Last week, Time magazine asked, "Why Are Southerners So Fat?"

There's no simple answer, of course. Poverty, culture and climate
all play a role in the South's high obesity rates. But one factor
that's increasingly blamed by everyone from medical journals to the CDC is how Southern cities are built.

"The South doesn't have many bus stops," Time writes.
"Public transportation is paltry, and for most people, the best way to
get around is by car. ... States like Mississippi and Tennessee also
have a surprising lack of sidewalks, discouraging even the most eager
pedestrians. Many roads are narrower than those in the North -- where
streets have wider shoulders to accommodate winter snow -- and people
who want to bike or jog find themselves uncomfortably close to traffic."

All of which speaks to the fact that cities matter -- to our health,
as well as to the health of the planet. When we think of the
environment in this country, we generally conjure up images in our mind
of cuddly wildlife and pristine wilderness -- the kind of things that
we go on vacation to see, not what's around us every day. But how we
build our cities can play a very important role in preserving and
protecting the environment.

"When it comes to global warming," Time says, "green acres aren't all that green -- life in the crowded city is actually much more climate-friendly."

There's a tendency in America to believe that everyone wants to live on two-acre lots in the suburbs, but city living has made a comeback in recent years, in part because cities are working to improve quality
of life and sprawl is turning out to be not-so-sustainable or desirable
to many people.

Well-designed transportation systems, mixed-use development,
progressive planning, energy and water conservation, recycling
programs, open space preservation -- all of these factors can help make
a city more friendly to the environment and more livable for its
residents.

A new website known as Smarter Cities,
which launched earlier this month, aims to highlight the potential of
cities to help reshape the environment responsibly. The site grew out
of the Smarter Cities Project, formerly part of National Geographic's Green Guide and now affiliated with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Smarter Cities ranks communities across the country with a
population of 50,000 or more on criteria of sustainability and
livability. The data is collected and crunched with the help of a
researcher from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The result: "One of the nation's most comprehensive and robust
databases of U.S. urban progress toward sustainability," according to
the Smarter Cities site.

So how green is your city? It will probably come as no surprise that
among the nation's largest metropolises, perennial greenies such as
Seattle, San Francisco and Portland topped the list (although you might be surprised at some of the other names in the top 15). Madison, Wis., is the top medium-sized city, while Bellingham, Wash., gets the small city nod.

Smarter Cities is far from the only attempt to identify the nation's greenest burgs,
and not everyone is going to agree. The criteria used, how they're
weighted, studying cities vs. metro areas, etc., can all make a
difference. So while the rankings can be fun, it's more important to
look at what they're based on and get a sense of what your city is doing right -- and where it needs improvement.

Is your city on the right path?

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Photo: Ralph HockensReason No. 137 that I love commuting by bike in New York City: I get to watch baby hawks go to flight school.

Last year, I was fascinated and then heartbroken by a pair of red-tail hawks that built a precarious-looking nest over
the West Side Highway, produced a trio of hatchlings, then lost their offspring before they got a chance to take flight, apparently to rat poison.

So
I was happy -- but concerned -- this year when the hawks returned to
Riverside Park and took up in a new tree, this time just off the West
Side bike path that I frequently ride to work. (New York real estate
experts would no doubt call this new nest an upgrade -- it has great
views of the Hudson River.)

I didn't watch the pair as closely as I did last year, because I had
a newborn of my own that took up most of my attention this spring. But
I did check the updates occasionally at blogs that obsessively follow urban hawks, and I always looked up at the nest when I passed by their tree.

Riding home last week, I noticed more commotion than usual.
Photographers -- call them hawkarazzi -- were pointing their lenses
skyward, and parks employees were surrounding the hawks' tree with a
temporary fence and signs warning dog walkers to keep their pooches at
bay.

The baby hawks were learning to fly.

I
pulled my bike over and craned my neck up with everyone else. I quickly
spotted mom and dad high in the branches, watching as their new trio of
youngsters tested out their wings. As a new father myself, I felt a
shared sense of pride with the plucky birds who -- like me -- call
Riverside Drive their home.

Much has been written about the connection that New Yorkers feel with their hawks -- particularly the famous Pale Male,
who nested for years on a Fifth Avenue co-op overlooking Central Park
that he shared with Mary Tyler Moore. (The Riverside Park hatchlings
are likely his descendents.)

For my part, I think it's a sense of validation and connection to
nature -- that even here on the island of Manhattan, one of the most
densely packed cities in the world, I can see hawks building nests and
raising their offspring, and I can do it from the back of my bicycle
while riding alongside the majestic Hudson River.

It's one of those hidden treats, those shared experiences that make
life in New York so rewarding and exhilarating, despite its daily
hassles and challenges and the constant queries from non-New Yorkers
along the lines of: "You've got a kid now. When are you going to move
out of your tiny apartment and into a real house in the suburbs
already?"

If the hawks can make it here, they can make it anywhere -- and so can the rest of us.

I think there's another appeal to hawk watching, as well: A sense
that if nature survives and thrives in an environment like New York
City, surrounded by all the concrete and chaos, then maybe things
aren't as bad as we sometimes fear they are. Maybe the world as we know
it will shrug off the pollution of our atmosphere, the changes in temperature, the loss of thousands of species, the massive shifts in climate that science tells us are coming. Maybe nature -- and we -- are tougher than we think.

Of course, that kind of hope can also bring disappointment.

I stopped by the nest again on my ride home last night and learned
from my fellow hawk gawkers that one of the three fledglings had been hit by a car and killed. Reports say that it was flying low while carrying a dead rat in its talons -- probably the first meal it
had caught on its own. Nature may be resilient, but there are dangers
around every turn.

Still,
the dead fledgling's siblings hadn't given up. There they were
yesterday evening, up in the trees, taking short flights from limb to
limb and following their father as he enticed them farther away from
the nest with a dead squirrel in his grasp.

I wished the fledglings luck and continued home. Soon, if they
survive, the young hawks will fly off for good, leaving an empty nest
behind. Surely there are safer places for the adult hawks to raise a
family than this busy spot on New York's Upper West Side, but
selfishly, I hope they continue to return year after year.

I want to bring my own son here one day, to point up into the trees
and hope that he shares my sense of wonder and inspiration at what's
learning to soar just above our heads.

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Investments in clean energy -- such as those encouraged by the American Clean Energy and Security Act --
would produce several times as many jobs as the same amount of money spent on traditional
fossil fuels, according to new studies released Thursday by a
coalition of environmental groups and research institutes.

Lower-income Americans in
particular would benefit, according to a report from the Political Economy Research
Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
which was commissioned by the Natural Resources
Defense Council and Green for All.

Upgrading the U.S. economy to
rely less on fossil fuels would create a surge of manufacturing and
construction jobs that would include renovating homes and buildings to be more
energy efficient, tapping clean energy sources such as wind and solar to
produce more electricity, and building better transit systems and other
infrastructure improvements.

"For a generation, this is
the great opportunity in our economy: rebuilding our energy infrastructure,"
said PERI's Robert Pollin at a news conference Thursday morning.

A separate report produced by
the Center
for American Progress and released jointly Thursday found that a $150
billion annual investment in clean energy could create a net increase of 1.7
million American jobs and significantly lower the national unemployment rate.

Clean energy investments take
dollars that would be spent on energy from overseas and instead invest that
money in local, homegrown energy sources and improvements in energy efficiency,
which saves homeowners and businesses money, said Bracken Hendricks, a CAP
fellow.

That's why clean energy
investments create more than three times as many jobs as the equivalent investment
in traditional fossil fuels, he added.

The bottom line, said NRDC
executive director Peter Lehner, is that the United States will spend trillions
of dollars on energy over the coming decades, in one sector or another.

"It will spend that money
stupidly, or it will spend it smart," Lehner said. "If we spend it well, it
will have tremendous impacts throughout the economy."

That's especially true for people with lower levels of
education, according to the NRDC
and Green for All report. It found that about half of the 1.7 million new
jobs created by a $150 billion investment in clean energy would be available to
workers with a high school degree or less, providing opportunities to lift
low-income workers out of poverty.

The study confirms that a "non-polluting
economy" provides more opportunities for people of color and people in urban
areas, said Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green for All.

NRDC's Lehner added that "the
two reports provide solid evidence why we need to move forward"  by encouraging
Congress to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which is
expected to be considered soon by the House. He added that the studies show that opponents of the bill -- who raise the specter of economic losses if it's enacted -- "have no facts to support them."

Although ACES is not perfect, Lehner said, it's a starting point for capping global warming
pollution and investing in clean energy -- and the need for clean energy
investments and the resulting benefits to the U.S. economy have never been
clearer.

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When I was growing up, my family lived in New Orleans for several
years, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. One of my father's
friends had a boat, and he liked to take it out shrimping. My dad and I
would often join him and his son.

I loved those early morning boat trips (except for the time that I
got very seasick -- probably my fault for snacking on Fritos -- and the
trip that I'm about to tell you about). The lake was so big that you
could barely see the shoreline.

On one occasion, our nets were coming up empty, so my dad's friend
steered the boat toward the mouth of the lake where it meets the Gulf
of Mexico and ventured into a cove where he hoped to find some shrimp.
Soon, the boat started dragging. We feared that the net had gotten
snagged on the bottom of the lake. But when they winched it in, the
cause turned out to be quite a bit scarier for my 10-year-old self.

The boat had gone right over a school of stingrays, which had
probably ventured into the lake from the Gulf, and our net was full of
them. As the net came up, it looked like they were going to spill into
the boat. My dad and his friend struggled to release them without
damaging the boat or the fishing equipment, but eventually they had no
choice but to cut the net away.

I watched from the prow as those ghostly stingrays spread out
beneath us, silently gliding away from the hapless weekend fishermen
who had inadvertently disturbed them.

Drawing food from the sea is one of the most fundamental
interactions that we can have with the our oceans, and I'm glad that I
have those early experiences in New Orleans to draw upon. The stingray
incident taught me a respect for the ocean and its creatures -- and a
concern for how we interact with them -- that sticks with me today.

The fish we choose to eat -- and the way we fish for them -- can have a tremendous impact on our oceans. As part of a personal goal to eat healthier, I'm trying to increase the amount of fish in my diet. It's a lean protein with great health benefits.
But there are risks, as well: Some types of fish can be contaminated
with mercury and PCBs, and sometimes seafood is harvested in a way
that's bad for the oceans.

A new Sustainable Seafood Guide from the Natural Resources Defense Council can help me -- and you -- make better choices about what we eat. It provides seven basic guidelines to follow when shopping for seafood or ordering at a restaurant, as well as specific advice about America's five favorite types of seafood, from shrimp to tuna to fish sticks.

I was
a little disheartened to see that many of my favorite varieties of fish --
grouper, halibut, orange roughy, cod -- had landed on the recommended "avoid" list. (Pacific cod and halibut are OK, but the Atlantic varieties are badly depleted.) I was aware of the overfishing problems that many species face, but this put it in pretty stark terms.

Today is the first-ever World Oceans Day, designated by the United Nations as an occasion to celebrate and protect the world's oceans. And there are certainly a lot of problems facing our seas -- overfishing, habitat destruction, acidification, water pollution, giant trash vortexes in the Pacific ... the list goes on.

We might not be able to tackle all of those big problems all at once. But as NRDC's Laura Pagano suggests,
one way that each of us can make a difference right now is to make
smarter choices about the seafood we eat and understand its impact on
the oceans.

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