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Five years ago, in a New Yorker essay titled "Green Manhattan," the writer David Owen set out to show that, despite outward appearances, New York City is actually "the greenest community in the United States." He deftly disabused the magazine's urbanite readers of the commonly harbored fantasy that leaving the city for greener pastures -- a farmhouse in Vermont, say -- would be good for the environment.

"The key to New York's relative environmental benignity," Owen wrote, "is its extreme compactness." Manhattan alone packs 1.6 million people onto an island of 23 square miles -- a population density more than 800 times that of the nation as a whole. That degree of compactness "sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for the rest of America to sprawl into." No matter how well a house in the country exploits the latest sustainable, energy-efficient, and nature-based techniques for building, heating, or cooling, Owen argued, it just can't beat good, old-fashioned city living for a small carbon footprint.

The essay, which now serves as the first chapter of Green Metropolis, Owen's expanded consideration of the subject, makes the unassailable and, for some, unforgivable central point that city dwellers drive less, heat and cool smaller homes, and take up less of the planet's surface area than their non-urban counterparts. Owen learned this firsthand several years ago when he moved with his family to a small town in northwestern Connecticut: their consumption of electricity jumped from roughly 4,000 kilowatt-hours a year in New York to almost 30,000 kilowatt-hours outside New York that first year.

Owen believes we see our cities as "environmental crisis zones" because we are thinking in just two dimensions. Per square foot, New York City consumes more energy and generates more solid waste and greenhouse gases than most comparably sized areas elsewhere in the United States. But this assessment of New York's environmental impact fails to take into account just how many people are actually living there, stacked atop one another.

New York City residents in aggregate may use more water than all of the people in Vermont, but the city's population is at least 13 times bigger. "It's per-capita consumption that is telling," Owen writes. By that measure, Vermonters use almost four times as much gasoline: 545 gallons per person per year versus 146 for all New York City residents and just 90 for those in Manhattan. Vermont ranks 11th in per-capita gasoline consumption, while New York State -- thanks to the city -- ranks last. The average Vermonter produces more solid waste than the average New York City resident, consumes four times the electricity, and has a larger carbon footprint.

Owen spends most of his time arguing the more general point that "barring a massive reduction in the earth's population, dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remedies for some of the world's most discouraging environmental ills, including climate change." Dense cities "are scalable," he writes, "while sprawling suburbs and isolated straw-bale eco-redoubts are not." And Manhattan, with its space-efficient grid pattern and decidedly vertical composition, is the best example of this intense scalability.

For Owen, the litmus test of a green lifestyle is how well it frees us from the oil-dependent automobile. Anything that encourages people to spread out leads to more driving, longer distances that goods must travel, and a tendency toward larger and less fuel-efficient houses. When people live closer together, mass transit is more practical, walking becomes more feasible, and homes are easier to stack and insulate against the elements. If only Americans would abandon the anti-urban fantasy, romanticized by everyone from Henry David Thoreau to Henry Ford, and accept the hard facts, Owen writes, the sooner the rest of the country could be made "more like Manhattan."

Owen revels in the counterintuitive argument. Big Agriculture is actually good, because it allows people to crowd into urban zones and be serviced from the periphery. No matter how green a hybrid vehicle, it's still burning oil, a limited and polluting fuel. Not only should the automobile-liberated mass transit users of New York be celebrated for their behavior; car-commuting suburbanites should be punished. After all, any attempt to make commuting easier or cheaper -- car-pool lanes, higher-efficiency vehicles, better roadways -- ultimately lowers the incentive to seek alternative means of transportation. Commuting should be made "more infuriating," not less.

This is the logic Owen pursues throughout his book. People need to stop looking for ways to compensate for their essentially polluting behaviors and instead just stop doing them. It's the simple things that matter: less driving, less air-conditioning, smaller homes, fewer lawns. The rest -- from carbon offsets to solar panels -- is at best icing on the cake, and more than likely a dangerous distraction from the efforts that actually do something.

Owen criticizes the showpiece work of architects like "green guru" William McDonough, whose Gap building in San Bruno, California, utilizes many innovations to promote energy efficiency but sits in a location that requires employees to drive to work. The Gap has compensated by providing buses, but "no bus is as green as an elevator." More energy would be saved, Owen argues, if the Gap had built an entirely less innovative high-rise in a more central location, within easy reach of mass transit. Likewise, Owen blasts new techniques of "vertical farming" as inefficient uses of valuable city space. Farming may be fun, but even if gardens are stacked in the style of a high-rise, they reduce the density of apartment dwellers and put people at greater distances from school, work, and services.

This argumentative strategy quickly wears thin. As often as not, Owen's examples seem forced. He deems the local-farming movement environmentally questionable compared with the supermarket model because he had to drive 30 miles to find locally grown raspberries. (Had Owen joined a Community Supported Agriculture farm, those raspberries would have found their way to his town square along with most of the other food he needed.) Meanwhile, he ignores Big Agriculture's role in topsoil depletion, its wanton use of antibiotics and pesticides, its waste of scarce freshwater, its destruction of coastal environments through manure runoff, and its encouragement of high-meat diets.

Owen also gets into a bit of trouble when he attempts to generalize the New York model to the entire world. It may make sense for Manhattanites to import their food from beyond the island's borders. But Owen extends that logic to the planet as a whole, criticizing developing nations for limiting the import and export of foodstuffs. According to the free market axioms of the World Bank, which Owen cites, those policies drive food prices higher. It would be better, he argues, if these nations simply bought their food from places like the United States, where grain can be grown so much more efficiently.

The World Bank argument is backward, however, designed to promote open markets and not the humans whose livelihood depends on them. Farming is so difficult in many developing nations because their land has been polluted by multinational corporations whose plants they were forced to accept along with World Bank loans. Subsistence farming has become impossible in places where it once was quite practical. Oversights like that keep Owen's thoughtful magazine piece from "scaling" into a full-fledged environmental treatise.

Owen is better at pointing out the faulty logic underlying our misperceptions about cities than he is at presenting ways to make cities more attractive or affordable alternatives to the inefficient sprawl of the suburbs. What he neglects to acknowledge is that for many, living beyond the city limits is less a lifestyle choice than an economic necessity. For all its efficiencies, New York City -- and Green Manhattan, in particular -- is simply too expensive for most Americans, particularly those trying to raise children.

Between the publication of Owen's original article and today, the problem has not been the wealthy moving out of Manhattan to the wasteful suburbs, but the middle class being outpriced by successive waves of gentrifiers. Those who do move out of the city, like Owen himself, may also have their own valid, if environmentally selfish, reasons for doing so: cleaner air, less noise pollution, decent public schools, and constant contact with the colors and rhythms of nature. It's actually nice out there. (Owen justifies his own abandonment of the city for a quaint village with dirt roads with the logic that neither he nor his wife have jobs that require commuting, and that their house already existed, so someone might as well live in it.)

It makes sense to disabuse wealthy people of the notion that leaving the city to spend a million dollars or more on a state-of-the-art, fuel-efficient estate next to a glacier-fed stream is good for the planet. It's an argument that has been made before, as Steven Johnson did in The Ghost Map, and it could certainly stand to be made again.