The self-congratulatory environmentalist
I’m totally green. As green as I wanna be. So green I’m golden, at least according to David Owen’s article in last week’s New Yorker. “Green Manhattan” is an excellent exposition of something I’ve always felt in my gut: density is frickin’ awesome for the environment. The worst thing we do to the environment is drive cars, and we do a awful lot of that. But in the city people do very little of that. On top of that we consume so much less land that, according to Mr. Owen, to accomodate NYC’s 8 million residents in a suburban density pattern, you’d need to cover the entirety of New England plus Delaware and New Jersey. That’s an awful lot of open space being saved from the terrors of landscaping and left to the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen. We also consume roughly 8 times less electricity per capita. The list of efficiencies inherent in apartment-living and skyscraper-working go on for quite a ways, but I think this quote from the article sums up the most important one:
Richard B. Miller, who resigned as the senior energy advisor for the city of New York six weeks before the blackout, reportedly over deep disagreements with the city’s energy policy, told me, “When I was with the city, I attended a conference call where somebody said, ‘We really need to raise energy and electricity prices in New York City, so that people will consume less.’ And my response at that conference was ‘You know, if you’re talking about raising energy prices in New York City only, then you’re talking about something that’s really bad for the environment. If you make energy prices so expensive in the city that a business relocates from Manhattan to New Jersey, what you’re really talking about, in the simplest terms, is a business that’s moving from a subway stop to a parking lot, and which of those do you think is worse for the environment?’”
The fact is, we in the city are the sacrificial lambs of this environment. We get by with less so that soccer moms can drive SUVs around with impunity and not worry about their precious shore houses being washed away by a flood of melted icebergs. I don’t want to suggest that there aren’t environmental problems in the city. Obviously the general level of pollution is bad and it would be better if there was more park space around, but the article makes the point that those are the problems we have to solve, i.e. urban densities are scalable, while suburban ones are not. Look at China, which now has over 100 cities with more than a million inhabitants, and I don’t believe that counts the millions of non-resident migrants that are in the cities working illegally. The U.S. has 9 such cities, and many are shrinking. Americans seem to have decided that they have a right to live in a cul-de-sac on a hill, and therefore have a right to cheap gas so that they can putter about to their heart’s content and never have to walk a block without their running pants on. Sure, we have more room to spread out than China, but the road don’t go on forever.
Of course, some Americans think that they have a right, not only to drive around, but to pretend to be farmers while they’re doing it. I can’t get started on farm subsidies, though, because I’ll just get to the point where I have to fly down to Kansas, rob five banks, and hand the money over to the MTA just to feel like there’s a shred of justice in the current federal budget.
evan :: Oct.18.2004 :: Notions :: 11 Comments »
What’s the point? Most of our nation’s major cities are situated on large bodies of water, so they’re all doomed as sea levels rise. Also, let’s be clear about why that’s happening. The CO2 that is causing today’s global warming is not from SUVs (although the final sea levels 200 years from now will be partly determined by current fossil fuel use). Global warming started naturally, but coincided with the exacerbating effects of industrialization, which is also the time at which truly modern population densities became possible. Nothing we do can save us. The human race is doomed (destined?) to follow the same path as almost every other species on this globe. Eventually we’ll die, and life will largely forget all about us. This isn’t ‘God Emperor of Dune’, people.
While it’s nice to pat ourselves on the back for using a little less water & electricity than others, we’re creating so many totally global problems (and I’m not convinced that calculations like watts/person/year and gallons/person/year account for the fact that NYC is a major engine for the rest of humanity’s wasteful economy) that we have no chance of mitigating any of it to any acceptable extent. Fuck it. Go eat a burger & shoot the rest of the cow at the ozone layer. It doesn’t really matter. Anyone reading this will likely die in a world not unlike the one they were born into. It’s our grandkids & beyond that are screwed, and there’s not much we can do to help them. So fuck it.
You, sir, are a little ray of sunshine and no mistake.
Yes I am. I am a ray of retina-searing, cancer-causing, globe-warming, satelite-frying sunshine.
Jesus. For goodness’ sake, we can do something. Something is better than nothing. Even if we assume that the human race will eventually be extinguished, isn’t it worth lengthening the time till we approach that eventuality, thereby saving human lives?
worthwhile for whom? not me. i’ll already be dead.
Three things: first, can you really be sure of that? Sure, your vessel will be gone, but maybe the soul-matter gets reincarnated. I don’t know if it does or not, and neither do you. If it does, it’s worth preserving the vessels from a self-interested standpoint. Maybe your spirit will come back as another one, and then another one, and so on, until the day the human race has ended.
Second, even if we assume that reincarnation doesn’t happen at all, isn’t there something special about humanity that’s worth saving? Aren’t we different from the bugs & bees? Doesn’t that whole self-consciousness thing mean something? The nihilist responds by saying, “Means nothing, look at all the wars, all the self-consciousness gets us is the ability to destroy ourselves.” By contrast, anyone with a shred of optimism points to the positive things humans have done and to the possibility that BECAUSE we are self-conscious, we can stop the trend of self-destruction. And what better way to harness our unique power than to save future humans from extinction? That’s the best use of the innate faculty unique to Homo Sapiens that I can think of.
Third, if you don’t buy any of that you think we’re just plain animals and nothing more, no smarter and no more self-aware–an idea with which I wholeheartedly disagree–then we at least share in animals’ desire to pass on their gene code. Biologists seem to think that at the end of the day that’s all animals really want anyway. At the least we are animals, so at the least we wanna pass on our genetic material, which means you’ll want to have your descendants well taken care of. Got to keep that DNA flowing.
First, there are more than your three options. Second, optimism and nihilism are not necessarily opposed. Third, I am not, nor have I espoused nihilistic views. Fourth, there is no monothilic opinion among ‘Biologists’ as to what ‘animals really want anyway’.
sure I’m responding to kind of a dead old thread here, but maybe hold off on congratulating your green ass until you assess how much trash gets thrown out of our office every day. No recycling, no reuse, and certainly no reducuction. Multiply that by all the offices in midtown. And then for kicks look at what the daily trash output of every mcdonalds and starbucks is. manhattan has two of each of those places on every corner… crap like that threatens to cancel out all of the happy stats from the new yorker article, no?
We’ve gotta do it like India man– make paper cups that disintegrate when you throw ‘em hard enough onto the train tracks. heh.
First, there is indeed no monolithic opinion among biologists about “what animals really want anyway,” so I’ll withdraw that unfortunate remark from what stands as a genuinely sincere attempt to respond to your points on their merits, my characterization of biologists notwithstanding. Second, I did not claim that you had espoused nihilistic views, but instead used the example of a hypothetical nihilist to make an argument. Nor need I characterize your position as nihilist to make said argument, by which I stand. Third, there are definitely more than my three options (which aren’t even options so much as they are arguments), which is why I never claimed that my three points represented the totality of all possible options. That would be a pretty arrogant thing to do. Thankfully I didn’t do it. In fact, all I did was to number my points, thereby following a rhetorical convention dating pretty far back–I want to say something clever like “dating to the Frankish kindgoms”–but for fear of provoking an unironic response like “There is definitely no evidence that the Franks numbered their points,” I’d better refrain from further attempts at [what I consider to be] cleverness.
Nah, I really don’t think office waste cancels out the energy consumption advantages talked about in the article, mostly because I don’t believe it’s any different in suburban offices. Yes, NYC produces a shitload of trash, and we could do a better job of recycling a lot of it, but we consume a lot less energy disposing of it, too. Out in the land of office parks trash must be driven around for miles until it is aggregated into a bargeful, burning fossil fuels all the while. Here all we have to do is drive everything to Staten Island.
The point of the article is that per capita cities like New York are greener than any suburban or rural areas, mostly due to us not driving everywhere. I don’t think that’s really disputable; to form an effective counter-argument you’d have to show some unique or out-of-scale environmental harm that emerges from high density areas.
There are all kinds of environmental effects unique to high-density areas. The price we pay for lowering global impacts such as fossil fuel use are vastly increased damage to local natural conditions. If you check out EPA’s list of severe nonattainment areas for various atmospheric pollutants you’ll see that they all line up with major cities. The northeastern US’ problem with particulates and sulfur dioxide being exacerbated by Midwestern power plants notwithstanding, most of these problems are of local origin. With the exception of industiral mining sites the same is true for water pollution.
Environmental systems are awesomely complex, and all are interrelated. So, while it’s great-and probably correct-to tout the benefits of high-density living it is also important to recognize the local impacts. Finally, let’s recognize that the problems or air and water quality in urban environments do far more harm to the human animals that anything else. That’s what water treatment plants and asthma medication are all about, after all.