I would add: New York is also northern New Jersey, the Hudson Valley, Long Island, and southwestern Connecticut.

An urban ecosystem does not stop at a city boundary line - a line someone drew on a map for political purposes.

Where do you think all the people who work in those skyscrapers live? Manhattan has three million jobs and less than a million residents in the workforce.

Any ecological assessment of NYC must include the people who drive for hours every day to fill our office buildings, the electricity plants in Pennsylvania that power the city, the trucks that drive across every state in the country to fill our grocery and retail stores, and the fact that the nearest landfill with any space in it is over 300 miles away in Virginia.

To me it's annoying to see cities with 500,000 people and metro regions of 2 million talk about how they were able to get their rivers slightly cleaner than the ones around NY when there are 8 million people in this city and 21 million people in the metropolitan area.

It's going to take a long time to further clean these waters. Permeable pavement, green roofs, etc. can reduce storm runoff and help prevent storm overflows. If you are worried about water quality, the best way to improve it is by reducing runoff. PlaNYC and the City department of planning are trying to make parking lots more permeable and there are already several green roof projects. The key is to build as many green roofs as possible and encourage legislation to make this happen.

Also, wouldn't it be nice to have a cap over the cross bronx expressway, capping and filtering all that air pollution?

I would attribute the pollution of the rivers to NYC's antiquated combined sewer overflow (CSO) system, which overloads the system with rainwater during storm events, rather than to lack of capacity by water treatment plants. The storm water runoff is a product of too many impermeable surfaces -- roads, driveways, pavement, everywhere. One solution is more permeable paving. The other is using landscape to capture water in soil. Transportation can play a big role -- by adding more greenstreets, landscaped medians, buffers, and greenroofs to all possible infrastructure.

What changes could improve the water?

Too often we confuse "green things" like clean streets and parks with things that reduce our impact on the global environment, such as not owning a car, living in an apartment rather than a detached house, and sharing resources in the most efficient way.

Suburbs have tons of green space by they are some of the lest friendly places to the environment. In NYC you see the trash you generate right there on the curb, you see the impact that you have because the results of human activity are right there in your face.

The most important thing for NYC, in terms of carbon impact is to continue to improve and expand public transit and to get some kind of freight rail link set up so that we can reduce the number of trucks in the city and decrease the amount of carbon produced when we ship goods.

Density is good, shared resources are good-- they are simple solutions compared to solar panels and hybrid cars-- I'm not saying that looking at cleaner sources of energy isn't at all important, I'm just saying that if we condensed they way we lived and planned so that more people could stop driving it'd have a much greater impact faster than any other idea out there.

Wanting people to act like they care and about something and "go through the motions of green awareness" is pretty ridiculous and condescending and won't get anything done. If we build attractive mass transit, rebuild streetscapes, rebuild powerplants, and build attractive efficient housing we won't need to go through the motions of green awareness, we'll be living in a sustainable way.

In addition, the weight of trash per capita disposed of in the City has gone down every year since 1940 (records have been kept). So there really isn't a "trash crisis," while there IS a climate crisis.

The New Yorker article clearly shows that the average New Yorker leads a low-impact life. Most New Yorkers don't talk about living green, or make any specific action other than choosing to live here. And very few of us have the kind of "green" aesthetic that involves living in a house made of old tires in New Mexico.

Green living is the best for the environment, since it makes a difference right now. Green actions (the "strides" mentioned in the Grist article) are good, and I'd like to see New York make more strides. Without living or action, green talk is just a bunch of hot air, and that's not going to help reverse climate change.

I've spent a significant portion of my life among green-talking back-to-the-land hippies running over deer and possums in their Subaru Wagons on the way to their yurts. Most of them are very nice people, but I'd rather live among clueless New Yorkers and be able to walk to the supermarket.