David Owen, New Yorker staff writer and author, has written a book, "Green Metropolis" about the energy savings inherent in living and working in highly populated and dense areas.   Owen says that the most realistic way to reduce our carbon footprints is to live in "densely-settled, pedestrian-friendly, public-transit-oriented cities like New York".  Furthermore, he suggests that cities such as New York stop worrying about what he calls "environmental fixations" such as residential solar panels and LEED-certified buildings and instead concentrate on “old-fashioned quality-of-life concerns” such as education, crime, noise, and recreational amenities in order to draw people back into the cities.

Catherine Tumber laid out Owen's arguments in an introduction to a conversation the other day on the blog, Firedoglake.  The conversation, like most at FDL, was quite informative and interesting in itself.  Owen responded to questions and elaborated on the introduction with additional information.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

"Manhattan residents are the lowest per-capita energy users in the country. They have the highest rate of public transit use and the lowest rate of automobile ownership, and they live in the smallest spaces. They don’t have lawns. They walk to the grocery store. Overall, residents of New York City–including all five boroughs–have the smallest per-capita carbon footprint in the country, a little over 7 metric tons, vs. a national average of more than 24.

"Spreading people out may make them feel green, but it actually increases the damage they do to the environment while making that damage harder to see and to address."

Owen clearly realizes that other areas of the country are not going to become NYC-like overnight.  However, along with Alex Steffen's recent talks at Town Hall, it does seems like an urban area like the Seattle or Portland areas have a lot to learn from what Owen is saying.