Perhaps car-free parks would be a partial reward for the green living New Yorkers already practice. A recent New Yorker article entitled "Green Manhattan" spurred cheers from transit advocates and urban environmentalists. It details how city dwelling is more environment-friendly than suburban or rural living, since urbanites take up less space, use public transit, consume less energy, and buy fewer consumer goods. Author David Owen notes that Phoenix, the country’s sixth largest city and one of its fastest growing, covers two hundred times the land area of Manhattan, with just over twice the population. Conversely, if eight million New Yorkers lived at the density of Owen’s town in Connecticut, they would fill up the six New England states, New Jersey, and Delaware.

An implication Owen explicitly draws is that while much of the environmental movement has focused on issues like clean fuels, solar panels, and recycling, Americans continue to destroy nature with low density development that creates more traffic and fuel consumption. Reducing suburban sprawl and revitalizing cities has been secondary to other environmental issues, even though is has a much larger impact on overall environmental health.  "By far the worst damage we Americans do to the planet arises not from the newspapers we throw away but from the eight hundred and fifty million or so gallons of oil we consume every day," Owen writes.  

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