Condemning the “go green” movement may seem like a risky move, but David Owen pulls it off. In “Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability,” Owen backs up his otherwise mind-boggling statements with thoroughly researched facts. Though most people have condemned Manhattan as an ecological housing nightmare, Owen believes that the city should serve as a model of environmental stewardship for communities around the world. Nobody wants to have a car in New York, Owen claims, because the streets are always so congested, thus encouraging hundreds of thousands of commuters to walk, take the bus, or hop on a subway. Aside from championing the green lifestyles of the Manhattan community, he criticizes the green culture’s move away from cities and toward open space, replete with high-tech products that waste money and promote wishful-thinking consumerism. Kurt Anderson, author of “The Real Thing,” calls the book “a bracing, important work of contrarian truth-telling.” And Publishers Weekly has this to say:
Owen’s lucid, biting prose crackles with striking facts that yield paradigm-shifting insights. The result is a compelling analysis of the world’s environmental predicament that upends orthodox opinion and points the way to practical solutions.
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