[Graeme]

Top 10 green U.S. cities

Although the EPA has not established official criteria for ranking the greenness of a city, there are several key areas to measure for effectiveness in carbon footprint reduction. These include air and water quality, efficient recycling and management of waste, percentage of LEED-certified buildings, acres of land devoted to greenspace, use of renewable energy sources, and easy access to products and services that make green lifestyle choices (organic products, buying local, clean transportation methods) easy.

Mother Nature Network's editorial team rounded up their top 10:

10. Austin, Texas

sanluisobispo

[Tyler_JC]

If Boston is number 3. I'm loath to consider number 103.

We just spent $15 Billion building a brand new underground highway system for our cars.



The tunnels are lovely (even with the occasional water leak or roof collapse) and traffic has certainly improved...but it wasn't exactly a "green" project.

[mos6507]

I guess Toby Hemenway made the right choice in Portland.

[VMarcHart]

This list and the method behind it are so hypocritical.

#1, there is nothing green about a large city. It's an oxymoron to call a large city green. A large city is Inheritably not green. It's like that mall in the suburbs of Chicago calling itself the greeniest mall; there's nothing green about mass consumerism. Or like Formula 1 installing kinetic energy recovery systems ("KERS") in their cars and calling itself green; there's nothing green about 3 mpg of 100+ octane. A pig wearing lipstick is still a pig.

#2, wouldn't you think the greeniest cities would be small rural areas, where people live very modestly, their durable goods last decades and their shorter-term items are used to the bone, they open the windows for cooling and heating, the air is nice and clean, you can literally walk everywhere, they compost, recycle, plant their vegetables, etc?

Sorry about ranting and venting.

I wonder how cities like Ashley, ND, Sheldon, IA, and Elkton, SD would stack up against the large cities in the EPA list.

[dinopello]

#2, wouldn't you think the greeniest cities would be small rural areas, where people live very modestly, their durable goods last decades and their shorter-term items are used to the bone, they open the windows for cooling and heating, the air is nice and clean, you can literally walk everywhere, they compost, recycle, plant their vegetables, etc?

Sorry about ranting and venting.

I wonder how cities like Ashley, ND, Sheldon, IA, and Elkton, SD would stack up against the large cities in the EPA list.

Villages (a single-neighborhood city) and towns (a small multi-neighborhood city) surrounded by enough land to support most of the food needs yet compact and dense enough to allow living without a car is a very 'green' living arrangement. There are lots of small and medium sized cities out there that are really nice places, although most are still highly dependent on moving non-walkable distances to meet daily needs. Most still want to "grow",

Like Ashley, ND

Are you planning on moving your business somewhere?

This is your opportunity to get away from the "Big City - Crime - Traffic - People"... and trade it in for "small town living, low crime, little traffic, safety and security" for yourself and your family.

It's a common thing for these small towns to say "Move away from all the people, and come here!" . Kind of ironic.

[mos6507]

Let's try to look beyond the biases of our doomer demographics. Not everybody wants to get away from the city.

[dinopello]

Let's try to look beyond the biases of our doomer demographics. Not everybody wants to get away from the city.

Most people are social animals and enjoy the company of others and appreciate the activities and cultural persuits enabled by cities. But, to look at cities like New York, or Chicago as typical is rediculous. They are very atypical, hyper-cities. Fine for some who want a very intense, stimulative environment, but probably not most people's cup o tea. A lot of people like to visit those places for the shear spectacle, cuisine, and entertainment though.

The places listed by VMarcHart are cities, but offer a vastly different experience. Personally, I like the form of a medium-sized city with maybe 6-12 or so neighborhoods for some variety of experience and perhaps big enough to have it's own arts/theatre district.

[bodigami]

"Top 10 green U.S. cities" that's like saying: "bottom (dirtier) 10 cities worldwide"

[hillsidedigger]

There are no 'green' American cities.

[Serial_Worrier]

I get the idea from a lot of Peak Oilers and doomers that they fetishize the rural areas and HATE technology. You realize after "the fall", you will not have internet access to rant anymore? I hope you'll also not miss modern medicine, but it's survival of the fittest right? Luddite-ism rules! Bring on the Butlerian Jihad!

[HumbleScribe]

I don't see that it's inherently less 'green' to live in a city. Surely 1,000,000 people living in an urban area consume much the same resources as 1,000,000 people scattered around rural areas - possibly less as they don't need to travel so far to reach the nearest shop/whatever.

[emersonbiggins]

I don't see that it's inherently less 'green' to live in a city. Surely 1,000,000 people living in an urban area consume much the same resources as 1,000,000 people scattered around rural areas - possibly less as they don't need to travel so far to reach the nearest shop/whatever.

Well said. I think the bias against cities is really just misplaced bias against large populations in general. If one has to distribute 1,000,000 people across an area, it is much more efficient to house them in cities, where per capita energy use is often just a fraction of that of most suburban and rural residents.

It's easy to forget that the gap between rural and urban standards of living is vastly closer now than it was even 40 or 50 years ago. The immense cost of "civilizing" every last square mile of countryside was and is an immense one (e.g., the rural electrification project), and shouldn't be discounted when determining where or how people should live. Cheap oil created the medium for "modern" rural life to take place.

Off-grid is another discussion altogether. However, I submit that rural life for 300,000,000 Americans is a near impossibility, with each given a mere 7 acres a piece, including land that would be considered untenable to all but the most delusional of people.

[thuja]

If you want top be truly "green", move out of your rural or small town bungalow and move to the city. Stop taking over every last parcel of land as you attempt to escape the city. Pack yourself densely use your space wisely.

Stop building your homes wherever you see free land, let it go to seed. Move into an apartment complex, live like a Bangladeshi and share.

Of course if you want to be greedy and rapacious, buy 10 acres and build your road onto it and dig your well and scare away all the native creatures with your loud chainsaws and cars and waste gas commuting 100 miles a day so you can live in your rural home.

Yeah if you want to be green, pack yourself in tight. Manhattanites use far less resources per capita than any rural denizen...

[Serial_Worrier]

If you want top be truly "green", move out of your rural or small town bungalow and move to the city. Stop taking over every last parcel of land as you attempt to escape the city. Pack yourself densely use your space wisely.

Stop building your homes wherever you see free land, let it go to seed. Move into an apartment complex, live like a Bangladeshi and share.

Of course if you want to be greedy and rapacious, buy 10 acres and build your road onto it and dig your well and scare away all the native creatures with your loud chainsaws and cars and waste gas commuting 100 miles a day so you can live in your rural home.

Yeah if you want to be green, pack yourself in tight. Manhattanites use far less resources per capita than any rural denizen...

You have no evidence for that sparky. I'm sure on the balance, Manhannittes use as much energy per capita as evil suburbanites.

[thuja]

You have no evidence for that sparky. I'm sure on the balance, Manhannittes use as much energy per capita as evil suburbanites.

Here's a great article talking about rural versus urban footprint by a well known permaculture expert Toby Hemenway...

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/3757

It really is common sense. From his article...

There, (in the country), we were twelve families on two miles of road, driveways hundreds of feet long, all served by long runs of phone and electric wire, individual septic systems and wells, each commuting long distances.

In the city, an equal group of twelve families use 10% of the road, wire, and pipe needed in my old neighborhood. Many neighbors bus or bike to work, or at worst, drive single-digit mileages.

[anador]

This is largely why the infrastructure in this country is in such sorry shape.

As compared to the taxes received per unit capita of provided improvement, suburban development is a diminishing return.

In fact in my town "suburban" of rehoboth ma. Every house that is built costs the town an average of 3000 dollars at the end of the quarter.

This largely relates to the fact that the school system is well regarded and families move in for the schools.

The town has to provide infrastructure to educate these young students, but as they age the kids and parents eventually move out. The tax dollars spent to educate the kids are not replaced. They pass through refunding none of the taxes, merely consuming town resources.

This is a specific situation, but it illustrates the problem with the system.

[Tyler_JC]

If the town is appealing enough, those children (or other children like them) will grow up, get good jobs, and move back to that same suburb.

It's not as if education dollars are wasted. They translate into higher future earners power of youngsters who can go on to pay the school taxes of their own children.

Education is an investment.

[anador]

This is not a hypothetical problem but something that is, in fact truly happening.

I worked for a time at the town offices.

But regardless of the education issue, the infrastructure required to sustain bedroom communities outweighs the tax revenue generated by development.

One of the reasons for this is that pod-zoning permits only homogenous uses over large areas.

99% of the town is off limits to anything but residential. It's illegal to diversify the tax base.

As more development occurs the population continually votes for more restrictive zoning, in what they believe is a way to protect the rural character remaining in the town.

The result is ever growing lot minimum sizes, shrinking frontage maximums, and ever smaller percentage coverage of the lot.

This stretches the infrastructure required per house more and more, such that now the town has to pay to maintain, plow, drain and bus kids for 500 feet of road per house in a new development.

When the collector roads and other surfaces are also considered this rises infrastructure costs to 1000 feet or more per residence.

This is a specific problem, though not as uncommon as one might think.

People are not voting these things down for two reasons.

The first is that the vast majority of people in the town do not attend town meetings and have no real feeling of civic connection to the place.

Many procedural votes are months behind because a quorum cannot be reached as too few people show up to the town meetings.

All town governments in ma.have a board of selectman system rather than a mayor, this requires all changes in town by-laws to be voted on by the public in a town meeting.

If no one shows up, nothing gets changed.

The second problem is, when quorum is reached it is usually not representative of the bulk of the population of the town. The aging retirees that populate parts of the area are the only ones with time an cantankerous interest in the process.

They vote down any new proposals that seek to improve the efficiency of development and continue to support aggressive restrictions in zoning code. This is not truly a malicious thing.

They believe they are in fact helping the town, But the irony is that the restrictive codes supposed to protect the town's rural character are in fact hastening its decline.

Think about it larger lot sizes just mean a development takes up more space in the end cutting trees, sowing hydroseed lawns and vinyl boxes over more of the landscape.

Sorry for the rant, i realize this is a bit off topic.