Living Green

Spring is coming. I hope. It is hard to tell here in the Midwest where snow storms have seemed endless this winter. But I fully expect to see trees budding out and the crocus peeking up later this month. The stark winter branches will eventually be hidden by green.

Which brings me to the topic of this blog: What does it mean to live green ? How do we manage to minimize our impact on the environment? Will using green products do it? Will recycling? Will sizing down? What should we do? Three authors come to rather different conclusions about the best ways to live greener lives.

Our first protagonist, Doug Fine, author of Farewell, My Subaru, is a self-described adventure journalist who traveled the world from hot spots (Rwanda) to cold spots (the Arctic Ocean), sending in reports to NPR and other publications. A few years ago, he decided to try living totally off the grid: provide his own power, raise his own food. He chose as the setting for this adventure New Mexico, for its relatively mild climate and plentiful sunshine. Farewell, My Subaru is the humorous story of his eventually fairly successful attempts to go green. Along the way, he gives up his Subaru for a diesel pickup powered by cooking grease; installs solar panels and a windmill for power and running water; and raises goats for their milk (yoghurt, cheese, and ice cream, anyone?). While I recommend reading the book, you can get a taste (feta?) of Fine’s life from this video clip:

While Fine’s choices seem to be working for himself and his family, how many others could make those same changes? Or would want to do so? New Mexico is not heavily-populated, but there is a reason for that. The ecosystem cannot support very many. So, although Fine’s story is impressive, it cannot really be said to provide much guidance for the rest of us.

Our second protagonist, Colin Beavan, author of No Impact Man, went off-grid in a completely different locale from Fine. Beavan and his family stayed put in their Manhattan apartment, but gradually reduced their use of resources to the absolute minimum. And I do mean absolute minimum. They quit using all disposable products. Think about that one. They tried to reduce their trash to zero, in part by having a composting bin in the kitchen. [From Fast Company, March 2003: “One of the more shocking measures of our ‘prosperity’ is the fact that the United States spends more on trash bags than 90 other countries spend on everything. In other words, the receptacles of our waste cost more than all of the goods consumed by nearly half of the world’s nations.”] Beavan and his wife bought only foods grown locally and seasonally(which pretty much meant a vegan diet): lots of time was spent at the farmer’s market. Their dietary choices were rather limited in the winter. The electricity was turned off. No late nights. Heating was “provided” by spillover from the surrounding apartments. Travel was by foot or bicycle. If clothing were needed, consignment stores were shopped. It was really amazing how minimal and no impact they were able to go. This video clip gives you some idea of the challenges.


Because Farewell, My Subaru had been humorous, I was expecting No Impact Man also to be written with a light touch. It was not. Beavan’s style is much more serious and well-researched (including a dense appendix of references and resources), as befits his academic origins. He has a PhD in electronic engineering. However, his story is just as compelling as that of Fine’s, maybe more so, because Beavan made his changes in a city of millions. Rather than uprooting himself to become a subsistence farmer in the wild west, Beavan and his wife kept their jobs, but dramatically changed their lifestyle. Whether or not others can go as minimal as the Beavans did is a serious question, but at least the possibility exists for others to follow in their ecological footprint. The last thing Fine should desire is for others to follow him to New Mexico to try to replicate his lifestyle since the end result would be increased environmental degradation.

This leads to our third protagonist, David Owen, author of Green Metropolis, the most scholarly book of the three. Owen is a writer for the New Yorker, which should give you some idea of his writing style. Green Metropolis is a paean to the virtues of Manhattan. One might think given how gloriously, ecologically green he views Manhattan to be that he and Beavan would be totally in sync and living very similar lifestyles in Manhattan apartments. But no. Owen lives with his family in an old house in a small town in Connecticut. Hmmm…

Owen’s main thesis is that it is only in dense urban centers, of which Manhattan is the prime exemplar, that humans can live truly green lives. The reasons for this are many and include the following. The dense integration of stores and housing allows residents to easily walk most places they need to go. Mass transit that is a short walk to and from any destination within the city is available for longer trips. Vertical structures with a small footprint are more efficient in their use of resources than are long, low structures. Overall, per capita resource consumption and trash accumulation is lower than in less dense environments. You can get a feel for the first chapter of his book from this video clip:


Owen evidently believes that if all humans lived in cities modeled after Manhattan, and if these cities had excellent mass transit along with policies that discouraged use of cars, the world would be a happier, greener place. He really loathes the urban/suburban sprawl of the Kansas City and Phoenix Metro regions, verbally shredding them throughout the book. Dubai and the new cities in China also get their share of the whip’s lash, in large part because they were not built on the Manhattan formula of dense business/residential integration and well-planned mass transit.

The world probably would be a greener place if humanity were confined to cities of skyscrapers on a few square miles of land. But this would require that natural selection work over time to shift the inborn desire of most individuals to live in an open area where they have long views to the horizon and some distance from their neighbors. If dense urban centers were natural for most humans, city residents would not have vacation homes in the country. They would not pack up and move to the suburbs as soon as they could afford to do so, like Owen and his wife did. And why did they move? Because they didn’t want to bring up their children in the city. They wanted their children to experience a more natural environment.

Owen may hate Kansas City and Phoenix for their sprawl, but it is that very sprawl that makes them feel like comfortable places to live for most individuals. However, I agree with Owen that they are definitely problematic environmentally since cars and all that goes with them are a necessity. I also agree with Owen’s statement that “Environmental changes that rely solely on willpower are doomed to fail.” We cannot all be like Colin Beavan and reduce our impact to near zero. Beaven wouldn’t be able to do what he did to the extent that he did it anywhere else in the United States but the dense urban center of Manhattan. Beavan went even further than Owen would consider necessary by eschewing elevators and mass transit. When Beavan said no electricity, he meant no electricity. But would the rest of us have his willpower and stamina?
So here is our conundrum. Most humans are better-adapted to suburban sprawl than high-density urban living. They can manage the urban jungle, but when given the opportunity, a significant portion of the population chooses to move to the edges, or further out. Returning to subsistence farming a la Doug Fine is not an option. The world is too populous for that. Only a tiny fraction of us have the willpower (or the location) to live the stripped-down life of Colin Beavan. And all of us cannot or will not move to Manhattan or similar cities in order to live David Owen’s version of truly green lives. Even he isn’t doing that.

Assuming that we do care about our planet and that we won’t just throw our hands in the air and give up, what should we do? What are you doing? I would really like to see some comments from readers posted below this blog. Maybe we can get a dialog going on this topic. It might not be easy being green, but do we really have a long-term option?