The American writer Henry David Thoreau is a hero of the environmental movement and the author of green classics such as "Walden". But he is also the protagonist of a little story that illustrates the Janus-faced nature of the modern environmental movement.
In 1844, young Thoreau fled the noise of the city to the country to spend undisturbed hours in the deep expanses of the primeval New England forest, enjoying nature and lounging around the campfire. But instead of doing something good for himself and nature, his fire spread to the neighboring treetops, causing a major fire and destroying more than a square kilometer of untouched nature.
Thoreau, once famous for saying, "I moved to the forest because I wanted to live mindfully, to get closer to real, real life," did nature a disservice by escaping the city. The American urban economist Ed Glaeser puts the moral of the story succinctly in a nutshell: "If you love nature, you'd better go to the city."
At first glance, this statement seems paradoxical: Aren't cities the epitome of an industrial octopus that pollutes everything, in which dirt, stench and fine dust are rampant? No, because the nine-armed pestilence is merely an invention of the Romantic era, when thinkers and poets like Thoreau or his contemporary Joseph von Eichendorff described cities as "overwhelming" and glorified rural regions.
But cities are an environmental success. The reason for this is their high concentration of population. The more people live together in one square kilometer, the more sustainable the city becomes. Because people in the country and in suburbs are mostly dependent on the car and have to drive many kilometers every day. In addition, they often live alone, only with their family or with a few parties in large single-family houses. Life in a rural idyll uses up a lot of natural space, takes up space for animal and plant species and is extremely CO2-intensive.
City dwellers, on the other hand, mostly live in energy-efficient multi-family houses that shoot up instead of wide. And they cover far fewer kilometers by car because they can get to a lot on foot, by bike or by tram. The concentrated urban lifestyle thus saves natural areas and promotes biodiversity. While densely built-up cities appear gray at first glance to many eco-lovers, their low carbon emissions make the world greener.
Unfortunately, despite the scientific consensus on the green benefits of dense cities, few ecos celebrate high population concentrations. Instead, one finds many Thoreausche romantics who seem to confuse the color green in the cityscape with the "green" city.
Symbolic of this is the so-called Nimby movement, whose English acronym stands for “not in my back yard”, well known in Berlin: “Not in my neighborhood!” Nimbys are citizens who try to prevent new construction projects such as skyscrapers because they don’t have them want in their area.
For example, a large apartment building project in Berlin-Pankow was stopped just last year because a group of Nimbys were concerned about the green spaces that were to be built on: the green spaces are an essential part of local environmental policy. The "Green Kiez Pankow" initiative lobbied against the project at the district assembly until politicians decided to "set up a development plan that protects the green spaces".
The Berlin example shows how Nimbys make the same mistake as Thoreau: They long for nature in the city, thus condemning and preventing population concentration and thereby pouring accelerant into the great ecological challenges.
The densely populated city, on the other hand, would be the right ecological fire extinguisher. State-of-the-art skyscrapers in the city center offer hundreds, possibly even thousands, of people carbon-efficient housing and jobs. They shorten travel distances, protect natural areas and protect biodiversity. Instead of wasting horizontal space in suburbs, living and working in modern cities is space-saving and literally in the air.
Recent studies from the United States show that doubling urban concentration can cut CO2 emissions from transport by almost half and emissions from residential emissions by more than a third. Far from the cliché of the densely populated concrete city, high-rise buildings or even skyscrapers also allow more space for green spaces in the city center. The more people live and work in the lofty heights of the inner city, the more space there is for greenery on the ground.
The residents of urban neighborhoods should stop making a romantic-rural bullerbü of their city and protect shreds of green spaces. Instead of tying themselves to inner-city trees with ropes, the residents of Prenzlauer Berg, Winterhude and Schwabing should rather take the ropes, pull construction machinery, excavators, rollers and cranes into the inner cities and let the green city sprout upwards.
The large ecological fires can only be extinguished with densely populated cities. For that we need skyscrapers and not Thoreau-style eco-romantics. Because supporters of skyscrapers take environmental science seriously, advocate for high population concentrations and unite under a common motto: higher, denser, greener.
Justus Enninga is a PhD candidate at King's College London and a senior research fellow at Prometheus. The Freedom Institute".
