Left a good job in the city...

Here is a great article from a Harvard professor on density, cities and the environment. Here an interesting paragraph:

Cities also face an uneven playing field because suburban residents do not pay for the full environmental costs of low-density living. Henry David Thoreau was right about caring for our environment, but wrong about how to achieve that end. People who live surrounded by green space often do much more harm to that green space than people who live in dense cities. In 1844, Thoreau's outdoor lifestyle was itself responsible for destroying 300 acres of Concord woods, which caught fire as a result of the great naturalist's attempt to cook chowder outdoors.

Here is another:

While we should be encouraging development in dense, urban areas that use less energy, many of our policies work exactly in the wrong direction. Our land use restrictions push development away from dense areas, with plenty of NIMBY-ist neighbors, toward empty spaces with fewer noisy abutters. Our transportation policies fail to charge people for the full social costs of driving long distances on crowded highways. Our localized school system encourages prosperous parents to flee urban poverty. Just think of how the 1974 Supreme Court decision that limited busing to within city boundaries encouraged mass suburbanization to get beyond those city borders.