EFTA00281356.pdf

Veen Netr polis Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability DAVID OWEN 1 Rivermecl Books s member of Penguin Group RIGA) Inc. New York 2009 EFTA00281356  One Mere Like Manhattan y wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve 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, and 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 pos- sessions of significant size. Our electric bill worked out to about a dollar a day. c The utopian community was Manhattan. Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an EFTA00281357  MORE LIKE MANHATTAN GREEN METROPOLIS than that of residents of any other American city, and less than ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and 30 percent of the national average, which is 24.5 metric tone; diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of Manhattanites generate even less. America it's a model of environmental responsibility. In fact, by "Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is the most significant measures, New York is the greenest com- obviously an environmental disaster—except that it isn't," John munity in the United States. The most devastating damage that Holtzclaw, who recently retired as the chairman of the Sierra humans have done to the environment has arisen from the burn- Club's transportation committee, cold me in 2004. "If New ing of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practi- Yorkers lived at the typical American sprawl density of three cally prehistoric by comparison with other Americans, including households per residential acre, they would require many times people who live in rural areas or in such putatively eco-friendly as much land. They'd be driving cars, and they'd have huge lawns cities as Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado. The average and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then they'd Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a be overwatering their lawns, so that runoff would go into whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most streams." The key to New York's relative environmental benig- widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T.' nity is its extreme compactness. Charles Komanoff, a New York Thanks to New York City, the average resident ofNew York state City economist, environmental activist, and bicycling enthusi- uses less gasoline than the average resident of any other state, ast, told me, "New Yorkers trade the supposed convenience of and uses less than half as much as the average resident of the automobile for the true convenience of proximity. They are Wyoming. Eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents able to live without the ecological disaster of cars—which is travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's caused not just by having to use a car for practically every trip, ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the but also by the distance that you have to traverse. Bicycling, rate for workers in Los Angeles County.' New York City is more transit, and walking support each other, because they are all a populous than all but eleven states; ifit were granted statehood, made possible by population density." Manhattan's density is it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use, not only be- approximately 67,000 people per square mile, or more than cause New Yorkers drive less but because city dwellings are eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole and roughly smaller than other American dwellings and are less likely to con- thirty times that of Los Angeles. Placing one and a half million tain a superfluity of large appliances.' The average New Yorker people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces (if one takes into consideration all five boroughs of the city) an- their opportunities to be wasteful, enables most of them to get nually generates 7.1 metric tons ofgreenhouse gases, a lower rate 3 2 EFTA00281358  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN by without owning cars, encourages them to keep their families end of our driveway, I can walk several miles through woods to small, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inher- an abandoned nineteenth-century railway tunnel, while crossing ently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apart- only one paved road. ment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for the rest of Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consump- America to sprawl into. tion of electricity went from roughly 4,000 kilowatt-hours a My wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, and I had our first year, toward the end of our time in New York, to almost 30,000 child, Laura, in 1984. Ann and I had grown up in suburbs, and kilowatt-hours—and our house doesn't even have central air- we decided that we didn't want to raise Laura in a huge city. A conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and couple of months after she learned to walk, we moved to a small another one soon after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. town in the northwest corner of Connecticut, about ninety (If you live in the country and don't have a second car, you can't miles north of midtown Manhattan. Our house was built in the retrieve your first car from the mechanic after it's been repaired. late 1700s. During a rainstorm one night soon after we moved The third car was the product of a mild midlife crisis; it evolved in, I stuck my head into the attic and ran a flashlight over the into a necessity as soon as Laura and our son, John, became old underside of the roof. The decking boards had been made, two enough to drive.) Ann and I both work at home, and therefore hundred years before, from the broad trunks of old-growth commute by climbing a flight of stairs, but, between us, we American chestnut trees, a species that was wiped out by an manage to drive more than 20,000 miles a year, mostly doing imported blight in the first half of the twentieth century, and ordinary errands.' City dwellers who fantasize about living in some of them were almost as broad, as sheets of plywood. The the country usually picture themselves hiking, kayaking, gather- rafters, which were hand-hewn, were joined not by iron nails but ing eggs from their own chickens, and engaging in other robust by wooden pegs. Carved near the ends of some of the rafters outdoor activities, but what you actually do when you move out were large Roman numerals, which had been placed there as of the city is move into a car, because public transit is nonexis- assembly aids by the anonymous eighteenth-century builder. tent and most daily destinations are too widely separated to The house is across a dirt road from a nature preserve and is make walking or bicycling plausible as forms of transportation. shaded by tall white-pine trees, and after the storm had ended I Almost everything Ann and I do away from our house requires could hear a swollen creek rushing past at the bottom of the hill. a car trip. The nearest movie theater is twenty minutes away, and Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional black bear feed them- so is the nearest large supermarket. Renting a DVD and later selves in our yard, and wildflowers grow everywhere. From the returning it consumes almost two gallons of gasoline, because 4 $ EFTA00281359  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN Blockbuster is ten miles away and each complete transaction bipolar disorder, and the antibacterial compound tridocarban, involves two round trips. Quite often, we use a car when taking which is an ingredient ofhousehold soaps and cleaning agents! our dogs for a walk, so that the walk can begin somewhere other Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to than our own yard. The office of our Manhattan pediatrician protect what we haven't ruined already, to conserve what we was in the lobby of our apartment building, an elevator ride haven't used up, to restore as much as possible of what we've away; the office of my Connecticut dentist is two towns over, a destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that round trip of thirty-two miles. When we lived in New York, heat civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children's escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment lifetimes and beyond. above ours; nowadays, many of the BTUs produced by our very To the great majority ofAmericans who share these concerns, modern, extremely efficient oil-burning furnace leak through densely populated cities look like the end of the world. Because our two-hundred-year-old roof and into the dazzling star-filled such places concentrate high levels of human activity, they seem winter sky above. to manifest nearly every distressing symptom of the headlong growth of civilization—the smoke, the filth, the crowds, the cars—and we therefore tend to think of them as environmental THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IS A CHRONICLE OF DE- crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City gen- struction: people arrive, eat anything slow enough to catch, sup- erates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces plant indigenous flora with species bred for exploitation, burn more solid waste than any other American region of comparable whatever can be burned, and move on or spread out. No sensi- size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in tive modern human can contemplate that history without a relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an shudder. Everywhere we look, we see evidence of our reckless- intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of ness, as well as signs that our destructive reach is growing. For deepening green. someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on But this way of thinking obscures a profound environmental a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is no longer truth, because if you plotted the same negative impacts by resi- the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, 175 miles away.' Tap dent or by household the color scheme would be reversed. New water in metropolitan Washington, D.C., has been found to Yorkers, individually, drive, pollute, consume, and throw away contain trace amounts of caffeine, ibuprofen, naproxen sodium, much less than do the average residents of the surrounding sub- two antibiotics, an anticonvulsive drug used to treat seizures and urbs, exurbs, small towns, and farms, because the tightly circum- 6 7 EFTA00281360  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN scribed space in which they live crates efficiencies and reduces cars and garages and lawn tractors and swimming pools and the possibilities for reckless consumption. Most important, the septic tanks higher than skyscrapers, and you wouldn't be able city's unusually high concentration of population enables the to build roads and gas stations fast enough to serve us, even if majority of residents to live without automobiles—an unthink- you could find places to put them. Conversely, if you made all able deprivation almost anywhere else in the United States, other tight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they than in a few comparably dense American urban cores, such as would require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New the central parts of San Francisco and Boston. The scarcity of England states plus Delaware and New Jerseys Spreading people parking spaces in New York, along with the frozen snarl of traffic thinly across the countryside may make them feel greener, but on heavily traveled streets, makes car ownership an unbearable it doesn't reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, burden for most, while the compactness of development, the it increases the damage, while also making the problems they fertile mix of commercial and residential uses, and the availabil- cause harder to see and to address. ity of public transportation make automobile ownership all but New York City is by no means the world's only or best ex- unnecessary in most of the city. A pedestrian crossing Canal ample of the environmental benefits of concentrating human Street at rush hour can get the impression that New York is the populations and mixing uses. Many large old cities in Europe— home of every car ever built, but Manhattan actually has the where the main population centers arose long before the auto- lowest car-to-resident ratio of anyplace in America. mobile, and therefore evolved to be served by less environmentally The apparent ecological innocuousness of widely dispersed disastrous means of getting around—are less wasteful than New populations—as in leafy suburbs or seemingly natural exurban York, and the most energy-efficient and least automobile- areas, such as mine—is an illusion. My little town has about dependent cities in the world include a number of Asian ones, 4,000 residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles among them Hong Kong and Singapore. But New York is a (just eight fewer square miles than San Francisco), and there are useful example because it is familiar both to Americans and to many places within our town limits from which no sign of settle- people in the developing world, and because it proves that afflu- ment is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight million ent people arc capable of living comfortably while consuming people like us, along with our dwellings, possessions, vehicles, energy and inflicting environmental damage at levels well below and current rates of energy use, water use, and waste production, current U.S. averages. And—as is the case with all dense cities— into a space the size of New York City, our profligacy would be New York's efficiencies are built-in and therefore don't depend impossible to miss, because you'd have to stack our houses and on a total, sudden transformation of human nature. Even for EFTA00281361  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN people who live in sparsely populated areas far from urban cen- virtually no hint of what had been before. The earliest outposts ters, dense cities like New York offer important lessons about of metropolitan civilization, such as it was, were confined to the how to permanently reduce energy use, water consumption, car- island's southern tip, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- bon output, and many other environmental ills. turies settlement spread northward at an accelerating pace. In Thinking of crowded cities as environmental role models re- 2007, Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist who was completing quires a certain willing suspension of disbelief, because most of a three-dimensional computer re-creation of precolonial Man- us have been accustomed to viewing urban centers as ecological hattan, told Nick Paumgarten, of The New Yorker, "It's hard to calamities. New York is one of the most thoroughly altered land- think of any place in the world with as heavy a footprint, in so scapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in short a time, as New York. It's probably the fastest, biggest land- which the terrain's primeval contours have long since been oblit- coverage swing in history."10 Picturing even a small part of that erated and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on long-lost world requires a heroic act of the imagination—or, side streets, the rocks in Central Park) are essentially decorations. as in Sanderson's case, a vast database and complex computer- Quite obviously, this wasn't always the case. When Europeans modeling software. first began to settle Manhattan, in the early seventeenth century, Given the totality of what has been erased, contemplation of a broad salt marsh lay where the East Village does today, the area New York's evolution into a megalopolis inspires mainly a sense now occupied by Harlem was flanked by sylvan bluffs, and of loss, and ecology-minded discussions of the city tend to have Murray Hill and Lenox Hill were hills. Streams ran everywhere, a forlorn aft. Nikita Khrushchev, who visited New York in the fall and beavers built dams near what is now Times Square. One of 1960, found the scarcity of foliage in the city depressing by early European visitor described Manhattan as "a land excellent comparison with Moscow, saying, "It is enough to make a stone and agreeable, full of noble forest trees and grape vines," and sad."" In environmental triage, New York is usually consigned another called it a "terrestrial Canaan, where the Land floweth to the hopeless category, worthy of palliative care only. Environ- with milk and honey."9 mentalists tend to focus on a handful of ways in which the city But then, across a relatively brief span of decades, Manhat- might be made to seem somewhat less oppressively man-made: tan's European occupiers leveled the forests, flattened the hills, by easing the intensity of development; by creating or enlarging filled the valleys, buried the streams, and superimposed an un- open spaces around structures; by relieving traffic congestion yielding, two-dimensional grid of avenues and streets, leaving and reducing the time that drivers spend aimlessly searching for 10 11 Vi EFTA00281362  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN parking spaces; by increasing the area devoted to parks, green- reinforces the view that urban life is artificial and depraved, ery, and gardening; by incorporating vegetation into buildings and makes city residents feel guilty about living where and how themselves. they do. But such discussions miss the point, because in most cases A dense urban area's greenest features—its low per-capita en- changes like these would actually undermine the features that ergy use, its high acceptance of public transit and walking, its create the city's extraordinary efficiency and keep the ecological small carbon footprint per resident—are not inexplicable anom- impact of its residents small. Spreading buildings out enlarges alies. They arc the direct consequences of the very urban char- the distance between local destinations, thereby limiting the acteristics that are the most likely to appall a sensitive friend utility of walking and public transportation; making automobile of the earth. Yet those qualities are ones that the rest of us, no traffic move more efficiently enhances the allure of owning cars matter where we live, are going to have to find ways to emulate, and, inevitably, reduces ridership on the subway. Because urban as the world's various ongoing energy and environmental crises density, in itself, is such a powerful generator of environmental deepen and spread in the years ahead. In terms of sustainability, benefits, the most critical environmental issues in dense urban dense cities have far more to teach us than solar-powered moun- cores tend to be seemingly unrelated matters like law enforce- tainside cabins or quaint old New England towns. , ment and public education, because anxieties about crime and school quality are among the strongest forces motivating flight to the suburbs. By comparison, popular feel-good urban eco- THIS WAY OF THINKING SEEMS COUNTERINTUITIVE TO projects like adding solar panels to the roofs of apartment build- most Americans, including most environmentalists. Ben Jervey, ings are decidedly secondary, even irrelevant. Planting trees in The Big Green Apple, a well-intentioned but frequently mis- along city streets, always a popular initiative, has high environ- leading guide to "eco-friendly living in New York City"—a con- mental utility, but not for the reasons that people usually as- cept that Jervey himself treats as oxymoronic—repeatedly misses sume: trees are ecologically important in dense urban areas not the point about New York. After growing up in a small town in because they provide temporary repositories for atmospheric Massachusetts," he writes in his preface, "I went off to pastoral carbon—the usual argument for planting more of them—but Vermont to study and then work, all the while developing an because their presence along sidewalks makes city dwellers more appreciation and concern for the fragile state of the world's ecol- cheerful about dwelling in cities. Unfortunately, much conven- ogy. But as easy as it is to don a green hat up in Vermont, the tional environmental activism has the opposite effect, since it beast that is New York City has the tendency to tear that noble 12 13 EFTA00281363  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN lid off and throw it into a puddle of mud. Upon arriving in the Jervey is by no means alone. The prominent British environ- big city I struggled to reconcile the environmentally concerned mentalist Herbert Girardet—who is an author, a documentary mind-set that comes so effortlessly in a place like Vermont with filmmaker, and a cofounder of the World Future Council—treats my new urban lifestyle. Of course sustainable living is easier in large cities mainly as environmental catastrophes. "The bulk of a Vermont township, where local produce is plentiful and every the world's energy consumption is within cities," he has written, backyard is equipped with a compost bin."u "and much of the rest is used for producing and transporting But this is exactly wrong. "Sustainable living" is actually goods and people to andfrom cities.'" He proposes dramatically much harder in small, far-flung places than k is in dense cities. reducing urban energy consumption and making city dwellers Jervey cites New Yorkers' "overactive dependence" on fresh water less dependent on agricultural and other inputs from outlying as an example of their supposed wastefulness, and he marvels areas, while improving overall energy efficiency through techno- that the city's total use "amounts to well over one billion gallons logical innovation. He has observed that cities cover just 3 or 4 per day."" A billion is a big number, to be sure, but Ncw York percent of the earth's land area while accounting for 80 percent City's population is more than thirteen times that of the entire of the world's consumption of natural resources—as though state of Vermont, so the city's total consumption figures in any population density were an ecological negative, and as though category will appear overwhelming in any direct comparison. It's there were no meaningful distinction to be made between dense per-capita consumption that is telling, though, and by that mea- urban cores and lightly populated suburbs. Urban dwellers, by sure Vermonters use more water than Ncw Yorkers do. They also his way of thinking, are environmental freeloaders, parasitically use more than three and a half times as much gasoline-545 drawing sustenance from the countryside, while people living at gallons per person per year versus 146 for all New York City lower densities are more nearly at harmony with nature.'6 Girar- residents and just 90 for Manhattan residents—with the result det is a victim (and perpetuator) of the same optical illusion as that, among the fifty states, pastoral Vermont ranks eleventh- Jervey. highest in per-capita gasoline consumption while New York New Yorkers themselves seldom fully appreciate the environ- state, thanks entirely to New York City, ranks last. The average mental virtues of their own way of living. On Earth Day 2007, Vermonter also consumes more than four times as much elec- the city announced an ambitious two-decade environmental tricity as the average Ncw York City resident, has a larger carbon initiative, called PIaNYC, which includes dozens of far-reaching footprint, and generates more solid waste, backyard compost proposals, among them the planting of more than a million bins notwithstanding.14 trees, the collection of tolls from most private and commercial 14 15 EFTA00281364 - 7,47.grze-sk. 4- -  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN vehicles using the most traffic-clogged parts of Manhattan dur- in terms of proportions can only be misleading, since there's no ing the busiest times of the day, the imposition of a surcharge way to decrease the percentage attributable to one element with- on the bills of the city's electrical customers, and other mea- out increasing the percentage attributable to others: they're sures.17 Actually implementing the plan has encountered the pieces of the same pie. Bringing down overall emissions levels is usual difficulties (shortly before Earth Day 2008, the state leg- a worthy goal, but the mayor's emphasis was misplaced. The islature killed the toll-collection scheme, which is known as proportion of greenhouse-gas emissions attributable to buildings "congestion pricing"), but one of the most striking features of is higher in energy-efficient old European cities, too. the entire plan is how little recognition it gives to the numerous Equally misguided is the plan's proposal to add a surcharge ways in which New York City's environmental performance is to New Yorkers' electrical bills, since New York City residents, already exemplary, even extraordinary, at least in comparison with an average of4,696 kilowatt-hours per household per year, with the rest of the United States. Shortly before the plan was already consume less electricity than the residents of any other made public, the mayor's office released a study showing that the part of the country. (The average Dallas household, by contrast, city's buildings arc responsible for 79 percent of its greenhouse- uses 16,116 kilowatt-hours, more than three times as much.)19 gas emissions—an ominous statistic, the study suggested, since Many news reports about the study focused on the fact that New the national average for buildings is just 32 percent. Daniel L York City is responsible for almost 1 percent of all thc green- Doctoroff, a deputy mayor and the city official in charge of the house gases produced by the United States, and suggested that plan, said, "We know we have to dramatically rethink the way this share was shockingly huge—but they overlooked, or men- we work with buildings"—probably an understatement, since tioned only in passing, the fact that the city contains 2.7 percent the mayor's announced goal was to cut greenhouse-gas emissions of the country's population, meaning that its carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2030.1$ is already remarkably low in comparison with that of other Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions is a fine idea, but in the American communities. Mandating large reductions in catego- case of the city's buildings the mayor's office obscured a far more ries in which New Yorkers already lead the nation is like trying important point. The proportion of emissions attributable to to fight obesity by putting skinny people on diets. buildings in New York City is high because the number of cars, Thinking of New York City's environmental record as some- which are the main source of greenhouse emissions in the rest thing that might instruct and inspire others, rather than treating of the country, is extremely low in relation to the city's popula- it as a candidate for emergency intervention, requires a major tion: it's a sign of environmental success, not failure. Thinking conceptual leap for many, even for those who deal directly with 16 17 EFTA00281365  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN the city's relationship to the environment. In 2004, I called New treated in large measure as sanctuaries from urban depravity. The York City's Department of Environmental Protection and told modern environmental movement arose, in the 1960s and a member of that agency's staff that I was interested in talking 1970s, when a growing sense of ecological crisis, first inspired to an expert about what I felt were ways in which New Yorkers nationwide by Rachel Carson's extraordinarily influential book are better environmental citizens than other Americans are. At Silent Spring=' combined with other social forces, including the first, she thought I was joking; later, I think, she decided I was civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, and nuts. "Why don't you call the Parks Department?" she said, the power of OPEC, to create a sense among large numbers finally, happy to be rid of me. of mainly young people that just about everything wrong with the United States was urban in essence, and could be combated only by establishing, or reestablishing, a direct connection to THE HOSTILITY OF MANY ENVIRONMENTALISTS TOWARD "the land." American environmentalists in every age have tended densely populated cities is a manifestation of a much broader to agree with Thomas Jefferson, who, in 1803, dismisscd "great phenomenon, a deep antipathy to urban life which has been cities" as "pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties close to the heart of American environmentalism since the be- of man."22 ginning. Henry David Thoreau, who lived in a cabin in the Jefferson made that disparaging remark in a letter to Dr. Ben- woods near Concord, Massachusetts, between 1845 and 1847, jamin Rush, a fellow signer of the Declaration ofIndependence. established an image, still potent today, of the sensitive nature Daniel Lazare, in America's Undeclared War: What's Killing Our lover living simply, and in harmony with the environment, be- Cities and How We Can Stop It, cites that letter as a key docu- yond the edge of civilization. Thoreau wasn't actually much of ment in the history of what he identifies as an enduring national an outdoorsman, and his cabin was closer to the center of antagonism toward urban life. Recently, I asked Lazare whether Concord than to any true wilderness, but for many Americans he detected that same antagonism in the modern American en- he remains the archetype—the natural philosopher guiltlessly vironmental movement. "Unquestionably," he said. "Green ide- living off the grid. John Muir, who was born twenty years after ology is a rural, agrarian ideology. It seeks to integrate man into Thoreau and founded the Sierra Club in 1892, viewed city liv- nature in a very kind ofdirect, simplistic way—scattering people ing as toxic to both body and soul." The National Park Service, among the squirrels and the trees and the deer. To me, that established by Congress in 1916, was conceived as an increas- seems mistaken, and it doesn't really understand the proper re- ingly necessary corrective to urban life, and national parks were lationship between man and nature. Cities are much more effi- 18 I9 EFTA00281366  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN dent, economically, and also much more benign, environmentally, spoiled coffee beans, which had been left to rot on the wharf and because when you concentrate human activities in confined seemed to Rush to be the most likely cause of the disease? Jef- spaces you reduce the human footprint, as it were. That is why ferson's letter made specific reference to that epidemic, which the disruption of nature is much less in Manhattan than it is in killed 4,000 Philadelphians (and caused Jefferson himself to flee the suburbs. The environmental movement is deeply stained the city, along with many other government officials and most with a sort ofMalthusian current. It's anti-urban, anti-industrial, of the city's wealthier inhabitants, including most of its physi- agrarian, primitivist. Manhattan seems to be a supremely un- cians). "When great evils happen," Jefferson wrote to Rush, "I natural place because of all the concrete and glass and steel, but am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from the paradox is that it's actually more harmonious and more be- them as consolations to us, and Providence his in fact so estab- nign, in terms of nature, than ostensibly greener human envi- lished the order of things, as that most evils are the means of ronments, which depend on huge energy inputs, mainly in the producing some good. The yellow fever will discourage the form of fossil fuels. In order to surround ourselves with nature, growth of great cities in our nation"—a providential result, in we get in cars and drive long distances, and then build silly his view. He acknowledged that cities "nourish some of the el- pseudo-green houses in the middle of the woods—which are egant arcs," but stated that "the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, actually extremely disruptive, and very, very wasteful." and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & To be sure, there has always been plenty to loathe about freedom, would be my choice."24 New York City, he wrote urban living. The history of large cities all over the world is a twenty years later, "seems to be a Cloacina* of all the depravities history of filth and squalor and disease. Benjamin Rush placed of human nature."35 himself at tremendous personal risk in 1793, a decade before The early stirrings of industrialization magnified this sense Jefferson's letter, while attempting to combat a yellow fever epi- ofurban catastrophe. Human populations all over the world had demic in Philadelphia, which was then both the nation's capital always dumped their waste into the same lakes and streams from and, with a population of 55,000, its largest city. No one in which they drew their drinking water, and the local consequences those days knew how yellow fever was transmitted, but there was became more dire as the settlements grew, and as steady ad- no local shortage of plausible explanations. The streets of Phila- vances in human ingenuity outpaced awareness of the dangers delphia, like the streets ofmost cities, were reeking, open sewers, and that particular summer the air had been made especially 'Cloacina was the goddess of the Roman sewer system. The name comes from the rank by the arrival from the Caribbean of a large shipment of Latin word for "sewer or "drain? 20 21 EFTA00281367  GREEN METROPOLIS MORE LIKE MANHATTAN posed by the effluents of prosperity. A source of drinking water in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eat- for some early Manhattanites was Fresh Water Pond, also known ing one another as they do there."28 as the Collect, a deep, seventy-acre spring-fed body of water just Europeans viewed the same evolution with a similar sense of north of where Canal Street lies today. By 1800, though, the horror. In 1847, a Scottish visitor to England concisely sum- pond had become, according to various observers, "a shocking marized the dark side of that country's industrial progress, when hole . . . foul with excrement, frog-spawn and reptiles," a "very he described the Irwell River as it flowed out of Manchester: sink and common sewer," and a heavily used dump for brewer- "There are myriads of dirty things given it to wash, and whole ies, tanneries, and other toxin-generating commercial enter- waggon-loads of poisons from dye-houses and bleach-yards prises; within fifteen years it had to be filled in 26 Throughout thrown into it to carry away; steam-boilers discharge into it their the city, the streets were mired in animal and human waste, seething contents, and drains and sewers their fetid impurities; and the air was thick with smoke and insects, and the shallow till at length it rolls on—here between tall dingy walls, there wells that provided drinking water for the city's residents were under precipices of red sandstone—considerably less a river than incubators of disease. a flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies, whether animal In 1832, cholera struck New York, killing 3,515, and its or vegetable, and which resembles nothing in nature, except, focus was the notorious neighborhood called Five Points, a foul perhaps, the stream thrown out in eruption by some mud- slum that had arisen on the site of the filled-in Fresh Water volcano." The proposed solution was to reverse the direction Pond. (The same neighborhood provided the setting for Martin of human migration—in effect, to create sprawl. In 1898, Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs of New York) The epidemic inspired Ebenezer Howard, a British urban planner and the originator of the same sort of panic and heroic but futile intervention that the open-space-oriented development scheme known as the gar- had characterized Philadelphia's response to yellow fever four den city movement, wrote, "It is wellnigh universally agreed by decades earlier. A city newspaper reported, "The roads, in all men of all parties, not only in England, but all over Europe and