Governor David Paterson recently called New York City the Greenest City in the United States. He pointed to the relatively low per-capita consumption of energy and products compared to the rest of United States, ignoring the fact that New York City is one of the most polluted areas in all of North America, and the hazardous byproduct of such a massive civilization.

New York City's low per capita greenhouse gas emissions, low resource consumption rates per capita and low solid waste production to capita initially appear quite impressive. Indeed, compared to many more rural parts of upstate, New York appears very green at least as far as per capita impact on the planet. Yet, the compounded impact of New York City and the indirect costs it imposes both to Upstate New York and the nation as a whole is enormous.

The state's biggest city benefits by it's close aggregation of people that allows greater sharing of resources. It takes less steel per room to create a skyscraper, then a two story house, less energy to move a train filled with people then private car. Yet put together, the impact of all those people is so outrageously big that humans can not even come to grasp the impact of it on our environment.

As you drive down to the city, you see a sickening orange haze from all the nitrous oxide pollution in the air that is causing smog. The sky is never as clear downstate as it is upstate, the waters in the Hudson River are much more polluted down by the city then they are upstate. The now closed Fresh Kill landfill, is the world's largest, and now the city dumps it's trash on distant farmland. By any measure, New York City is not sustainable or even a good influence on the environment.

Cities are inherently unnatural and inhuman. New York City takes this to an even larger scale, and is so big that it's direct impact can be seen from people far away in the sky. New York City even on distant satelight photos is one of the few places that appears gray on an overwhelmingly green and blue planet. Many people in New York City have no real grasp of the world or how life exists outside of the urban.

New York City will never be a sustainable city. It will never generate the energy need to supply so such a massive group of people from the surrounding land, or feed them from nearby farms. It will always require negative impacts on far away land, while products are fed into this massive machine that is beyond any human scale. New York City will always be one of the most unsustainable places in North America.