David Owen > Quotes

“The crucial fact about sustainability is that it is not a micro phenomenon: there can be no such thing as a “sustainable” house, office building, or household appliance, for the same reason that there can be no such thing as a one-person democracy or a single-company economy.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“One of the least meaningful and most overused words in the English language is 'sustainability.' For most Americans, it means something like 'pretty much the way I live right now, though maybe with a different car.' A good test of any activity or product described as sustainable is to multiply it by 300 million (the approximate current population of the United States) and then by 9 or 10 billion (the expected population of the world by midcentury) and see if it still seems green. This is not an easy test to pass”
― David Owen, The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse

“We all tend to think of ourselves as the last unsinning inhabitants of whatever place we live in. We don't usually recognize ourselves as participants in its destruction.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“Water problems in the western United States, when viewed from afar, can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: all we need to do is turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers.”
― David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

“Placing people and their daily activities close together doesn't just make the people more interesting; it also makes them greener.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“There are too many people in the world, and too many more are on the way. This is an issue that, in the United States, both conservatives and liberals have often seemed eager to avoid--for conservatives, perhaps, because it raises questions about family size, birth control, and abortion, and for liberals because it raises questions about immigration. Every one of the world's environmental problems is made worse by increases in the number of humans, and, most of all, by increases in the number of Americans, since U.S. residents--whether manufactured locally or imported from abroad--have the largest energy and carbon footprints in the world.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“the river functions more like a fourteen-hundred-mile-long canal. The legal right to use every gallon is owned or claimed by someone—in fact, more than every gallon, since theoretical rights to the Colorado’s flow, known to water lawyers as “paper water,” greatly exceed its actual flow, known as “wet water.” That imbalance has been exacerbated by the drought in the western United States, which began just before the turn of the millennium, but even if the drought ended tomorrow, problems would remain.”
― David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

“Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to protect what we haven't ruined already, to conserve what we haven't used up, to restore as much as possible of what we're destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children's lifetimes and beyond.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“Because the cost of energy is blended into the cost of everything, changes in the cost of energy have the power to transform lives.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“A few years ago, I made a serious effort to get better about turning off the lights in my house, and my wife’s and my electricity consumption went down by a noticeable amount. But our overall energy consumption didn’t fall, because the money we saved on our electric bills helped to pay for a big anniversary trip that we took to Europe, and that means that the real impact of our reduction in household electricity use was merely to transform natural gas into jet fuel. As we get better at doing things, we do more things.”
― David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

“WHILE HOOVER DAM was under construction, California began building the Colorado River Aqueduct and Parker Dam. Arizona’s governor, Benjamin B. Moeur, viewed the dam as an act of theft. Like many Arizonans, he worried that Southern California would suck the river dry before Arizona was in a position to divert almost any of its own share, whatever that turned out to be, so he sent a small National Guard detachment to the construction site to make sure that neither the workers nor the dam touched land on the Arizona side of the river—a challenge for a dam builder, you would think. The National Guardsmen borrowed a small ferryboat from Nellie Trent Bush, a state legislator who lived in the town of Parker, a few miles downstream. As the boat approached the site, it became entangled in a cable attached to a construction barge, and the National Guardsmen had to be rescued by their putative enemies, the people working on the dam. Moeur later sent a message to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in which he said that he had “found it necessary to issue a proclamation establishing martial law on the Arizona side of the river at that point and directing the National Guard to use such means as may be necessary to prevent an invasion of the sovereignty and territory of the State of Arizona.” By that time, his National Guard detachment had grown to include many more soldiers, as well as a number of trucks with machine guns mounted on them. Moeur also made Nellie Bush “Admiral of the Arizona Navy.” Nellie”
― David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

“The greatest environmental gains from population density arise once destinations become so close to one another that people elect to get around all by themselves - the urban-transit equivalent of the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining.”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“The gourmet infatuation with tiny vegetables has water and energy implications. So does the preference for organic produce, which, because the yields are lower, requires both more water and more land, thereby encouraging “agricultural sprawl,”
― David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

“According to an estimate cited by the U.S. Geological Survey, if you removed all the salt from all the world’s seawater and spread it evenly on land, it would cover the entire non-ocean surface of the earth to a depth of more than five hundred feet.”
― David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

“The San Diego County Water Authority recently became the second American water utility with a seawater desalination plant, in Carlsbad. That facility has twice the output of Tampa Bay’s and is expected to meet roughly eight percent of its service area’s projected water demand by 2020.”
― David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

“Locavorism is appealing as an environmental strategy because it permits its practitioners to believe they're doing good for the world by doing good for themselves, and to recast their consumption and nutrition preferences as contributions to humanity....”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“Stacking and concentrating dwellings and businesses is the easiest way to make communities truly efficient, and it is the only way to achieve deep reductions in per-capita energy use and carbon output in large, prosperous populations...”
― David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

“With good land-use management, water scarcity can even be a useful tool for containing the heedless sprawl of human habitation. Unfortunately,”
― David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River