Green is Obsolete

Environmental issues got you down on this enviro-themed blog-action day? Maybe it’s time to stop trying to see the world in green.

In 2003, after spending three years completing a degree in environmental science, I felt like I had learned just about every way that things on this planet had, could and would go catastrophically wrong.

It was actually in my part-time job as office assistant for for ecologically-minded architecture firm L’OEUF , that I caught my first whiff of how things could begin to go right. In their sunny office, in a converted warehouse building in St-Henri, I stumbled upon a book called Suburban Nation that changed my view of the environment as definitively as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring changed our view of pesticides in the ’70s.

The seed that this book planted in my consciousness – a topic that had never been broached during 3 years at the School of Environment – is that urban areas, with a bit of mindful planning, might be our best bet for sustainable living. Up til that point, I had believed that the city I lived in, and indeed all cities, were some kind of irreparable unnatural disaster.

If this sounds unlikely to you – and especially if it sounds too good to be true – I urge you read an article entitled NYC is the Greenest City in America, by David Owen (originally published in the New York Times in 2004). This article frames environmental issues in a unique way that is both urban and optimistic. At least read the brilliantly tricky 1st paragraph.

To quote the author, “The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole.” New Yorkers live in smaller homes and therefore consume less land and energy per capita. They also own fewer cars and drive less, and they share the environmental burden of the city’s infrastructure (things like paved roads and sewers) between a huge number of people. As a result, even the most decadent of New Yorkers have the lowest per capita ecological footprint in the US.

The population density in Manhattan is 105 people per acre and across the 5 boroughs it is 42 people per acre. In comparison, the density in the Plateau is 53 people per acre, which, by the same logic, suggests that Plateau-dwellers are some of the “greenest” citizens in Canada. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Montreal as a whole.

In Montreal’s metropolitan region, the average density is about 3.5 people per acre, which is way below the number of people necessary to support even a basic public transit system or to make a depanneur economically viable. And that means that a lot of suburbanites are driving over to the mall every time they need a carton of milk.

Sprawl consumes fertile farmland and natural habitats; it requires more energy and infrastructure per capita, and it makes people dependant on cars for transportation, which in turn creates pollution, reduces physical activity, detracts from public spaces, and isolates people too young to drive. Ironically enough, suburbanites will often say that they chose their neighbourhood in order to live closer to nature!

In my opinion, the term “green,” as a synonym for sustainable is obsolete to the point of being misleading. This catchprase perpetuates the myth that so long as we are surrounded by greenery we can do no ecological wrong. Of course trees and plants are an important part of our ecosystem, but so are roads, sewers, farms, and shopping malls… these are just a few of the systems that cycle the energy and resources we consume. The majority of North Americans live in cities -isn’t it time we start interpreting our surroundings as an ecological system – albeit one with a lot of room for improvement - rather than an unnatural disaster.

The most sustainable systems aren’t always the greenest – just ask a polar bear.