26 Oct 2009: Opinion Greenest Place in the U.S.? It’s Not Where
You Think Green rankings in the U.S. don’t tell the full story
about the places where the human footprint is lightest. If you
really want the best environmental model, you need to look at
the nation’s biggest — and greenest — metropolis: New York City.
In 2007, Forbes picked Vermont as the greenest state, a choice
consistent with conventional thinking about low-impact living.
Vermont has an abundance of trees, farms, backyard compost
heaps, and environmentally aware citizens, and it has no crowded
expressways or big, dirty cities. (The population of Vermont’s
largest city, Burlington, is just under 40,000.) Vermont also
ranks high in almost all the categories on which Forbes based
its analysis, such as the proportion of buildings certified by
the U. S. Green Building Council’s increasingly popular eco-
rating system, which is called Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design (LEED), and the implementation of public
policies that encourage energ