It’s Easy to Say it’s Easy Being Green: David Owen’s “The Conundrum”

Like a green Gladwell or Taleb, the writer David Owen loves unintuitive ideas about the environment (the greenest place in the U.S. isn’t Portland but New York City, traffic can be a good thing). But his newest one is even harder to swallow: the gains we make in technological advances, like energy efficiency, often cause overall energy use to rise rather than fall. That principle extends to our many gestures at sustainability — Owen’s definition: “Pretty much the way I live right now, though maybe with a different car” — to say nothing of recent efforts at – or trends toward – local, urban farming, which often are more a sign of luxury than charity.

And waiting for brand new solutions or breakthroughs, like better batteries or small nuclear reactors is a distraction, Owen argues. The good news, he reports in his new book, The Conundrum, is that we already have the technology and knowledge we need to live sustainably. (See a book trailer above.) A smattering of vigorous activism aside, like the protests that helped kill the Keystone XL pipeline, public interest in sustainable practices is low, and action in Washington is in shorter supply, even as the warning signs about the damage of climate change, for instance, have never loomed larger. Watching this creepy video won’t fix anything, of course, but it’s a good reminder that even if we didn’t get ourselves into various ecological conundrums, we’re the ones who can either get ourselves out. Or dig in deeper.