Episode 14: Noah Gallagher Shannon on Sustainable Living and the Uruguay Example

The Sustainable City

In his at once inspiring and dispiriting piece in the New York Times Magazine from November 2022 entitled “What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay,” Noah Gallagher Shannon writes:

“This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them. . . . [T]he problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. No model exists for creating such a world, which is partly why paralysis has set in at so many levels. The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?”

Noah explores this pivotal question and more in this episode of the Sustainable City podcast. What’s the leap in imagination, if not logic, required from the Uruguay example of sustainable living to the US? And are we kidding ourselves as Americans to think that we could ever live with a carbon footprint less than our current generation enjoys, about 25 tons per capita, which would be a first and, to some, the beginning of the end of the American Dream, where more is better and most is best, especially our freedom to choose how we want to live, consume, travel. Don’t tread on me, or my 6000 pound SUV, seems to be our latest American credo.

Noah Gallagher Shannon is a reporter and writer based in Colorado. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American and elsewhere. Noah’s stories have been cited for awards by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Science Writers and others, and he’s appeared on The Daily, BBC and NBC Nightly News. Noah’s reported widely throughout the US, Latin America and Africa, and written about skateboarding, violent thunderstorms, cinematography, corporate private security and other subjects.
He's currently at work on a book for Random House about track and field, 1970s West Texas and a group of young athletes from East Africa who changed the sports world.