Clean energy, public transit and local food make these 10 big cities the greenest of them all.

Honking cars emit foul black clouds, skyscrapers blot out the sun, litter lines the gutters and healthy green space can be hard to come by. But in many of America’s biggest cities, these negative traits are being eclipsed by clean, efficient public transit, bike-friendly infrastructure, multiplying trees, reliance on renewable energy and a fierce pride in locally-produced products. Slashing greenhouse gas emissions and coming close to zero waste is no easy feat for a metropolis with a population of at least 250,000, but these 10 cities – from Boston to San Francisco – prove that sustainability is possible on the largest of scales, in good economic times and bad.

10. Boston, Massachusetts

Representing the entire East Coast in impressive renewable energy stats, Boston boosted its solar power with the Solar Boston program and counts wind among its top three sources of electricity, with a turbine on city hall and more slated for several public schools. Other big plans include turning fall leaves and other yard clippings into power and fertilizer with a new biogas facility, and using recycled trash to power homes. For those residents who don’t rely exclusively on the nation’s most utilized public transportation systems, taxis will soon be another green option as they’re all required to go hybrid by 2015. New bike lanes and 250 bike racks have increased Boston’s pedal power, and the city saves a whopping $400,000 a year thanks to LED traffic lights.

9. Denver, Colorado

The Mile-High City is an outdoor wonderland with 14,000 acres of parkland in the mountains, 200 parks within the city limits, 850 miles of dedicated bike trails and 29 recreation centers. Denver preserves and protects its active, natural heritage with conservation measures like a no-pesticide policy in its parks and the Mile-High Million program, which plans to plant one million trees in the metropolitan area by 2025. For a city in a semi-arid region, Denver is adept at managing its water consumption, offering residents incentives to keep their usage down. Any concrete going into new city projects must be green, and Denver has also made some significant renewable energy goals, hoping to run on 20 percent wind power by 2020.

8. San Jose, California

Maybe it’s not California’s best-known or most-beloved city, but San Jose deserves some serious accolades for its clean-tech goals and innovations. Angling for the title of clean tech capital of America, San Jose has already created over 25,000 jobs in green industries and actively works to lure green businesses to the city. In fact, after Tesla Motors relocated its headquarters there in 2009, San Jose began rapidly developing infrastructure for electric vehicles including plug-in charging stations. It’s home to many of the nation’s top solar manufacturers as well as the world’s largest testing facility for solar products.

In a bid to become a zero-waste city, San Jose has managed to divert 62 percent of its waste to recycling and plans to reuse 100 percent of its waste water for landscaping within the next 15 years. The city’s Green Vision plan also includes a goal to reduce per capita energy use by 50 percent and get 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources within the same time period.

7. Oakland, California

Hop on a zero-emissions bus for a tour of one of America’s model green cities, checking out dozens of urban farms, renewable energy projects and a wide variety of eco-friendly businesses. Oakland is working to rise above high levels of unemployment and poverty to position itself as a leader in sustainability, particularly in the areas of local food, green jobs and renewable energy. Taking cues from its bigger Bay Area sister San Francisco (and sometimes even eclipsing it), Oakland gets 17% of its energy from renewable sources like hydroelectric, biomass and wind, and in 2007, it won the City Solar Award from NorCal Solar for having more solar power wattage than any other big city in Northern California.

The city aims to lower its greenhouse gas emissions to 36 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020, the most ambitious target in the nation. It’s also home to Van Jones’ Ella Baker Center, one of several local organizations that focuses on training low-income adults for jobs in green industries.

6. Austin, Texas

Austin may be best known for its vibrant music scene, but this city shines just as bright in the sustainability arena. Not only is Texas’ capital city bicycle and pedestrian friendly, with plenty of mass transit and even hybrid plug-in stations, but its building codes encourage green practices and home energy audits are mandatory when selling a house. Austin is also the largest local government to run on 100% renewable energy, and by 2020 the city aims to have 30% of its residential, commercial and industrial energy consumption shifted to clean sources.

Birthplace of Whole Foods, Austin is brimming with organic restaurants and natural food stores, including America’s first zero-waste, packaging-free grocery store, In.gredients. If you’ve never been there and imagine the entire state of Texas as a dusty wasteland full of tumbleweeds, banish that notion from your mind, at least as it pertains to Austin – this city is surprisingly lush, offering stunning outdoor settings for biking, kayaking, swimming or just relaxing.

5. New York, New York

The fact that the Big Apple can compete with much smaller cities like Austin and Oakland is reason enough to land it in the top five greenest cities. It’s undoubtedly no easy task to keep a teeming metropolis of over 8 million residents from turning into an environmental nightmare, and while New York City can’t boast quite the same statistics on clean air or water conservation, it excels in public transportation and does surprisingly well on greenhouse gases and public park space. It’s the city’s very density that makes it so efficient, with just 20 percent of the population driving their own vehicles on a regular basis. Tall, jam-packed skyscrapers are more energy efficient than single-family homes, and of course, they use up a lot less land. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is further kicking up the city’s eco credentials with tree-planting programs, hybrid taxis and a program that phases out heavy heating oils.

4. Chicago, Illinois

Boardwalks, parks, nature centers, organic restaurants, green hotels and lots of eco-friendly shops: Chicago definitely has a lot to boast about.  The United Nations chose it as one of just two U.S. cities for UN-Habitat’s 100 Cities Initiative for its work over the past two decades addressing climate change and healthier, greener living in general. Since 1989 the city has seen 500,000 trees planted, 10,000 bike racks installed, 114 miles of bike lanes established and 900 acres of abandoned, polluted land returned to productive use.

Chicago’s City Hall boasts a stunning rooftop garden, adding to more than 2.5 million square feet of green roofs within the city limits – more than all other U.S. cities combined. A downtown airport was demolished to make way for a 100-acre park, adding to the city’s reputation as a testing ground for reducing the urban heat island effect. The city is also making headway on a 2008 climate goal that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent come 2050.

3. Seattle, Washington

All of those waterways surrounding Seattle don’t just give it its postcard-perfect beauty and contribute to its wet, mild climate – they also provide over 90 percent of the city’s power in the form of hydroelectricity, and more low-impact hydropower plants are planned to reduce impact on wildlife like salmon. The city’s two global warming initiatives, Seattle Climate Action Now and Seattle Climate Partnership, have distributed thousands of home energy efficiency kits to residents and urged over 100 local businesses to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. And when something like blackberry brambles threaten to overtake Seattle City Light’s substations, the utility employs a chemical-free solution: goats.

2. Portland, Oregon

Seattle’s carbon-neutral electricity makes it the star of the Pacific Northwest when it comes to climate change, but Portland has it beat in all-around sustainability and green living. A quarter of Portland’s workforce commutes by bike, carpool or public transportation with about 9,000 city residents biking downtown every day. The first city to adopt a climate change action plan, Portland offers free plug-in parking spots for electric vehicles and has more LEED-certified residential towers than any other city in the U.S. Portland is beating back sprawl with zoning regulations that encourage dense urban growth while leaving farmland for agricultural use. And on top of all of this, Portland has rightfully earned a reputation as a laid-back, eco-friendly place to live thanks in part to a lively local food and beer scene.

1. San Francisco, California

While Portland and Seattle are snapping at its heels, San Francisco manages to hang on to its title as the greenest city in America for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that city residents seem to have concern for the environment encoded into their DNA. Voters routinely approve aggressive green programs like banning plastic grocery bags and financing renewable energy for public facilities. San Francisco diverts a jaw-dropping 70 percent of its waste thanks to mandatory recycling and composting, and urban farms produce 20 times more food than the city’s residents can consume in a year. Nearly half of all San Francisco residents bike, walk or take public transit every day. Despite being more populated, San Francisco has a lower annual output of greenhouse gases than its Pacific Northwest competition, and is on track to reach its goal of 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Images: Tony the Misfit, Manu_H, dherrera_96, Wikimedia Commons, Ella Baker Center, Andreanna Moya, njt4148, compujeramey, wordridden, periwinklekog, kevincole

Lara Miller brings back the fun of wearing shorts this summer.

The perfect summer short? Does it exist? Lara Miller has found the way to our hearts with her side zippered Jay Short. Made from hemp and organic cotton stretch twill, the fabric is light enough to carry you through summer but thick enough not to show all the BBQ feasting you’ll be doing. Plus, with a little stretch and a whole lot of style, you’ll be able to tackle those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer with ease.

$165

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

Instant cities and a not-so-Jetsonian future.

As a kid, I took it for granted that by now we’d be riding around in space cars, á la The Jetsons, flying from place to place with our feet hardly ever touching the ground. According to John D. Kasarda, professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, and Greg Lindsay, writer and co-author of Aerotropolis: the Way We’ll Live Next, daily air travel is here – though not in the way we once imagined.

Instant cities with matching airports are popping up at record speed, drawing vast pools of money and people, but it’s hardly the Jetson vision of high-speed space bubbles propelling people across town. An aerotropolis, says Kasarda, is defined as “an airport-integrated region, extending as far as sixty miles from the inner clusters of hotels, offices, distribution and logistics facilities.” No futuristic fantasies here, just a new approach to how we get to and work with cities.

Kasarda has spent hundreds of hours up in the air, touching down just long enough in places like Bangkok and Detroit to discuss cities of the future with eager entrepreneurs and government officials.

Since ancient times, cities have been built near transportation centers, whether they are on rivers like the Tigris and Euphrates, ports like Bordeaux, or the railroad yards of Chicago. Kasarda and Lindsay’s book makes the case that a city like Chicago is what it is now because of O’Hare (up until recently, the busiest airport in the world).

Yesterday’s Chicago is today’s Dubai, or Shenzhen, or Memphis. Yes, Memphis, thanks to Federal Express, which had no small part in turning the area near Graceland into the cargo capitol of the United States. Cosmopolitan Dubai is practically old news, though it’s interesting that New York University now has a campus in this Gulf state.

Dubai’s Atlantis Hotel is considered an architectural wonder.

Shenzhen is a textbook aerotropolis. Located on the Pearl River Delta, north of Hong Kong, it is easily accessible by train, plane and ship. A former fishing village, its port is now strewn with containers carrying electronics and other goods leaving and coming to China. The airport is a major hub for commerce and inter-Asian travel. It has had its own stock exchange since 1990 and is a modern city in every way, serving as a model for future aerotropolis’s in China.

Downtown Shenzhen

Other Asian nations are racing to create efficient, prosperous urban dwellings. New Songdo City, a green, LEED certified city, is being built on a man-made island off the coast of South Korea. By the time it is finished in 2015, it will have a replica of New York’s Central Park, a Jack Nicklaus Golf Course, South Korea’s tallest building and all the business and lifestyle amenities needed to attract foreign businesses. One of its most important features is that its airport will serve as a gateway to the rest of Asia and South Asia without being terribly far from Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

The authors believe the most futuristic cities will be ones modeled on the aerotropolis, with the purpose of providing jobs, creating growth and adding to national prosperity. For builders and planners in renowned cosmopolitan cities like London, New York and San Francisco, this rise of the aero-city may sound inauthentic, perhaps even fatal to the city as we know it. But given that 80% of the world will be living in one by 2050, the notion of what makes a city hospitable is bound to change.

Image: rickyqi, Lori Greig, Phil

ColumnA new website lets you scope out new restaurants…and friends.

Running short on foodie friends? Not to worry, there’s always the internet.

Dating sites have gone from fringe to norm, but in the social media age, the internet isn’t just being used for finding soul mates; it’s the perfect spot to track down your new FBFF (foodie best friend forever), as well. Enter Grubwithus, a new website devoted to “social meals.” Combine food rating website with personal friend search and you get the idea.

The site works with select restaurants to coordinate family-style meals for the Grubwithus community. Users then make reservations for a particular meal, and once they have done so, can see who else is attending. Which means, you can probably get in a bit of Google stalking before your dinner ensues. Residents of Chicago and San Francisco can get in on the action, and New Yorkers will soon join the list.

It’s an interesting concept, particularly for those in the “40-hour a week and over” crowd where time is of the essence, not just for dating but simply for socializing. And although Grubwithus might be the first of its kind to organize this kind of thing virtually, prix-fixe group dinners aren’t new. For example, in Portland, the owners of Detour Cafe and Ford Food and Drink offer two dinners a month, where $35 scores you a four-course meal with other like-minded folks.

Whether it’s online or not, getting taking part in these type of events might just be because of our inherent need to connect with people, and food is the perfect vehicle for doing so.

Once you’ve gained a culinary crush or two, just make sure you don’t become a stereotypical poster child for the Foodie series. “This is my new friend, Kate, and she loves roasted beets with fresh chevre and rosemary just as much as I do!” Word to the wise, foodie.

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, taking a conscious look at what’s bubbling in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Image: vanz, Grubwithus

Chicago is getting its very first Chick-fil-A in April and people are pretty close to losing their minds as the fast food giant expands across the Midwest. Chicago has enough problems with its collective weight (thanks, pizza), and Chick-fil-A’s staunch stance against gay marriage makes me queasy. The company also has this creepy statement of purpose: “To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us and to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.”

That’s a heavy sandwich.

With apologies to my transplanted, salivating southern friends,  I know we’ve done you wrong with the weather and we sort of owe you one but we don’t need another fast food restaurant and we definitely don’t need to welcome a business that hides behind Christian values to fuel bigotry.

While I am a vegetarian, I’m not made of stone. The company’s Eat More Chikin campaign is super cute. And I get that people have fond, buttery childhood memories that include the popular sandwiches. But we’re not six, and fast food chicken sandwiches are terrible for both your body and the planet.

I’m not saying you have to shell out for Karyn’s Cooked every day, but there’s a Subway across the street from the new location, so if animal rights and environmentally conscious eating aren’t your things, please, think of your ass! We’re all smart enough to know that 920 calories for lunch (original sandwich, medium fries and medium sweet tea) is too many. Sure, you can order a salad, but you’re at Chick-fil-A. Who orders the salad?

Eating your politics isn’t for everyone and it’s easy to go overboard with the food thing (see the Portlandia episode featuring Colin, the chicken), but there are some companies with politics so against everything I believe in that I simply can’t give them my money. Remember back in the day when Domino’s founder Tom Monaghan started donating to Operation Rescue and a bunch of doctors who provided abortions were killed? Chick-fil-A is one of these companies for me.

The company is very open about their Christian roots, and I like religious freedom. It’s a private company with every right to be closed on Sundays and give people discounts for going to church or whatever. But Chick-fil-A’s charitable arm, the WinShape Foundation, loves to hate on gay marriage and has close ties to the National Organization for Marriage’s Ruth Institute and “ex-gay” activists Alan Chambers and David Blankenhorn.

The Ruth Institute and the National Organization for Marriage’s line is that same-sex marriage destroys the fabric of society, and they’ve worked hard to pass legislation banning gay marriage or taking existing marriage equality rights away from same-sex couples. Chambers, of Exodus International, is a proponent of ex-gay therapy, which perpetuates the idea that there is something wrong with being gay – and after a year of highly-publicized teen suicides linked to bullying and homophobia, can’t we all agree that telling people there’s something wrong with them is a bad idea?

But will denying yourself the joy of Chick-fil-A make the world better for gay people? Across the country, college kids say it will and in Florida, Indiana and New York,  students have rallied to get the franchises kicked off campus. Change.org has a series of stories worth taking a look at but it’s too soon to say what will happen in Chicago. The Windy City Times is the best local source for news about the issue and has raised some good points. If there are gay and lesbian Chick-fil-A employees, none have complained of discrimination but that could be because there aren’t any. As the paper points out, the corporation openly favors married people and most of its locations are in states that do not recognize gay marriage, so potential gay and lesbian employees would appear to be automatically out of the running. Because Chicago’s human rights ordinance includes sexual orientation and gender identity, that could also be a key factor as the community decides whether to organize a boycott.

I know many of my butter-bun loving pals can’t wait for April and the chance for a little southern comfort, but organized or not, I’ll personally be boycotting Chick-fil-A.

Image: iheartmacaroni

If you love beautiful clothing with a conscience and haven’t heard of Lara Miller, it’s time to brush-up on your eco fashion facts.

Chicago’s eco-darling and one of the sustainable design world’s pioneers, Lara is tireless in her pursuit to design, encourage, promote and re-create herself. And as executive director of Chicago Fashion Incubator, she mentors and supports up and coming designers.

Her own fresh designs are poster children for modular clothing, having the ability to be wrapped, reversed, and most distinguishably flipped to reveal an entirely different look – watch this video to see what I mean.

Manufactured in Chicago, Lara’s work is strongly influenced by the city’s architectural and cultural landscape while being fashioned from eco-friendly fibers such as organic cotton, hand-loomed bamboo, hemp and vegan silk. Lara says her designs are created with a playful geometry that connects to the personalities of the women who wear them.

“I see my company as a way to support my community – not only by using organic materials while adhering to a “˜green’ lifestyle and workspace – but also by manufacturing locally and working to sustain the sewn products industry in Chicago.”

St. Lara, I have no problem connecting with your line at EcoSalon Shops! on June 4th and will, I swear, finally slip into one of your dresses.

Image: Courtesy of Ecouterre

A “green alley” movement is gaining momentum in cities across the country. All I can say it’s about time. Getting rid of the dark, smelly, and often scary and dangerous places in the big cities will go a long way to making cities not only safer but also cleaner and greener.

Here’s how three cities are turning their alleys green:

Chicago’s Green Alley program began in 2006 as part of  Mayor Richard Daley’s environmental and beautification campaign. One of its goals was to eliminate polluted water from spilling into Lake Michigan by resurfacing alleys with porous material. So far, more than 80 of the city’s 1300 alleys have “gone” green.

Seattle’s The Clear Alleys Program, launched last month, plans on making alleys in the downtown area more people-friendly by banning dumpsters, recycling bins and compost containers. Instead, they will be providing color-coded bags for trash and recycling that will be collected up to three times a day by natural gas-powered trucks.

Los Angeles has over 900 miles of alley in the city, most of which are underutilized and unsafe. The city’s Green Alleys Program, which has been running since December 2008, hopes to rectify this. Like other cities, one of the goals is to reduce and absorb rainwater runoff through the laying of permeable pavements. More pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares away from street traffic will be created, possibly with gardens and outdoor cafes.

Image: mugley