City Living Is Green: Why The Lorax Was Wrong

Economist Edward L. Glaeser penned a guest blog for the New York Times about green city living. He points out that people who want a much smaller carbon footprint should live in high-density cities, where travel is less necessary and living quarters are more confined.

In almost every metropolitan area, we found the central city residents emitted less carbon than the suburban counterparts. In New York and San Francisco, the average urban family emits more than two tons less carbon annually because it drives less. In Nashville, the city-suburb carbon gap due to driving is more than three tons. After all, density is the defining characteristic of cities. All that closeness means that people need to travel shorter distances, and that shows up clearly in the data.

While public transportation certainly uses much less energy, per rider, than driving, large carbon reductions are possible without any switch to buses or rails. Higher-density suburban areas, which are still entirely car-dependent, still involve a lot less travel than the really sprawling places. This fact offers some hope for greens eager to reduce carbon emissions, since it is a lot easier to imagine Americans driving shorter distances than giving up their cars.

Glaeser refers both in that piece and in a piece her wrote for the City Journal recently to an amusing (but true) parable about the environment:

On a pleasant April day in 1844, Henry David Thoreau--the patron saint of American environmentalism--went for a walk along the Concord River in Massachusetts. With a friend, he built a fire in a pine stump near Fair Haven Pond, apparently to cook a chowder. Unfortunately, there hadn't been much rain lately, the fire soon spread to the surrounding grass, and in the end, over 300 acres of prime woodland burned. Thoreau steadily denied any wrongdoing. "I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it," he later wrote. The other residents of Concord were less forgiving, taking a reasonably dim view of even inadvertent arson. "It is to be hoped that this unfortunate result of sheer carelessness, will be borne in mind by those who may visit the woods in future for recreation," the Concord Freeman opined.

Thoreau's accident illustrates a point that is both paradoxical and generally true: if you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it.

Freak chowder-related accidents aside, Glaeser's research for the City Journal piece demonstrates that city living can require a fraction of the energy that suburban living does -- and that temperate cities require less energy than hot cities. Sort of startling, though, is that Los Angeles, a city famous for its driving culture, falls into the lowest-emitting group.

Comments

[MissElaineous]

I grew up in NYC and it has been reported for years that New Yorkers use far less energy than any other population in the US. You don't need a car in NYC, because the excellent transportation system runs 24/7. Even affluent people don't have cars. They may take cabs. Before you say that cabs use fuel, realize that two dozen people using that same cab in one day are 23 fewer cars that need to exist. Apartments don't need as much fuel to heat and cool, because the units function as each others' insulation. Smaller residences mean fewer consumer goods crammed into the place. You can raise children in a dense city. Just go to any major city and there are kids aplenty, who have lots of fun things to do. Services like police and fire can get to you quickly. There are outdoor spaces in better planned cities (birding is big in Central Park). Big indoor spaces are easy to come by. Many pubs and restaurants have a room you can rent for those 2 or 3 big parties a year. Those of you who think the small farm and pellet stove is the perfect solution should visit London, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing or NYC to get an idea of the sheer, staggering number of humans on this planet. This world cannot support a small farm for every household. Of course, we can stand having fewer people. Telling people to stop babies? You first. Good luck.

[Mykel]

Interesting article up until the end, when yet another sneaky pro-sprawl piece of propaganda about Los Angeles. "emitting less" carbon rears its ugly head. Like that old chestnut about L.A. being more densely populated than New York (see link below), it, too, is a blatant falsehood.

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20070919/sprawl-brawl

[KillTheMessenger]

L.A. must be doing something right...

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/6427a6b7538955c585257359003f0230/85ceecc3cfc0c09c8525756e0072d90d!OpenDocument

[roseau]

The Lorax wasn't wrong. The Lorax speaks of environmental impact on several levels. One of those is the direct devastation of natural places, and so city living is kinder to wilderness, yes. Another area of impact is based on consumption. While city living may involve a lower footprint in terms of transportation and housing, the culture of consumption knows no geography. Does a city dweller who shops all the time have a smaller carbon footprint than a suburbanite whose hobby is organic gardening and who consumes few new goods? The ultimate message in the Lorax is that the fate of our natural world is in our own hands, each of us must act and choose wisely. Having said all that, I love this article because I've been annoyed for years by the back to the land crew and their unsustainable consumption of land, polluting old wood stoves, and self-righteous addiction to scratchy clothes and bad soup.

Unless.

[falcon1982]

I can't speak for every city, but it seems that at least in New York, green living and gentrification seem to go hand in hand. It would be great if the working class could benefit from all the great things this article is talking about. But jacking up property or rent prices (especially those close to subway stations) makes it so that only the well off enjoy the fruits of this movement, forcing those who cannot afford to live in high density areas to move to elsewhere.

We need to make green living accesible to everyone, not just the well off. Other than this, everything about green living is great. I'm in total support of it.

[Yamunation]

This is true. Cities provide public transportation. Even living in the outskirts offers better transportation than the suburbs, and you can often get errands done in the city before returning home, so you again save on fuel. You also buy less junk and knickknacks for the home, and there is less wastage overall.

Suburbs certainly can get better, by creating more busing systems, and marketing it as a safe, trendy way to travel, rather than the last resort.

[burnsrunner]

This concept is completely real and true. I agree that by living within the city it helps lessen our carbon footprints. I also know that there are many options available on how to make your living space more environmentally green. Author Beth Greer, explains in her "Super Natural Home" book about practical advice and healthy solutions to reducing your toxic exposures.

www.supernaturalhome.com

[ColoradoJake]

ED! DUDE! I think you're onto something here man, but what if we took it just one step further...

Why don't we just put all the people into little pods, hook them up to a feeding tube, plug all their synapses into the mainframe a play a computer program in their heads to make them think they are living their lives! Problem SOLVED! No traveling, nobody is bad to the environment, no carbon footprint!

[norkas]

Well written, Thank you for giving us something good to think about

[Jimmy121]

Why stay away from a bicycle ? People here in the U.S. are getting fat. Online here there are ads all over the place on dieting. People here are too lazy here in the U.S, You need to go to work or get to groceries store. You live 5 miles, ride a bicycle, Well you would say it takes to long, Well 5 miles takes 1 hour exercize helps you lose weight I'm 65, thats what I do. If I had to I would ride a bicycle to the bus or train station to get to work A bicycle uses NO OIL & NO GAS. This way I am conserving money, and getting a good exercise and not getting obese at the same time,Well i can't put my bicycle on a bus are train,Buy a Dahon D7 foldup bicycle we have two Dahon Bicycles

[Feanor]

Pretty obvious, but still worth repeating.

[dutt]

Having lived and traveled through much of Europe, something that struck me was how areas much more densely populated than most of the U.S. still felt much more rural in nature. In the rural areas of Europe, people tend to still concentrate in towns and villages thereby achieving a higher population density while at the same time maintaining more open space. That means that even in rural areas the residents live closer to necessities and conveniences than their American counterparts. It also makes public transportation even in the rural areas a viable means of getting around .

On the other hand we in America prefer to spread ourselves out as thinly as possible which makes for extreme inefficiency while destroying valuable farm and woodland.

[JScott]

But in Europe tho there are no large tract of roadless wilderness like here.

[netzwerg]

watch this video I made some years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk6YxhKH590

[Matt Lowe]

Great! We'll have all the professional castes in the cities, and the artists there too, all the people that make all the decisions will all be free from the drudgery of producing food and fiber and materials, and the Farmer and Woodsman castes will be out in the frightful wilderness, boldly plowing and ripping up the earth. Hey, until we normalize our relationship with the earth and take what we need from it in a way that doesn't take from every other organism, we need to remain exposed to the wilderness. It is the teacher. The west, the capitalists (and the communists, for that matter) think linearly. But there are no lines in nature, only cycles. We can't conceive of the world this way. But we sure as hell have to. Read some Wendell Berry.

I agree that the suburbs are a travesty, but this article represents a fatal myopia about issues of land and resource use, among other things. When you live in a city very little is being produced there. Under the current model, the rural and suburban folks will consume as much packaging and manufactured delivery systems, more, than their urban counterparts. But a normalization in the rural and suburban areas will see people growing food in their yards, taking the time to do that instead of working the time it takes to earn the money to buy the food. Read Toby Hemenway.

[MissElaineous]

If you live in a smaller place with no two car garage, you need less stuff. You don't need a car, you don't need all those lawn toys and patio furniture, you don't have room for the detritus that suburban families aquire. Many don't have or need their own washer or dryer.

[JScott]

Maybe we should all live like 'The World Inside' google it.
Yup we can have 76 billion people on the planet shoved into huge buildings never going outside of them with the rest of the planet growing our food and fiber but there would be no wilderness and no other living wild animals and plants.

[KillTheMessenger]

That is not a particularly nice fantasy. However, we will have 12 billion people on this planet and with a little care we can have some wilderness, too.

[JScott]

Why is there NOTHING on limiting human population growth in the linked report. It just 'assumes' they'rll be more humans, typical that this is just towing the corporate line for MORE of the same and that that is always the best. N O T ! ! !

[EllaBee]

That's why I am all for New Urbanism.

http://www.newurbanismblog.com