Green Metropolis

Such thinking, the author acknowledges, goes against America’s long antipathy towards urban life, perhaps best expressed by Thomas Jefferson’s description of big cities as “pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.”

While he doesn’t share Jefferson’s dim view of urban morality, Owen doesn’t see New York’s ecological virtues as evidence of great civic piety, either. The city’s smart growth, in fact, seems more the result of geographical and historical accidents. Being surrounded by water, for example, Manhattan was forced to confine its sprawl. And because the city developed so long before automobiles, it wasn’t able to remake itself to truly accommodate car culture.

Such providence makes New York a difficult model to duplicate, and one of Owen’s consistent themes is that when it comes to environmental stress, cities are far from equal. He points to Los Angeles as a poster child for “metastatic outward growth” and complains that the commuter-centric city of Atlanta “has probably been the source of more bad transportation policy than any other in America.”

Owen’s focus on cars as an agent of sprawl tends to exclude other factors that spur the growth of suburbs. He makes only passing reference to quality of life issues – such as education, crime, and street noise – that drive city dwellers away from the urban core. And as Robert Bruegmann told readers in his book, “Sprawl,” migration from city centers is not unique to modern America, but rather a historical reality that goes back centuries, long predating the rise of the auto.

But it’s hard to quibble with an author who takes such pains to point out his own imperfections. Readers of Owen’s lighter books, such as the essays of domestic life he gathered in “Around the House,” already know that his chief charm is an abiding gift for self-effacement.

That quality is also evident in “Green Metropolis,” which begins with Owen’s confession that for all his professed devotion to urban density, he left Manhattan many years ago for a larger home in nearby Connecticut, becoming a part of the very problem he bemoans. He also confesses to a persistent affection for driving and big-box stores.

Owen offers a few suggestions as to how all Americans, even those of us in the ’burbs, might “apply the Manhattan template to our own lives, to the extent that we can.” But ultimately, “Green Metropolis” is important not for the answers it yields but the questions it raises – questions that should be part of the ongoing dialogue about the health of our planet.

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.”

Previous

1 | 2