Dave Owen's book called "Green Metropolis" touts the ability of New York residents into getting America's energy dependency back. Owen makes the case that if more people lived in areas like New York things would be better and we would not have harmed our budgets and environments. the lessons shown in this book in living sustainable should be a model and best way to future growth away from the car centric and energy guzzling sprawl. Owen talks about our oil addictions and how the average New Yorker uses much less energy in all forms compared to the rest of America. David Owen takes on the mega 'green" office complexes in suburbia that claim to be energy efficient but are actually dead wastelands where people hardly come out of the cubicle and walk around the planned complex. In fact, nothing has contributed more to sprawl than office buildings and their larger parking lots so whenever I hear news of companies moving back into the cities this is a good thing for the country and economy. More people need to realize the ecological nightmare that are the planned communities of the suburbs and how we need to gradually escape from this environment. Dave talks about the growth in China and how the American lifestyle of lush lawns and car driving threatens to make China a worse polluter and energy user than America. He describes the Chinese hutang and how greedy developers are quick to destroy all of the alley people and their habitats. This is a fabulous book describing the role of cities in making the planet a less polluting habitat for humanity.
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