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, we didn't have a lawn, a clothes dryer, 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 bill worked out to about a dollar a day.
The utopian community was Manhattan. 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. In fact, by most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States. The most devastating damage that humans have done to the environment has arisen from the burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric by comparison with other Americans, including people who live in rural areas or such putatively eco-friendly cities as Portland, Oregon, or Boulder, Colorado.
The average Manhattannite consumes 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 Model T. Thanks to New York City, the average resident of New York state uses less gasoline than the average resident of any other state, and uses less than half as much as the average resident of Wyoming. Eighty-two percent of employed Manhattanites 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 workers in 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, not only because New Yorkers drive less, but because city dwellings are smaller than other American dwellings and are less likely to contain a superfluity of large appliances. The average New Yorker (if one takes into account all five boroughs of the city)
annually generates 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases, a lower rate than that of residents of any other American city,
and less than 30 percent of the national average, which is 24.5 metric tons; Manhattanites generate even less.
"Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously an environmental disaster -- except that it isn't," John Holtzclaw, who recently retired as the chairman of the Sierra Club's transportation committee, told me in 2004. "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. Charles Komanoff, a New York City economist, environmental activist, and bicycling enthusiast, told me, "New Yorkers trade the supposed convenience of the automobile for the true convenience of proximity. They are able to live without the ecological disaster of cars -- which is caused not just by having to use a car for practically every trip, but also by the distance you have to traverse. Bicycling, transit, and walking support each other, because they are all made possible by population density. . . ."
The crucial fact about sustainability is that it is not a micro phenomenon: there can be no such thing as a "sustainable" house, office building, or household appliance, for the same reason that there can be no such thing as a one-person democracy or a single-company economy. Every house, building and appliance, no matter where its power comes from or how many of its parts were made from soybeans, is just a single small element in a civilization-wide network of deeply-interdependent relationships, and it's the network, not the individual constituents, on which our future depends. Sustainability is a context, not a gadget or technology. There is a reason that dense cities set such a critical example: they prove that it's possible to arrange large human populations in ways that are inherently less wasteful and destructive. . . .
What would it take, short of utter economic collapse, for a prosperous First World population to reduce its carbon output and other environmental impacts permanently? The standard prescription is familiar; less reliance on fossil fuels, more reliance on renewable energy (and uranium), increased efficiency, reduced waste, more buses, fewer incandescent lightbulbs, more recycling. These and other elements, to be sure, will become increasingly important parts of our lives with every month that passes, but decades of experience have shown that the measurable results of our conscious efforts to use less are seldom as significant as forecast, and that reductions in waste are typically offset or exceeded by increases in consumption.
These discouraging realities make urban density even more significant as an environmental tool.
Cutting back overall U.S. per capita greenhouse emissions to New York City's current level [GRA: published 2009, so probably 2008 or 2007] would require a national reduction of 71 percent - a feat that not even the wildest Kyoto optimist thinks is remotely achievable. Yet New York's record is not the result of a massive, expensive environmental campaign; it's the result of New Yorkers living the way New Yorkers have always lived.
The city's efficiencies, like the efficiencies of all dense urban cores, are built into the fabric of the place, and they don't depend on an unprecedented commitment to sacrifice and compliance by environmentally concerned citizens. In fact, New Yorkers themselves, when informed that their per-capita energy consumption is the lowest in the United States, usually express great surprise. They don't generate less carbon because they go around snapping off lightbulbs.
Granted, directly comparing New York's greenhouse emissions with those of the rest of the country is unfair to much of the rest of the country, because the city couldn't exist without massive agricultural, industrial, and other inputs from far beyond its borders, and is therefore responsible for emissions occurring elsewhere. But all other American communities are subject to this same interdependence, and even if they weren't, New York's example would still be significant because the city proves that tremendous environmental gains can be achieved by arranging infrastructure in ways that make beneficial outcomes inescapable, and that don't depend on radically reforming human nature or implementing technologies that are currently beyond our capabilities or our willingness to pay. At an environmental presentation in 2008, I sat next to an investment banker who was initially skeptical when I explained that Manhattanites have a significantly lower environmental impact than other Americans. "But that's just because they're all crammed together," he said. Just so. He then disparaged New Yorkers' energy efficiency as "unconscious," as though intention trumped results. But unconscious efficiencies are the most desirable ones, because they require neither enforcement nor a personal commitment to cutting back. I spoke with an energy expert, who, when I asked him to explain why per-capita energy consumption was so much lower in Europe than in the United states, said, "It's not a secret, and it's not the result of some miraculous technological breakthrough. It's because Europeans are more likely to live in dense cities and less likely to own cars." In European cities, as in Manhattan, in other words, the most important efficiencies are built-in. And for the same reasons. . . .
The truth, though, is inescapable. In a world of nearly 7 billion people and counting, sustainability, if it can be achieved, will look a lot more like midtown Manhattan than like rural Vermont.
The environmental lessons that New York City offers are not necessarily easy to apply -- and, even to New Yorkers, they can often be difficult to discern -- but the most important of them can be summarized simply:
- Live smaller: The average American single-family house doubled in size in the second half of the twentieth century, and the size of the average American household shrunk. Oversized, under-occupied dwellings permanently raise the world's demand for energy, and they encourage careless consumption of all kinds. In the long run, big, empty houses are no more sustainable than SUVs or private jets, no matter how many photovoltaic panels they have on their roofs. As the cost of energy inevitably rises in the years ahead, and as the long-term environmental and economic consequences of our accustomed levels of wastefulness become clearer and more dire, we are going to need to find ways to reduce the size of the spaces we inhabit, heat, cool, furnish, and maintain. (A notable counter-trend: while the typical American single-family house was doubling in size, rising real-estate values in New York City were reducing the size of the living space of the average Manhattan resident, thereby making it more efficient.)
Live closer: The main key to lowering energy consumption and shrinking the carbon footprint of modern civilization is to contract the distances between the places we live, work, shop, and play. Unfortunately, the steady enlargement of the American house was accompanied by the explosive growth of low-density subdivisions and satellite communities linked by networks of new highways and inhabited by long-distance commuters. Living closer to one's daily destinations, Manhattan-style, reduces vehicle miles traveled, makes transit and walking feasible as forms of transportation, increases the efficiency of energy production and consumption, limits the need to build superfluous infrastructure, and cuts the demand for such environmentally doomed extravagances as riding lawnmowers and household irrigation systems. The world, not just the United States, needs to pursue land-use strategies that promote high-density, mixed-use urban development, rather than sprawl.
Drive less: Making automobiles more fuel-efficient isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it won't solve the world's energy and environmental dilemmas. The real problem is not that they don't get enough miles to the gallon; it's that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging. Most so-called environmental initiatives are actually counter-productive, because their effect is to make driving less expensive (by reducing the need for fuel) and to make car travel more agreeable (by eliminating congestion). What we really need, from the point of view of both energy conservation and environmental protection, is to make driving costlier and less pleasant. And that's as true for cars that are powered by recycled cooking oil as it is for cars that are powered by gasoline. In terms of the automobile's true environmental impact, fuel gauges are less important than odometers. In the long run, miles matter more than miles per gallon. As we make cars more efficient, we must compensate by making driving less so -- a goal both harder to attain and less likely to be embraced by drivers themselves.