Green Metropolis

Green Metropolis

by David Owen
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 17/09/2009

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Look out for David Owen's next book, Where the Water Goes.


A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future.


Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume 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 Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.


These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

ISBN:
9781101140314
9781101140314
Category:
Urban communities
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
17-09-2009
Language:
English
Publisher:
Penguin Publishing Group
David Owen

David Owen achieved 1st class honours in BA Creative Writing and MA Writing for Children at The University of Winchester, where he went on to teach on the BA Creative Writing course for three years. He hopes that one day all of his students will surpass his own achievements.

David's debut YA novel, Panther (2015) received rave reviews, and was nominated for the Carnegie medal. He is the Content and Social Media specialist for gapyear.com and a former freelance games journalist. David spends most of his time thinking about biscuits.

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