Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability Book

This book is terrible. The premise is alright although no where near as revolutionary as Owen would lead you to believe, but the book is terrible.

The premise is that cities with a high population density are better for the environment than suburbs. People in cities use less space and less energy. Again, this isn't revolutionary. Years ago, I spent a semester in grad school looking at ways of increasing population density. The author makes it seem like all environmentalists hate cities, which sets him up as the sole prophet of population density, but he never differentiates between environmentalists and naturalists. Jefferson, Muir and the others were naturalists. They may have also been environmentalists but there is a difference. I feel like most environmentalists live in cities these days. Other than the premise, there were maybe 30 pages of useful, interesting information. I didn't know that people who get more fuel efficient drive more so higher fuel efficiency standards are basically a wash environmentally.

The author starts out on the wrong foot by focusing completely on New York City. NYC can be a good example in terms of public transportation and not using cars, but it's not the most densely populated city in the US, much less the world. "The problem we face is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents currently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with." So even if you've tried really hard to be environmental, built a net-zero home, biked to work, recycled, give up, you're not as environmentally responsible as the former Wall Street Exec who tired of rush hour traffic and decided to hire a helicopter to get him to and from work everyday (Too Big to Fail)... I feel like I don't even need to argue that because it's so pointless.

The other thing that really bothered me, and just got worse and worse the deeper into the book I got, is the author's extreme hypocrisy. He lives in a small town in Conneticut. He drives everywhere. He argues to make driving more difficult so people will do it less, yet when he has a chance to take the train into NYC, he drives. He addresses this hypocrisy in a paragraph or two in the last ten pages. He says that if he and his wife moved back to NYC, someone would buy his conneticut home and live in it and buy his car and drive it, so it's better that he and his wife are there because they both work at home. The hypothetical buyers of their house wouldn't work from home, of course they also might not drive their car to walk their dogs, which the author admits to doing. Since he's remained in his home, the hypothetical buyers have had to build a new home in small town Conneticut, and buy a new car and drive it. It's obviously better to have two families living in Conneticut and driving everywhere than one living in Conneticut and one living in NYC. The author admits to not even doing the small steps to reduce his energy use like adding insulation or moving his third floor office to the second floor. The price of gas dropped again, and even though he writes about how it's just going to go up and up, he lost his motivation to make an impact. It's the economy's fault, not his. Why did he even write the book? His attitude is that he can't make a difference, it's up to the government. I really, really hope not too many other people have that attitude because why would we even try?

Some lesser issues that I had with this book... LEED doesn't meet the author's high standards. Noone claims it's a perfect program. The author complains about the alternative fuel parking spots credit and brags about questioning it at a conference. The entire book is about density and he doesn't even mention the density credit. Also, towards the end, he says "environmentalists tend to focus on defending the places where people aren't rather than on intelligently organizing the places where people are" which is the whole point of LEED. Mies van der Rohe doesn't live up to the author's expectations which didn't sit well with me. The author complains about the local food movement. By his calculation, the blueberries that travel from California came in a truck full of blueberries reducing the embodied energy per blueberry while the blueberries at the farmer's market he has to drive 30 miles each way to cost a lot more energy-wise. He's missing the whole point of his entire book. If I walk to any of the three farmer's markets within a mile from my apartment, I can buy blueberries with almost no expenditure of energy.

I could go on, but I'll stop. I'll leave it at this, this book is terrible.