Learn > Shades of Green, Part I: New England v. America

Congested urban centers Denver and Oakland; tiny Alabaman Hunstville; Honolulu; Berkeley; Oregon’s Eugene and Portland; St. Paul. What these disparate cities have in common is inclusion on National Geographic’s Top 10 Green Cities list of 2006. But the number of Northeast cities that made the grade? Zero.

Well, it’s only one list, and maybe the region will do better in the 2007 survey: in the more inclusive list of Top 25, Boston is a respectable number eleven, while Cambridge is number fifteen. Still, no New York; no Pittsburgh; no Philadelphia; no Hartford; no Providence. The Northeast, widely thought to be the stronghold of liberal politics in this country, is lagging behind the rest of the U.S. in internalizing what used to be thought of as the distinct provenance of the left: environmental protection.

How do you get to be Number One?

The National Geographic study handing out these seemingly arbitrary numbers asked officials of cities of 100,000 people or greater to rank certain criteria in order of importance to their constituents. Researchers then combined this information with data from third parties, like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), in order to determine a city’s place on the list. Air quality, green design, electricity efficiency and green space were among the qualities examined.

All of which is to say, this study is a decent index for judging what shade of green your hometown might be, since it takes into account how supportive the residents are of these measures and not just the happy effects wrought by a few keen-sighted councilmen. Looking at the study distributed geographically, the Top 25 are everywhere: West Coast, Southwest, Midwest, South, Mid-Atlantic and East Coast. California does have the strongest showing, with four cities dominating the list: Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco (though, really, it does seem unfair that one metro area gets three whole slots), as well as wine country’s Santa Rosa.

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