{"product_id":"9781101140314","title":"Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability","description":"\u003cb\u003eLook out for David Owen's next book, \u003ci\u003eWhere the Water Goes.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFrom the Trade Paperback edition.\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Penguin Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47133220536560,"sku":"9781101140314","price":4.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781101140314_p0.jpg?v=1763685114","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781101140314","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}