Green Manhattan

GREEN MANHATTAN; OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS

DAVID OWEN. The New Yorker New York:Oct 18, 2004. Vol. 80, Iss. 31, p 111-123
Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as
an ecological nightmare. However, Owen says that by most significant
measures, New York is the greenest community in the US.

Full Text (5739 words)

(Originally published in The New Yorker. Compilation copyright (c) 2004

The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young

and naive and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first

home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For

seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would

strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space

measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn’t have a

dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery

shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used

public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom

acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked

out to about a dollar a day.

The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth

Street, between Second and Third.) Most 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. The most devastating damage humans have done to the

environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a

category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average

Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole

hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely

owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per

cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by

bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in

general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County.

New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were

granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.

“Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously

an environmental disaster–except that it isn’t,” John Holtzclaw, a

transportation consultant for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources

Defense Council, told me. “If New Yorkers lived at the typical American

sprawl density of three households per residential acre, they would

require many times as much land. They’d be driving cars, and they’d

have huge lawns and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and

then they’d be overwatering their lawns, so that runoff would go into

streams.” The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its

extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than eight

hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half

million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces

their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in

some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in

the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for

the rest of America to sprawl into.

My wife and I had our first child in 1984. We had both grown up in

suburbs, and we decided that we didn’t want to raise our tiny daughter

in a huge city. Shortly after she learned to walk, we moved to a small

town in northwestern Connecticut, about ninety miles north of midtown

Manhattan. Our house, which was built in the late seventeen-hundreds,

is across a dirt road from a nature preserve and is shaded by tall

white-pine trees. After big rains, we can hear a swollen creek rushing

by at the bottom of the hill. Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional

black bear feed themselves in our yard. From the end of our driveway, I

can walk several miles through woods to an abandoned nineteenth-century

railway tunnel, while crossing only one paved road.

Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consumption of

electricity went from roughly four thousand kilowatt-hours a year,

toward the end of our time in New York, to almost thirty thousand

kilowatt-hours in 2003–and our house doesn’t even have central air-

conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and another one

soon after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. (If you live in

the country and don’t have a second car, you can’t retrieve your first

car from the mechanic after it’s been repaired; the third car was the

product of a mild midlife crisis, but soon evolved into a necessity.)

My wife and I both work at home, but we manage to drive thirty thousand

miles a year between us, mostly doing ordinary errands. Nearly

everything we do away from our house requires a car trip. Renting a

movie and later returning it, for example, consumes almost two gallons

of gasoline, since the nearest Blockbuster is ten miles away and each

transaction involves two round trips. When we lived in New York, heat

escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment above ours;

nowadays, many of the Btus produced by our brand-new, extremely

efficient oil-burning furnace leak through our two-hundred-year-old

roof and into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.

When most Americans think about environmentalism, they picture wild,

unspoiled landscapes–the earth before it was transmogrified by human

habitation. 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.

Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we

think of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot,

New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and

produces more solid waste than most other American regions of

comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in

relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an

intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of

deepening green.

If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household,

however, the color scheme would be reversed. My little town has about

four thousand residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles,

and there are many places within our town limits from which no sign of

settlement is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight million

people like us, along with our dwellings and possessions and current

rates of energy use, into a space the size of New York City, our

profligacy would be impossible to miss, because you’d have to stack our

houses and cars and garages and lawn tractors and swimming pools and

septic tanks higher than skyscrapers. (Conversely, if you made all

eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they would

require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New England

states plus Delaware and New Jersey.) Spreading people out increases

the damage they do to the environment, while making the problems harder

to see and to address.

Of course, living in densely populated urban centers has many

drawbacks. Even wealthy New Yorkers live in spaces that would seem

cramped to Americans living almost anywhere else. A well-to-do friend

of mine who grew up in a town house in Greenwich Village thought of his

upbringing as privileged until, in prep school, he visited a classmate

from the suburbs and was staggered by the house, the lawn, the cars,

and the swimming pool, and thought, with despair, You mean I could live

like this? Manhattan is loud and dirty, and the subway is depressing,

and the fumes from the cars and cabs and buses can make people sick.

Presumably for environmental reasons, New York City has one of the

highest childhood-asthma rates in the country, with an especially

alarming concentration in East Harlem.

Nevertheless, barring an almost inconceivable reduction in the earth’s

population, dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remedies

for some of the world’s most discouraging environmental ills. To borrow

a term from the jargon of computer systems, dense cities are scalable,

while sprawling suburbs are not. The environmental challenge we face,

at the current stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable

resources, is not how to make our teeming cities more like the pristine

countryside. The true challenge is how to make other settled places

more like Manhattan. This notion has yet to be widely embraced, partly

because it is counterintuitive, and partly because most Americans,

including most environmentalists, tend to view cities the way Thomas

Jefferson did, as “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the

liberties of man.” New York is the place that’s fun to visit but you

wouldn’t want to live there. What could it possibly teach anyone about

being green?

New York’s example, admittedly, is difficult for others to imitate,

because the city’s remarkable population density is the result not of

conscientious planning but of a succession of serendipitous historical

accidents. The most important of those accidents was geographic: New

York arose on a smallish island rather than on the mainland edge of a

river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a physical

constraint to outward expansion. Manhattan is like a typical seaport

turned inside out–a city with a harbor around it, rather than a harbor

with a city along its edge. Insularity gave Manhattan more shoreline

per square mile than other ports, a major advantage in the days when

one of the world’s main commercial activities was moving cargoes

between ships. It also drove early development inward and upward.

A second lucky accident was that Manhattan’s street plan was created by

merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than in

boulevards, parks, or empty spaces between buildings. The resulting

crush of architecture is actually humanizing, because it brings the

city’s commercial, cultural, and other offerings closer together,

thereby increasing their accessibility–a point made forty-three years

ago by the brilliantly iconoclastic urban thinker Jane Jacobs, in her

landmark book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”

A third accident was the fact that by the early nineteen-hundreds most

of Manhattan’s lines had been filled in to the point where not even

Robert Moses could easily redraw them to accommodate the great

destroyer of American urban life, the automobile. Henry Ford thought of

cars as tools for liberating humanity from the wretchedness of cities,

which he viewed with as much distaste as Jefferson did. In 1932, John

Nolen, a prominent Harvard-educated urban planner and landscape

architect, said, “The future city will be spread out, it will be

regional, it will be the natural product of the automobile, the good

road, electricity, the telephone, and the radio, combined with the

growing desire to live a more natural, biological life under pleasanter

and more natural conditions.” This is the idea behind suburbs, and it’s

still seductive. But it’s also a prescription for sprawl and

expressways and tremendous waste.

New York City’s obvious urban antithesis, in terms of density and

automobile use, is metropolitan Los Angeles, whose metastatic outward

growth has been virtually unimpeded by the lay of the land, whose early

settlers came to the area partly out of a desire to create space

between themselves and others, and whose main development began late

enough to be shaped by the needs of cars. But a more telling

counterexample is Washington, D.C., whose basic layout was conceived at

roughly the same time as Manhattan’s, around the turn of the nineteenth

century. The District of Columbia’s original plan was created by an

eccentric French-born engineer and architect named Pierre-Charles

L’Enfant, who befriended General Washington during the Revolutionary

War and asked to be allowed to design the capital. Many of modern

Washington’s most striking features are his: the broad, radial avenues;

the hublike traffic circles; the sweeping public lawns and ceremonial

spaces.

Washington is commonly viewed as the most intelligently beautiful–the

most European–of large American cities. Ecologically, though, it’s a

mess. L’Enfant’s expansive avenues were easily adapted to automobiles,

and the low, widely separated buildings (whose height is limited by

law) stretched the distance between destinations. There are many

pleasant places in Washington to go for a walk, but the city is

difficult to get around on foot: the wide avenues are hard to cross,

the traffic circles are like obstacle courses, and the grandiloquent

empty spaces thwart pedestrians, by acting as what Jane Jacobs

calls “border vacuums.” (One of Jacobs’s many arresting observations is

that parks and other open spaces can reduce urban vitality, by creating

dead ends that prevent people from moving freely between neighborhoods

and by decreasing activity along their edges.) Many parts of

Washington, furthermore, are relentlessly homogeneous. There are plenty

of dignified public buildings on Constitution Avenue, for example, but

good luck finding a dry cleaner, a Chinese restaurant, or a grocery

store. The city’s horizontal, airy design has also pushed development

into the surrounding countryside. The fastest-growing county in the

United States is Loudoun County, Virginia, at the rapidly receding

western edge of the Washington metropolitan area.

The Sierra Club, an environmental organization that advocates the

preservation of wilderness and wildlife, has a national campaign called

Challenge to Sprawl. The aim of the program is to arrest the mindless

conversion of undeveloped countryside into subdivisions, strip malls,

and S.U.V.-clogged expressways. The Sierra Club’s Web site features a

slide-show-like demonstration that illustrates how various sprawling

suburban intersections could be transformed into far more appealing and

energy-efficient developments by implementing a few modifications,

among them widening the sidewalks and narrowing the streets, mixing

residential and commercial uses, moving buildings closer together and

closer to the edges of sidewalks (to make them more accessible to

pedestrians and to increase local density), and adding public

transportation–all fundamental elements of the widely touted anti-

sprawl strategy known as Smart Growth. In a recent telephone

conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in Challenge to

Sprawl, I said that the organization’s anti-sprawl suggestions and the

modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant

features with Manhattan–whose most salient characteristics include

wide sidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings,

and an extensive network of subways and buses. The representative

hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would

prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating

New York City would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the

people whom the Sierra Club is trying to persuade.

An obvious way to reduce consumption of fossil fuels is to shift more

people out of cars and into public transit. In many parts of the

country, though, public transit has been stagnant or in decline for

years. New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and

Department of Transportation account for nearly a third of all the

transit passenger miles travelled in the United States and for nearly

four times as many passenger miles as the Washington Metropolitan Area

Transit Authority and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan

Transportation Authority combined.

New York City looks so little like other parts of America that urban

planners and environmentalists tend to treat it as an exception rather

than an example, and to act as though Manhattan occupied an

idiosyncratic universe of its own. But the underlying principles apply

everywhere. “The basic point,” Jeffrey Zupan, an economist with the

Regional Planning Association, told me, “is that you need density to

support public transit. In all cities, not just in New York, once you

get above a certain density two things happen. First, you get less

travel by mechanical means, which is another way of saying you get more

people walking or biking; and, second, you get a decrease in the trips

by auto and an increase in the trips by transit. That threshold tends

to be around seven dwellings per acre. Once you cross that line, a bus

company can put buses out there, because they know they’re going to

have enough passengers to support a reasonable frequency of service.”

Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the United States and one of the

fastest-growing among the top ten, yet its public transit system

accounts for just one per cent of the passenger miles that New York

City’s does. The reason is that Phoenix’s burgeoning population has

spread so far across the desert–greater Phoenix, whose population is a

little more than twice that of Manhattan, covers more than two hundred

times as much land–that no transit system could conceivably serve it.

And no amount of browbeating, public-service advertising, or federal

spending can change that.

Cities, states, and the federal government often negate their own

efforts to nurture public transit by simultaneously spending huge sums

to make it easier for people to get around in cars. When a city’s

automobile traffic becomes congested, the standard response has long

been to provide additional capacity by building new roads or widening

existing ones. This approach eventually makes the original problem

worse, by generating what transportation planners call “induced

traffic”: every mile of new highway lures passengers from public

transit and other more efficient modes of travel, and makes it possible

for residential and commercial development to spread even farther from

urban centers. And adding public transit in the hope of reducing

automobile congestion is as self-defeating as building new highways,

because unclogging roads, if successful, just makes driving seem more

attractive, and the roads fill up again. A better strategy would be to

eliminate existing traffic lanes and parking spaces gradually, thereby

forcing more drivers to use less environmentally damaging alternatives–

in effect, “induced transit.” One reason New Yorkers are the most

dedicated transit users in America is that congestion on the city’s

streets makes driving extraordinarily disagreeable. The average speed

of crosstown traffic in Manhattan is little more than that of a brisk

walker, and in midtown at certain times of the day the cars on the side

streets move so slowly that they appear almost to be parked. Congestion

like that urges drivers into the subways, and it makes life easier for

pedestrians and bicycle riders by slowing cars to a point where they

constitute less of a physical threat.

Even in New York City, the relationship between traffic and transit is

not well understood. A number of the city’s most popular recent

transportation-related projects and policy decisions may in the long

run make the city a worse place to live in by luring passengers back

into their cars and away from public transportation: the rebuilding and

widening of the West Side Highway, the implementation of EZ-Pass on the

city’s toll bridges, the decision not to impose tolls on the East River

bridges, and the current renovation of the F.D.R. Drive (along with the

federally funded hundred-and-thirty-nine-million-dollar Outboard Detour

Roadway, which is intended to prevent users of the F.D.R. from being

inconvenienced while the work is under way).

Public transit itself can be bad for the environment if it facilitates

rather than discourages sprawl. The Washington Metropolitan Area

Transit Authority is considering extensions to some of the most distant

branches of its system, and those extensions, if built, will allow

people to live even farther from the city’s center, creating new, non-

dense suburbs where all other travel will be by automobile, much of it

to malls and schools and gas stations that will be built to accommodate

them. Transit is best for the environment when it helps to concentrate

people in dense urban cores. Building the proposed Second Avenue subway

line would be environmentally sound, because it would increase New

Yorkers’ ability to live without cars; building a bullet train between

Penn Station and the Catskills (for example) would not be sound,

because it would enable the vast, fuel-squandering apparatus of

suburbia to establish itself in a region that couldn’t support it

otherwise.

On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, I was working in my office, on the

third floor of my house, when the lights blinked, my window

airconditioner sputtered, and my computer’s backup battery kicked in

briefly. This was the beginning of the great blackout of 2003, which

halted electric service in parts of eight Northeastern and Midwestern

states and in southeastern Canada. The immediate cause was eventually

traced to Ohio, but public attention often focussed on New York City,

which had the largest concentration of affected power customers.

Richard B. Miller, who resigned as the senior energy adviser for the

city of New York six weeks before the blackout, reportedly over deep

disagreements with the city’s energy policy, told me, “When I was with

the city, I attended a conference on global warming where somebody

said, ‘We really need to raise energy and electricity prices in New

York City, so that people will consume less.’ And my response at that

conference was ‘You know, if you’re talking about raising energy prices

in New York City only, then you’re talking about something that’s

really bad for the environment. If you make energy prices so expensive

in the city that a business relocates from Manhattan to New Jersey,

what you’re really talking about, in the simplest terms, is a business

that’s moving from a subway stop to a parking lot. And which of those

do you think is worse for the environment?’ ”

People who live in cities use only about half as much electricity as

people who don’t, and people who live in New York City generally use

less than the urban average. A truly enlightened energy policy would

reward city dwellers and encourage others to follow their good example.

Yet New York City residents pay more per kilowatt-hour than almost any

other American electricity customers; taxes and other government

charges, most of which are not enumerated on electricity bills, can

constitute close to twenty per cent of the cost of power for

residential and commercial users in New York. Richard Miller, after

leaving his job with New York City, went to work as a lawyer in

Consolidated Edison’s regulatory affairs department, spurred by his

thinking about the environment. He believes that state and local

officials have historically taken unfair advantage of the fact that

there is no political cost to attacking a big utility. Con Ed pays more

than six hundred million dollars a year in property taxes, making it by

far the city’s largest property-tax payer, and those charges inflate

electric bills. Meanwhile, the cost of driving is kept artificially

low. (Fifth Avenue and the West Side Highway don’t pay property taxes,

for example.) “In addition,” Miller said, “the burden of improving the

city’s air has fallen far more heavily on power plants, which

contribute only a small percentage of New York City’s air pollution,

than it has on cars–even though motor vehicles are a much bigger

source.”

Last year, the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C., held a

show called “Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st

Century.”A book of the same name was published in conjunction with the

show, and on the book’s dust jacket was a photograph of 4 Times Square,

also known as the Conde Nast Building, a forty-eight-story glass-and-

steel tower between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets, a few blocks

west of Grand Central Terminal. (The New Yorker’s offices occupy two

floors in the building.) When 4 Times Square was built, in 1999, it was

considered a major breakthrough in urban development. As Daniel Kaplan,

a principal of Fox & Fowle Architects, the firm that designed it, wrote

in an article in Environmental Design & Construction in 1997, “When

thinking of green architecture, one usually associates smaller scale,”

and he cited as an example the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain

Institute, a nonprofit environmental research and consulting firm based

in Snowmass, Colorado. The R.M.I. building is a four-thousand-square-

foot, superinsulated, passive-solar structure with curving sixteen-inch-

thick walls, set into a hillside about fifteen miles north of Aspen. It

was erected in the early eighties and serves partly as a showcase for

green construction technology. (It is also the home of Amory Lovins,

who is R.M.I.’s co-founder and chief executive officer.) R.M.I.

contributed to the design of 4 Times Square, which has many innovative

features, among them collection chutes for recyclable materials,

photovoltaic panels incorporated into parts of its skin, and curtain-

wall construction with exceptional shading and insulating properties.

These are all important innovations. In terms of the building’s true

ecological impact, though, they are distinctly secondary. (The power

generated by the photovoltaic panels supplies less than one per cent of

the building’s requirements.) The two greenest features of 4 Times

Square are ones that most people never even mention: it is big, and it

is situated in Manhattan.

Environmentalists have tended to treat big buildings as intrinsically

wasteful, because large amounts of energy are expended in their

construction, and because the buildings place intensely localized

stresses on sewers, power lines, and water systems. But density can

create the same kinds of ecological benefits in individual structures

that it does in entire communities. Tall buildings have much less

exposed exterior surface per square foot of interior space than smaller

buildings do, and that means they present relatively less of themselves

to the elements, and their small roofs absorb less heat from the sun

during cooling season and radiate less heat from inside during heating

season. (The beneficial effects are greater still in Manhattan, where

one building often directly abuts another.) A study by Michael Phillips

and Robert Gnaizda, pubished in CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, found

that an ordinary apartment in a typical building near downtown San

Francisco used just a fifth as much heating fuel as a new tract house

in Davis, a little more than seventy miles away. Occupants of tall

buildings also do a significant part of their daily coming and going in

elevators, which, because they are counterweighted and thus require

less motor horsepower, are among the most energy-efficient passenger

vehicles in the world.

Bruce Fowle, a founder of Fox & Fowle, told me, “The Conde Nast

Building contains 1.6 million square feet of floor space, and it sits

on one acre of land. If you divided it into forty-eight one-story

suburban office buildings, each averaging thirty-three thousand square

feet, and spread those one-story buildings around the countryside, and

then added parking and some green space around each one, you’d end up

consuming at least a hundred and fifty acres of land. And then you’d

have to provide infrastructure, the highways and everything else.” Like

many other buildings in Manhattan, 4 Times Square doesn’t even have a

parking lot, because the vast majority of the six thousand people who

work inside it don’t need one. In most other parts of the country, big

parking lots are not only necessary but are required by law. If my

town’s zoning regulations applied in Manhattan, 4 Times Square would

have needed sixteen thousand parking spaces, one for every hundred

square feet of office floor space.

The Rocky Mountain Institute’s showcase headquarters has double-paned

krypton-filled windows, which admit seventy-five per cent as much light

as ordinary windows while allowing just ten per cent as much heat to

escape in cold weather. That’s a wonderful feature, and one of many in

the building which people ought to copy. In other ways, though, the

R.M.I. building sets a very poor environmental example. It was built in

a fragile location, on virgin land more than seven thousand feet above

sea level. With just four thousand square feet of interior space, it

can hold only six of R.M.I.’s eighteen full-time employees; the rest of

them work in a larger building a mile away. Because the two buildings

are in a thinly populated area, they force most employees to drive many

miles–including trips between the two buildings–and they necessitate

extra fuel consumption by delivery trucks, snowplows, and other

vehicles. If R.M.I.’s employees worked on a single floor of a big

building in Manhattan (or in downtown Denver) and lived in apartments

nearby, many of them would be able to give up their cars, and the

thousands of visitors who drive to Snowmass each year to learn about

environmentally responsible construction could travel by public transit

instead.

Picking on R.M.I.–which is one of the world’s most farsighted

environmental organizations–may seem unfair, but R.M.I., along with

many other farsighted environmental organizations, shares

responsibility for perpetuating the powerful anti-city bias of American

environmentalism. That bias is evident in the technical term that is

widely used for sprawl: “urbanization.” Thinking of freeways and strip

malls as “urban” phenomena obscures the ecologically monumental

difference between Phoenix and Manhattan, and fortifies the perception

that population density is an environmental ill. It also prevents most

people from recognizing that R.M.I.’s famous headquarters–which sits

on an isolated parcel more than a hundred and eighty miles from the

nearest significant public transit system–is sprawl.

When I told a friend recently that I thought New York City should be

considered the greenest community in America, she looked puzzled, then

asked, “Is it because they’ve started recycling again?” Her question

reflected a central failure of the American environmental movement:

that too many of us have been made to believe that the most important

thing we can do to save the earth and ourselves is to remember each

week to set our cans and bottles and newspapers on the curb. Recycling

is popular because it enables people to relieve their gathering

anxieties about the future without altering the way they live. But most

current recycling has, at best, a neutral effect on the environment,

and much of it is demonstrably harmful. As William McDonough and

Michael Braungart point out in “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We

Make Things,” most of the materials we place on our curbs are

merely “downcycled”–converted to a lower use, providing a pause in

their inevitable journey to a landfill or an incinerator–often with a

release of toxins and a net loss of fuel, among other undesirable

effects.

By far the worst damage we Americans do to the planet arises not from

the newspapers we throw away but from the eight hundred and fifty

million or so gallons of oil we consume every day. We all know this at

some level, yet we live like alcoholics in denial. How else can we

explain that our cars have grown bigger, heavier, and less fuel-

efficient at the same time that scientists have become more certain and

more specific about the consequences of our addiction to gasoline?

On a shelf in my office is a small pile of recent books about the

environment which I plan to reread obsessively if I’m found to have a

terminal illness, because they’re so unsettling that they may make me

less upset about being snatched from life in my prime. At the top of

the pile is “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil,” by David

Goodstein, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, which

was published earlier this year. “The world will soon start to run out

of conventionally produced, cheap oil,” Goodstein begins. In succeeding

pages, he lucidly explains that humans have consumed almost a trillion

barrels of oil (that’s forty-two trillion gallons), or about half of

the earth’s total supply; that a devastating global petroleum crisis

will begin not when we have pumped the last barrel out of the ground

but when we have reached the halfway point, because at that moment, for

the first time in history, the line representing supply will fall

through the line representing demand; that we will probably pass that

point within the current decade, if we haven’t passed it already; that

various well-established laws of economics are about to assert

themselves, with disastrous repercussions for almost everything; and

that “civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this

century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”

Standing between us and any conceivable solution to our energy

nightmare are our cars and the asphaltlatticed country we have built to

oblige them. Those cars have defined our culture and our lives. A car

is speed and sex and power and emancipation. It makes its driver a self-

sufficient nation of one. It is everything a city is not.

Most of the car’s most tantalizing charms are illusory, though. By

helping us to live at greater distances from one another, driving has

undermined the very benefits that it was meant to bestow. Ignacio San

Martin, an architecture professor and the head of the graduate urban-

design program at the University of Arizona, told me, “If you go out to

the streets of Phoenix and are able to see anybody walking–which you

likely won’t–they are going to tell you that they love living in

Phoenix because they have a beautiful house and three cars. In reality,

though, once the conversation goes a little bit further, they are going

to say that they spend most of their time at home watching TV, because

there is absolutely nothing to do.” One of the main attractions of

moving to the suburbs is acquiring ground of your own, yet you can

travel for miles through suburbia and see no one doing anything in a

yard other than working on the yard itself (often with the help of a

riding lawnmower, one of the few four-wheeled passenger vehicles that

get worse gas mileage than a Hummer). The modern suburban yard is

perfectly, perversely self-justifying: its purpose is to be taken care

of.

In 1801, in his first Inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson said that the

American wilderness would provide growing room for democracy-sustaining

agrarian patriots “to the thousandth and thousandth generation.”

Jefferson didn’t foresee the interstate highway system, and his

arithmetic was off, in any case, but he nevertheless anticipated (and,

in many ways, embodied) the ethos of suburbia, of anti-urbanism, of

sprawl. The standard object of the modern American dream, the single-

family home surrounded by grass, is a mini-Monticello. It was the car

that put it within our reach. But what a terrible price we have paid–
and have yet to pay–for our liberation from the city.

Everywhere should be more like New York.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Environmental Art Activism Archive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.