Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability Right now

David Owen's new book is right on target in reminding us of the environmental benefits of high-density development. And I'm not just saying that because the book is a "love letter" (as another reviewer aptly puts it) to my home town: NYC.

Crowding people together makes mass transit easier, forces people to walk more and drive less, allows for scale efficiencies in energy and water use. It lowers per capita environmental impact. It also helps support certain kinds of high culture that are expensive or highly specialized.

However, crowding together in cities also cuts people off from wild nature, a real loss. Owen acknowledges this concern perfunctorily, referencing the recent book by Louv, "Last Child in the Woods," but goes on to assert:

"A sensitive person's first reaction to the mounting evidence that Americans, especially young Americans, may be losing interest in directly experiencing the natural world is likely to be one of regret and loss, or even despair. But is it necessarily a bad thing, globally speaking? It seems perverse to say so, but sitting indoors playing video games is easier on the environment than any number of (formerly) popular outdoor activities, . . . In the end, it may not be a bad thing for the earth or for the human race if increasing numbers of Americans would rather watch our shrunken wilderness on TV than fly to it in an airplane and drive across it on a motorbike."

But environmentalism, to my mind, isn't just about limiting the human footprint; it is also about knowing, appreciating and celebrating wild nature. For me and my family, that doesn't mean flying thousands of miles to a pristine wilderness area, but hiking, birdwatching, fishing and skinnydipping in natural areas close to home. We couldn't do that in NYC, and that's why we don't live there, or in another big city.

Owen is right that density makes it easier to lower per capita environmental impact, which we need to do. But it also cuts us off from nature, which many of us refuse to do. And the world, or our country, would be a poor place, if it was all as densely populated as NYC.

The answer, I think, is that we need a variety of habitats, human as well as non human. We should have dense, urbane cities like NY; livable small towns like the town I live in now; rural areas; and wild lands, set aside primarily for all the other species with which we share the planet. That makes for interesting diversity and choices for us, and also shares resources fairly with other species.

To do this, however, we'll need to set some limits to human population growth. Toward the end of the book, Owen writes:

"A huge and often unmentioned issue underlying all our ongoing environmental problems is the issue of population. There are too many people in the world, and too many more are on the way. This is an issue that, in the United States, both conservatives and liberals have often seemed eager to avoid--for conservatives, perhaps, becuase it raises questions about family size, birth control, and abortion, and for liberals because it raises questions about immigration. Every one of the world's environmental problems is made worse by increases in the number of humans, and, most of all, by increases in the number of Americans, since U.S. residents--whether manufactured locally or imported from abroad--have the largest energy and carbon footprints in the world."

True enough! However, these insights aren't integrated into the rest of the book. This tends to leave the impression that really, the key to sustainability is to keep cramming more people together. The denser we get, the more sustainable we will be.

David Owen appears to know better, but I doubt his editors at the "New Yorker" (where he is a staff writer) will be asking him for an article on US population policies any time soon.Get more detail about Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability.