Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability

The world’s principal source of man-made greenhouse gases has always been prosperity. That relationship is easy to see, now that the global recession has flipped it onto its back: shuttered factories don’t spew carbon dioxide; the unemployed drive fewer miles and turn down their furnaces, air conditioners, and swimming-pool heaters; struggling corporations and families cut back on air travel; even affluent people buy less throwaway junk. Gasoline consumption in the United States fell almost 6 percent in 2008. That was the result not of a sudden greening of the American consciousness but of the rapid rise in the price of oil during the first half of the year, followed by the full efflorescence of the current economic mess.

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, office 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 a technology. This is the 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.