Green Metropolis

I just finished reading David Owen’s book, “Green Metropolis.”    I was excited to read that according to Owen my hometown – NYC – and other European cities are a model of environmental sustainability.  Of course, I’d figured this out a while ago, when living in Monterey, CA.  I couldn’t get to San Francisco without a car.  The distance (a little over 100 miles) is roughly the same as between Manhattan and Montauk, Long Island or Manhattan and New Haven, Connecticut.  The difference of course is accessibility to public transportation.  Public transportation makes people less car reliant and lower carbon emitters.  Living Smaller and Closer, as Owen writes, lowers the amount of energy used.  On average New Yorkers use less fuel to heat their homes and electricity per person than anywhere else in the United States.

In the book, he suggests cities adopt stricter policies to make it less convenient to drive and more convenient to take public transportation, and criticizes cities like Atlanta whose MARTA subway system has too few stations or lines to really make a dent.  The city continues to build more roads to deal with traffic.  Lessons learned from the past have shown that paving more roads just leads to more drivers.

He also criticizes the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard.  LEED has helped spread awareness about green construction processes, however it is so expensive and its certification process so cumbersome, that so few buildings have sought certification.  In 2008 fewer than 1,500 projects in the U.S. have sought certification.  In addition, says Owen, many buildings like Sprint Headquarters in Kansas or the Merrill Environmental Center in Annapolis, MD of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation encourage urban sprawl and employees’ newfound need for personal automotive transportation to reach these new sites.

At the end of his book, which I had borrowed from the SF Public Library, Owen is dubbed a “hypocrite” by a past reader in ominous blue ink. I similarly felt let down.  Throughout the book Owen is a staunch critic of the suburban life, of cities that do little to support public transportation and urban sprawl.  He begins by writing that you can’t change the human compulsion towards comfort and hints that policy must intervene.   Yet at the end he writes, “As long as two-hundred-plus-year-old houses in small New England towns continue to exist and be inhabited, it’s probably not a bad thing for them to be inhabited by people like [my wife and I], since we work at home and therefore don’t have to drive anywhere to work.”  He offers criticism, but few solutions, which left me feeling angry and empowered.  Maybe this was Owen’s intention?

Interested in discussing Owen's book?  Come join us at the San Francisco Green Community Meetup.  We're meeting on February 7th.  For more information, log onto: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Green-Community/calendar/15980397/