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 ::
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