Green Metropolis

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Last edited by VacuumBot
August 4, 2012 | History

Green Metropolis

  • 4.0 (2 ratings) ·
  • 5 Want to read
  • 2 Have read

A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future. In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York, New York. 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, 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 percapita 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.

Publish Date
Publisher
Penguin USA, Inc.
Language
English

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Edition Availability
Cover of: Green Metropolis
Green Metropolis
2009, Penguin USA, Inc.
Electronic resource in English
Cover of: Green metropolis ; what the city can teach the country about true sustainability
Green metropolis ; what the city can teach the country about true sustainability
2009, Riverhead Books
in English

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Published in
New York

The Physical Object

Format
Electronic resource

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL24274362M
ISBN 13
9781101139400, 9781101140314
OverDrive
1BE06C82-CA99-4B53-8BEF-F8A00D41DD95

Source records

marc_overdrive MARC record

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
August 4, 2012 Edited by VacuumBot Updated format 'electronic resource' to 'Electronic resource'
June 19, 2010 Edited by ImportBot Added new cover
June 18, 2010 Created by ImportBot Imported from marc_overdrive MARC record