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Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability David Owen. Riverhead Books, New York, 2009. 357 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $16.00 paper. (ISBN: 978-1-59448-484-1)
Alas, if everyone lived like New Yorkers, Earth's environment would be much better off. Or so argues David Owen in his book, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sus- tainability, one man's soliloquy to correct urban planning and save the environment from environmentalists, anti-urbanists, "LEED brain," Vermonters, and self-satisfied Prius owners. Professional geographers are not David Owen's audience, nor are geo- graphical studies his source materials, and this book offers little to urban geographical theories.
I am not strictly an urban geographer, although I am interested in urban form, development, and rural-urban connec- tivity, so my reason for reading this book was less for thematic critique or insight, and more to determine if it would be a suitable assignment for my Introduction to Human Geography students when we dis- cuss urban processes (the same way I as- sign chapters of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma when we discuss agricultural pro- cesses) . In my class, smart growth, new ur- banism, global urbanization, and green building are popular topics. Green Metropo- lis seemed just the thing my students could get into, i.e., a book that discusses relevant topics, yet is accessible because it is written for the general public, not academics.
Green Metropolis is six chapters. In chapter one, Owen lays out his central ar- gument: counter to what most people think New York City is "a model of envi- ronmental responsibility . . . the greenest community in the U.S." (p 2) Owen is not concerned with New York City's large ur- ban footprint and instead he relies heavily on national averages and per-capita en- ergy consumption to support his claim. For example, as compared to most Americans, 82 percent of employed Manhattan resi- dents travel to work by public transit,...