Event Description

This presentation by The New Yorker staff writer, David Owen, will focus on the topic of his 2010 book, The Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability and the inherently sustainable aspects of urban living. David will talk about the efficiencies associated with cities in this introductory level webinar for anyone interested in conservation and sustainability.

Most Americans think of densely populated cities as ecological nightmares: wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. But in comparison with suburbs, small towns, and rural areas, they are models of responsibility. Individually, city dwellers drive, pollute, consume, and throw away less than do average residents of the surrounding suburbs and exurbs, and they use less energy per capita and make far greater use of public transportation. The reason is that the tightly circumscribed spaces in which they live create efficiencies and reduce the possibilities for reckless consumption.  Living in cities has obvious downsides, including the fact that urban density makes pandemics, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too. Nevertheless, the environmental challenge we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world's non-renewable resources, is not how to make the world's teeming urban areas more like the pristine countryside. The true challenge is to make other settled places more like cities.

The objective of this course is that at the conclusion, participants will be able to:

• Identify the inherently sustainable aspects of urban living
• Weigh the green benefits of one city over another based on density and existing urban infrastructure
• Recognize that mass transit requires a high level of population density in order to be efficient and economically worthwhile
• Distinguish so-called green initiatives that have merit from ones that are not environmentally beneficial
• Appreciate that living in cities has genuine disadvantages, but that, from an environmental point of view, the advantages outweigh them
   

David Owen is the author of The Green Metropolis.