David Owen argues [pdf] for urban green with himself as a New Yorker as example. He lives in a modest house; has limited consumption because of his small house; does not own a car; and uses his feet, legs or public transport to get around.
Manhatten skyline from kaz7572's photostreamMost Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world.Being green is usually confused with wilderness romanticism. This is why a photograph of a recently logged forest is emotionally powerful. However Greeness is about efficiency as much as anything else and urban centers are exceptionally efficient in comparison to suburban and exurban areas. Much of that efficiency is structural and based on scale; however, the urban areas do offer benefits in this time of increasing fossil fuel costs. Owen continues:
New York City is one of the most thoroughly altered landscapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in which the terrain's primeval contours have long since been obliterated and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on side streets, the rocks in Central Park) are essentially decorations. Ecology-minded discussions of New York City often have a hopeless tone, and focus on ways in which the city might be made to seem somewhat less oppressively man-made: by increasing the area devoted to parks and greenery, by incorporating vegetation into buildings themselves, by reducing traffic congestion, by easing the intensity of development, by creating open space around structures. But most such changes would actually undermine the city's extraordinary energy efficiency, which arises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic.Owens is arguing for an acceptance of urban town planning as efficiency which contributes to being Green.
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