Making Cities Sustainable as Billions Migrate
Manhattan is an eco-commune, a utopian environmental community, and the most ecologically sustainable place in America explains Will Boisvert reviewing Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability. He tries to see through the gray, and through the exhaust fumes to outline various arguments regarding dense urbanity that offer "a compelling blueprint for addressing our ecological crises." He notes that a New Yorker's environmental impact is a third less than the average American's, and if everyone lives like they do in Manhattan, emissions would drop 70%.
Contra Pollan, the author of Green Metropolis, isn't a locavore and has a distaste for anti-urban bias that's common to environmentalism — and sustainability. He'd prefer food be shipped thousands of miles by rail than have hundreds of people drive miles to an upstate farmers' market.
Carolyn Steel might disagree. As she explained at TED conference earlier this year, feeding a city is a miracle, with food routes shaping the modern world. She sees urban populations just as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were. It's just that the urban jungle obscures it from our view. Increasing urbanization (it'll double for 2050) means more people in cities to feed, necessitating mega-farms to produce all the food (there will be twice as much meat and dairy consumed). Now, it's the jungle and rainforest that's suffering from the rising demand for arable land.
Steel demands food become more central to daily life, with networks of locally grown food that are part of the community, and urban greenhouses to teach kids about food — reconnecting us with nature and understanding where our food comes from. Both Steel and Boisvert have a lot to teach us about how cities, being where more and more people are living, can become both models of sustainability and can be modeled to become more sustainable.
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