of the city is move into a car, because public transit is nonexis tent and most daily destinations are too widely separated to make walking or bicycling plausible as forms of transportation. Almost everything Ann and I do away from our house requires a car trip. The nearest movie theater is twenty minutes away, and so is the nearest large supermarket. Renting a DVD and later returning it consumes almost two gallons of gasoline, because Blockbuster is ten miles away and each complete transaction involves two round trips. Quite often, we use a car when taking our dogs for a walk, so that the walk can begin somewhere other than our own yard. The office of our Manhattan pediatrician was in the lobby of our apartment building, an elevator ride away; the office of my Connecticut dentist is two towns over, a round trip of thirty-two miles. When we lived in New York, heat escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment above ours; nowadays, many of the BTUs produced by our very modern, extremely efficient oil-burning furnace leak through our two-hundred-year-old roof and into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.