Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability by David Owen (review)

Alas, if everyone lived like New Yorkers, Earth's environment would be much better off. Or so argues David Owen in his book, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability, one man's soliloquy to correct urban planning and save the environment from environmentalists, anti-urbanists, "LEED brain," Vermonters, and self-satisfied Prius owners. Professional geographers are not David Owen's audience, nor are geographical studies his source materials, and this book offers little to urban geographical theories.

I am not strictly an urban geographer, although I am interested in urban form, development, and rural-urban connectivity, so my reason for reading this book was less for thematic critique or insight, and more to determine if it would be a suitable assignment for my Introduction to Human Geography students when we discuss urban processes (the same way I assign chapters of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma when we discuss agricultural processes). In my class, smart growth, new urbanism, global urbanization, and green building are popular topics. Green Metropolis seemed just the thing my students could get into, i.e., a book that discusses relevant topics, yet is accessible because it is written for the general public, not academics.

Green Metropolis is six chapters. In chapter one, Owen lays out his central argument: counter to what most people think New York City is "a model of environmental responsibility . . . the greenest community in the U.S." (p 2) Owen is not concerned with New York City's large urban footprint and instead he relies heavily on national averages and per-capita energy consumption to support his claim. For example, as compared to most Americans, 82 percent of employed Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, bicycle, or on foot. New Yorkers also live in smaller spaces and have fewer appliances, and, therefore, each resident generates 30 percent less green house gases than the average national citizen. New York City is also more populous than all but 11 states, and if it were granted statehood would rank 51^st in per-capita energy consumption (p 2). Arguments such as these continue throughout the book, and although it becomes more apparent in later chapters, one outcome of Owen's overreliance on national averages and green house gas emissions is the reduction of all environmentalist perspectives to CO₂ emissions.

Readers' also find out in chapter one that the sources of Owen's frustrations and his principle reason for writing the book are accounts of New York City as 'unsustainable,' such as Ben Jervey's The Big Green Apple, and the viewpoints of Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Jefferson. To Owen, Thoreau and Jefferson's anti-urban, pro-agrarian, pro-open space mind-sets have led many, like Jervey, to preach "the sanctity of open spaces [which] helps to propel development into those very spaces" (p 25). To Owen, people living in open spaces are the problem, because "[t]he average Vermonter . . . consumes a third more electricity as the average New York City resident, has a larger carbon footprint, and generates more solid waste" (p 14). Owen says Jane Jacobs is right in The Death and Life of Great American Cities when she argues that density and diversity are the engines that make human communities work.

In chapter two, Owen discusses the primacy of oil and how it, gasoline and plastic dominate American lives. His point is to persuade people to drive less. He seems to be talking to his neighbors and friends, or a group he labels 'Vermont environmentalists.' To Owen, oil's increasing scarcity will demand that people be less car dependent. Vehicle fuel efficiency, often regarded as environmentally friendly, only encourages people to commute farther distances and is therefore bad for the environment. Dense cities, he argues, are clearly a...