Thank you! I've been happy to see a lot of environmental folks coming around to the idea that cities are, or at least can be, green. I'm a city girl born and raised, so this is very gratifying to me. Walking down the block to the metro to go to work sure beats sitting in a car in traffic every morning! I live in DC where, according to a new study, 11% of our residents walk to work--the highest in the nation. Now, we certainly aren't perfect here, but that says a lot, especially when compared to our suburbs--Northern Virginia has some of the worst sprawl I've ever been unfortunate enough to witness.

In any case, it's important that we all continue to find ways to make our cities greener, both here and internationally. It's really in all of our best interests to make our cities more livable, so that more people willingly live in them with a lower footprint. With over half of the world's population now residing in cities, maybe the time for the green city has finally come!

I believe that huge cities (a la NYC, and definitely not LA) are not the answer. I do believe that compact living is, but a typical urban dweller is much too far removed from nature to actually care about it, and thus creates a mentality problem. There's something about being a child and walking through woods on the weekends, being able to cross-country ski for a gym class, and smelling manure and tasting unpasturized milk (as nasty as it was) that sets a precedent for the way one thinks.

Smaller cities and towns that are designed smarter among forests, fields, and farms (an important point also) with a well-developed network of transit are a good way to go. Farms are inherent to food production and if more people worked on these, US overdevelopment problems would be much lower.

Delivery of food (and subsequent waste of it by people who are completely unaware of how it got there) to large places like NYC are a major part of the problem besides the immediate footprint of the dwelling and ability to use mass-transit.