Quick, what's the greenest spot in America? Vermont, with its lush landscape and environmentally conscientious citizenry? Or maybe Oregon, with all those trees and people who love to hug them?
Wrong on both counts. It's New York City, according to author David Owen. He argues on Yale Environment 360 and in his new book, "Green Metropolis," that the thing that makes New York an ecological nightmare in many minds --- its densely packed population --- is the very thing that makes it an environmentalist's dream.
"We think that's counterintuitive because we've been schooled to think of cities as environmentally destructive places," Owen said in an interview. "But its pretty obvious that you reduce energy use by shrinking living spaces and the distances between people and their destinations. When conventional American environmentalists talk about cities, they say we need to make cities more like the country. But when you do that, you put people in cars."
Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of a dozen books, marshals compelling evidence to support his case. For instance, verdant, sparsely populated Vermont is one of the most automobile-dependent states in the nation. The average Vermonter burns up 545 gallons of gasoline per year; Manhattan residents average about 90 gallons. Metropolitan New York accounts for a third of all the public-transit passenger miles traveled in the United States, and New York's compactness makes walking and bicycling far more viable means of getting around than they are in rural or suburban areas.
First graders from the Hannah Sennesh Community Day School water flowers
Stuart Ramson, Aveeno / AP
New York City first graders water flowers in honor of Earth Day, April 20, 2007.
To top it off, New Yorkers live in notoriously expensive -- and small -- apartments, while the size of the average American house has more than doubled in the past 50 years. One predictable result is that New Yorkers consume far less electricity than other Americans -- about 4,700 kilowatt hours per household per year, compared with 7,100 kilowatt hours in Vermont and more than 11,000 in the U.S. as a whole.
"In smaller spaces," Owen said, "you don't have as much room for energy-hungry devices, such as air-conditioners, huge refrigerators, lawnmowers, swimming pool heaters."
Some might argue that New York City's most glaring environmental sin is exporting its garbage to landfills, some of them hundreds of miles away. But Owen counters that it's necessary to consider the "whole equation" -- that densely populated areas are more efficient overall and that New Yorkers generate less solid waste per capita than other Americans. And, he adds, recycling is not our salvation.
"Yes, we need to recycle," Owen said, "but the idea that recycling is an adequate response to our troubles is wrong. The thing to focus on is energy use and the consumption of resources. Americans consume more of everything than anyone else on the planet."
Which brings us to the good news. In 2008, with much of the world sliding into a recession and the cost of energy rising, energy use worldwide declined. The result? The world's emissions of greenhouse gases decreased by 2.5 percent.