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Title details for Green Metropolis by David Owen - Available

Green Metropolis

What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability

by David Owen
Patrick Lawlor
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares—as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, David Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in per-capita greenhouse gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.


These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn't reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world's nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 23, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400193714
      • File size: 282859 KB
      • Duration: 09:49:17

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      GREEN METROPOLIS is David Owen's book-length version of his important and influential 2004 NEW YORKER article "Green Manhattan." Unfortunately, in the book Owen focuses too little on the environmental virtues of high-density urban living. Instead he wanders across the landscape of environmental initiatives, finding little he likes. Owen is an excellent prose stylist. His punchy sentences work well in an audiobook. Owen can be quite funny, although this book tends more to righteous declaration. Patrick Lawlor's clear, even narration is easy to take. Lawlor conveys both Owen's humor and dissatisfaction without too much drama. Lawlor's slightly nasal tone complements the author's Midwestern roots and conveys his general displeasure with the world beyond Manhattan. F.C. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 1, 2009
      While the conventional wisdom condemns it as an environmental nightmare, Manhattan is by far the greenest place in America, argues this stimulating eco-urbanist manifesto. According to Owen (Sheetrock and Shellac
      ), staff writer at the New Yorker
      , New York City is a model of sustainability: its extreme density and compactness—and horrifically congested traffic—encourage a carfree lifestyle centered on walking and public transit; its massive apartment buildings use the heat escaping from one dwelling to warm the ones adjoining it; as a result, he notes, New Yorkers’ per capita greenhouse gas emissions are less than a third of the average American’s. The author attacks the “powerful anti-urban bias of American environmentalists” like Michael Pollan and Amory Lovins, whose rurally situated, auto-dependent Rocky Mountain Institute he paints as an ecological disaster area. The environmental movement’s disdain for cities and fetishization of open space, backyard compost heaps, locavorism and high-tech gadgetry like solar panels and triple-paned windows is, he warns, a formula for wasteful sprawl and green-washed consumerism. Owen’s lucid, biting prose crackles with striking facts that yield paradigm-shifting insights. The result is a compelling analysis of the world’s environmental predicament that upends orthodox opinion and points the way to practical solutions.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 25, 2010
      Owen packs a mean and green punch in this comprehensive look at how high-density city living is the environmentally responsible choice. His argument seems sound and his research is extensive, but Patrick Lawlor’s delivery lends a defensive tone to Owen’s appeal. The slight chip on the shoulder edge to his reading aside, Lawlor has an engaging and lively voice that breezes through Owen’s more complicated explanations about the differences between city dwelling and its potentially sustainable opportunities. Both author and narrator come together well to provide a fresh new point of view in the debate on humans and the environment. A Riverhead hardcover (Reviews, June 1).

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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