gbNYC Book Club: David Owen's "Green Metropolis" Singles Out NYC as Standard-Setter

Plenty of New Yorkers found reasons to vote against Michael Bloomberg yesterday, although roughly five percent more found a reason to vote for him, and he was elected for his third term as Mayor. (You may have heard as much if you use sites other than gbNYC for your local politics news, which you probably should) Whether they made that decision despite or because of the Bloomberg campaign's $85 million mini-stimulus to the negative-advertising and direct-mail industries is a decision each voter made for him- or herself, but one achievement on which Bloomberg can easily hang his (very expensive) hat is the impressive greening of New York City. I'm not always the hugest fan of Bloomie -- Stephen likes him more than I do, I think -- but His Orange, Philanthropically Inclined Honor has delivered to an impressive degree on his goal of making New York City a surpassingly green city for its size. "Green Metropolis," a (relatively) new book by The New Yorker's David Owen, argues that Bloomberg's New York is not just one of the greenest cities in the United States, but in the entire world.

Of course, this isn't exactly news to New Yorkers who care about this sort of thing -- the news that New Yorkers' per capita carbon footprint is less than a third of the 24.5-metric-ton American national average has long been a point of pride for those of us who bother being proud of that sort of thing. Owen's greater point -- as summarized in Margaret Mittelbach's review of "Green Metropolis" in the San Francisco Chronicle -- is that the secret of New York's efficiency lies less in New Yorkers than in New York itself. "The lesson to be learned from New York City, [Owen] says, is not that New Yorkers are particularly environmentally aware, compared with anyone else," Mittelbach writes. "It's that their population-dense living situation makes it easier and cheaper to use less energy."

Or, as Owen himself put it in The New Yorker five years ago (gbNYC is breaking news!), "To borrow a term from the jargon of computer systems, dense cities are scalable, while sprawling suburbs are not. The environmental challenge we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world's non-renewable resources, is not how to make our teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The true challenge is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan." Owen updated that piece recently on his website, and also made this point in greater detail, and more recently, at Yale's Environment 360 website.

In the Yale piece, Owen makes the point that while New York's efficiency is easy to disparage as "unconscious" -- that is, we don't really have much choice but to live in smallish apartments, get to work on the subway, etc. -- it's that very inevitability that made New York comparatively efficient on a per-capita basis even before programs such as Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030 made the quest for a greener, more sustainable city something that people actually thought about. This is kind of a new thing for gbNYC, but I'm going to buy "Green Metropolis" and give it a read, and hope you'll do the same -- I'll post my thoughts on it once I read it. If you've already read it, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. I trust there won't be any serious spoilers; this isn't "Mad Men," here, which means I imagine it won't get revealed that NYC is secretly cheating on Betty with the (pretty but honestly kind of boring) schoolteacher. If that happens in the book, please keep it to yourself.