Jessica S. McKenzie

Hell Gate: Matt Green’s 10,000-Mile Quest to Walk Every Block in NYC Is Finally Over

On Saturday, September 21, 44-year-old Matt Green hopped over the finish line of his obsessive, years-long quest to walk every street and pedestrian path in New York City, a journey of almost 10,000 miles.

It ended at the corner of Armstrong Avenue and Amboy in Staten Island—the same randomly selected street where he started his walk on December 31, 2011. To celebrate, his girlfriend handed him a shot of whiskey in a glass emblazoned with the words “Let’s Do This” in glitzy gold lettering, something that Green had, naturally, found while walking in the city; someone else handed him a giant congratulatory citation signed by the mayor, which he read aloud. (“I applaud his awesome achievement and his commitment to showcasing the excitement and wonder that can be found throughout our great metropolis,” the mayor wrote.)

Amid cheers from the gathered crowd of friends and admirers, someone tapped Green on the shoulder to draw his attention to a newly installed commemorative plaque honoring his achievement. Tears welled up in his eyes and spilled onto his cheeks, still damp with sweat. “I’ve been the one reading those signs the past 12 years, the weird little signs that no one pays attention to,” Green said. Now, he was part of the landscape, someone that another New Yorker might learn about while on a stroll. Turning to embrace his mother, Miriam, he said, “I’ve been worried about missing a turn all day, and now I’m feeling rather emotional.” It was a characteristic understatement from Green, who, despite devoting 12 years, eight months, and 21 days of his life to his walk, still can’t quite explain why he did it.

“I don’t have an answer to that question,” he told me. “I did it because it sounded like a cool thing to do.” He continued: “Something that’s important to me is that people not feel like they have to be able to come up with an explanation for the things they’re compelled to do. There are probably a lot of people who would have done something really interesting, but it just seemed too weird, and they couldn’t explain why they were going to do it, and that seemed intimidating or something. I don’t know why, and I never really tried to come up with a nice-sounding explanation.”

I had known of Green’s quest for some time—I even once flippantly referred to it as “slightly repellent,” mostly because it sounded like a logistically tedious nightmare. So, when I heard from a mutual friend that it was ending, I asked to tag along, hoping to gain some understanding on what would possess someone to embark on such an undertaking, or, at the very least, to learn what he got out of it.

Earlier that Saturday, I had met Green and more than a dozen of his friends outside the Annadale train station, all of whom were there to accompany him on the last segment of his walk. Our starting point was just a mile and a half from the finish line, but Green’s circuitous 10-mile route, written out turn by turn in a little notebook, would take us five hours. The group included Jeremy Workman, the friend who made a documentary about Green called “The World Before Your Feet“; the friend who made Green’s website detailing his walk; Green’s brother; and some people who had met in the late aughts, when Green led a weekly walking group called Hey I’m Walkin’ Here.

One couple there on Saturday met at a frisbee game where they heard about Green’s walks, and were the only people who thought, “That sounds like fun, let’s go.” Green later officiated their wedding.

Liz, half of that aforementioned couple, greeted a fellow walker by quipping that she hardly recognized him with his hair short. “You finally grew up!” she teased. “I would have taken that as an insult,” Green cut in. “Not that it took so long, but that you grew up!”

Green has a puckish, eternally youthful demeanor, in spite of the grays peppering his beard and the crow’s feet that spring up around his eyes when he smiles. Growing up is something it seems Green has been avoiding—at least its most conventional trappings—since quitting his job as a civil engineer in 2010. That was the year he decided to walk across America, from Rockaway Beach in Queens to Rockaway Beach in Oregon, a journey that took five months. It was after finishing that walk that he decided to keep on walking, only this time, his path would be through all of New York City.

When Green started, he told the New York Times it would take more than two years of full-time walking to complete his quest. At that time, he had no fixed address, but moved around the city cat-sitting and house-sitting or sleeping on friends’ couches, subsisting on less than $20 a day. He kept a blog with photos and sometimes short histories of the things he saw each day.

Green isn’t the only New Yorker to attempt to traverse the entire city by foot. William Helmreich, a CUNY sociologist, walked “almost” every street in New York City before penning the book “The New York Nobody Knows.” By many accounts, Green has been even more dogged, traversing alleys and private streets that Helmreich skipped. (Green and Helmreich were able to meet and walk together before Helmreich died in early 2020 from COVID.)

The difference is clear in their estimated mileage: Helmreich walked more than 6,000 miles; Green’s best estimate is that he’s walked 9,954 miles, give or take a few. (The discrepancy partly comes from the fact that Green at times would repeat some stretches, in order to cover every block.)

If Helmreich walked the city to understand it, and to explain it to others, Green’s goal is to merely experience it, largely for himself. (Green’s journey has, however, inspired a subreddit for people who want to follow in his footsteps.) Garnette Cadogan, a lecturer in urbanism at MIT who came down from Boston for the walk, said Green was more “humble” in his approach to walking the city.

Even his blog isn’t tailored for others, Green said—he doesn’t care about metrics, or how many people read it. “It frees me from having to think about anything other than what I’m looking at. I can just truly experience it as myself, without any kind of thought for it having a particular purpose or use,” he said.

Green compared his approach to walking to the way people are trained to look at artwork, to notice the light and the details: “And in doing that, you just start to learn things about yourself, and to notice what moves you.”

As we walked, Green would regularly pause to take a photo of something that moved him or caught his eye, shooing the rest of us out of the frame. This included: a small tree growing out of a sideway crack; a 9/11 memorial (he has a collection of these); and the hood of a car covered in bird droppings, which one of his friends referred to as “a Matt Green special.”

I started to ask another question but Green told me to hold that thought—he wanted to guide the group up a short driveway leading to Tosomock Farm, Frederick Law Olmsted’s former residence and living laboratory, which was purchased by the Parks Department in 2006.

We poked around the decaying building for a bit, relishing the shade. One friend of Green’s asked if he had saved the Olmsted residence for the last walk. No, he replied. “These are just completely random blocks that I happen to have left,” he said.

That brought him to his grand theory of walking, if you can call it that (Green probably wouldn’t): “We sometimes think about the city as if the city itself is interesting or not interesting, different parts of it are interesting or not interesting. But we, as the observers or participants of the city, as we’re walking around, have an equal responsibility for whether it’s interesting or not.” He continued: “If you have a group of 23 or however many people walking around, if they are curious people, then the walk will be interesting. And if they’re not interested in anything, then the walk will be boring, no matter what we walk by.”

Over the past few years, Green’s walk has become something he does, not the only thing he does. During the pandemic, he had to take an extended break, as he moved back to Virginia to live with his parents. (Naturally, he walked every block in his hometown.) After returning to the city, he began gradually settling down, downshifting into a new phase of his walk, and of his life. He began dating someone new two years ago, and he is now working as an assistant for the Colombian writer Jaime Manrique, who was at the finish line. He and his girlfriend have been living together—in their own apartment—for almost a year now. “It’s a big change in some ways, but it’s also just a natural step,” he said.

Green hopes to eventually do something with his years-long backlog of urban photographs and accompanying research, although he said it would take decades to work his way through the existing material. He’s also fantasized about starting a boutique elopement service where he guides couples to cool and weird places in New York City, and marries them there.

But all of that was part of the future, not the present. As we neared the finish line, I asked Green if he thought he’d be sad when it’s over. He looked at me for a moment, bright-eyed, then smiled and laughed. “I don’t know,” he replied.

Read on Hell Gate…

Bulletin: ‘We’re not going fast enough’: Sherri Goodman on climate change as security threat

In September 1987, when Sherri Goodman joined the US Senate Committee on Armed Services, she was its youngest professional staff member and the only woman. Goodman would go on to help forge the nascent fields of environmental and climate security. In her new book, Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security, she tells the inside story of what she calls the “military’s environmental awakening.”

One of Goodman’s first responsibilities was overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons plants at a particularly fraught moment. Within a year of joining the Armed Services Committee, the New York Times was running front-page stories about safety lapses at nuclear weapons plants on an almost weekly basis. Goodman’s work was thrust into the Congressional hot seat. She was tasked with drafting legislation for a new oversight mechanism, which eventually became (after a legislative wrestling match with the Governmental Affairs Committee) the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.

In 1993, Goodman was appointed the first-ever deputy undersecretary of defense (environmental security). She oversaw the Defense Department’s environmental programs, including the projects to clean up pollution at the roughly 100 military bases on the list of toxic Superfund sites. Many of the stories from this period of her career are about fighting tooth and nail for barely adequate funding from defense officials who would rather spend dollars on more equipment or weapons than on cleaning up their messes—even if those messes posed environmental health threats to American citizens. “There always seemed to be a faction who saw environmental stewardship and military readiness as opposing forces, instead of two sides of the same coin,” Goodman writes.

While at the Pentagon, she had a front-row seat to the political fight over whether the United States would sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty to set legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change had become a fraught, polarizing issue in American politics. (President Bill Clinton signed the treaty but Congress never ratified it, and President George W. Bush later withdrew that signature.)

Goodman led the development of the Defense Department’s first climate change strategy, focusing on achieving emissions reductions without compromising military might and readiness. When she left the Pentagon in January 2001, her team fêted her with gag gifts like a plaque that said, “Mother of Environmental Security” (she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time).

Goodman’s work in that arena was far from over. While working at the Center for Naval Analyses, she convened the CNA Military Advisory Board, a group of former senior (three- and four- star) military leaders, to study the security implications of climate change. It was in a meeting of this group that Goodman suggested “threat multiplier” as a way of describing how climate interacts with security concerns, and the phrase was included in the 2007 report, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”

In the following interview, Sherri Goodman discusses that legacy, the military’s mixed record on climate and environmental issues, the need for strong and enforceable environmental regulations, and the extent to which the United States is prepared for climate disasters.

Bulletin: Science historian Naomi Oreskes schools the Supreme Court on climate change

In a 2007 decision, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens contended that when Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, “the study of climate change was in its infancy” and it wasn’t until later that decade that the federal government “began devoting serious attention to the possibility that carbon dioxide emissions associated with human activity could provoke climate change.” Even so, the Court found in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Clean Air Act authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as air pollutants, because the act was “capacious” in its definition of air pollutants.

A 2022 decision by a starkly different Supreme Court all but reversed the Massachusetts decision, greatly curtailing the EPA’s ability to limit power plant emissions of carbon dioxide. The basis of the decision in that case, West Virginia v. EPA, involved a new and hotly contested legal theory: the so-called “major questions doctrine” that the current, conservative-dominated Court has adopted. Under that doctrine, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, there must have been “clear congressional authorization” for executive branch agencies such as the EPA to take actions with “vast economic and political significance.” The decision holds that there was no such authorization, greatly limiting the EPA’s efforts to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.

Considered together, the Massachusetts and West Virginia cases raise an important question: Did Congress understand that regulating air pollutants like carbon dioxide would have vast economic and political impacts when it passed the Clean Air Act more than 50 years ago?

The answer to that question, according to a forthcoming paper in the Ecology Law Review, is clearly “yes.”

What began as a modest inquiry by science historian Naomi Oreskes into what scientists and elected officials knew about carbon dioxide in 1970 ballooned into a years-long investigation that underlies the law review paper, made available to the Bulletin ahead of its expected publication later this month. That investigation, which Oreskes conducted along with other researchers from Harvard and Duke universities, shows that experts long ago recognized the climate-altering impacts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and that they also knew that regulation of these emissions could have wide-ranging economic impacts. These facts were shared and discussed among White House staffers and high-ranking elected and administrative officials, including the primary architects of the Clean Air Act.

Such conversations were not limited to the halls of power. The paper also reveals the extent to which discussions about carbon dioxide and global warming penetrated popular culture early on. Among those pop culture efforts was a 1958 educational film by Frank Capra (whose better-known movies include Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life) called The Unchained Goddess, in which the character Dr. Research explains that the carbon dioxide emitted from factories and automobiles was already warming the atmosphere, and if the polar ice caps melted, one day tourists “in glass bottom boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” The greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide emissions was also covered in My Weekly Reader and other school materials for children.

In February 1969, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg appeared on The Merv Griffin Show, discussing how the proliferation of automobiles and “their excrement” was warming the Earth. The show prompted a concerned citizen to write to US Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, asking him to contradict this dangerous misinformation. Jackson passed the letter on to presidential science advisor Lee DuBridge, who replied at length, confirming that the greenhouse effect was real and was the result of gases from burning fossil fuels. “We are, in a word, performing a gigantic experiment on ourselves,” DuBridge wrote. “It seems to me of great importance that we know the meaning of this experiment and its possible outcomes before discovering them too late and perhaps to our sorrow.”

Shortly thereafter, DuBridge floated the idea of a “polluter’s tax” on Meet the Press. “I don’t like to be a calamity howler, but sometimes it takes a few calamity howlers to wake people up to the fact that there are serious problems and to arouse people to the point where they are willing to do something about it,” he told television viewers. “I think we are at that point now.” That point was 1969.

In the following interview, Oreskes and I discuss the origins of her investigation and how its conclusions about the history of climate science could impact future environmental court cases.

Audubon: The Black-crowned Night-Heron’s Unlikely Refuge

Growing up in the steel mill corridor near Chicago, artist Lauren Levato Coyne was surrounded by waterbirds. They lived in the marshes and swamps, even as crisscrossing highways and railroads increasingly encroached upon their habitat. Levato Coyne drew on that landscape—“all the birds, the sounds, the smells”—while creating this portrait of the Black-crowned Night-Heron.

Bulletin: Is the University of Chicago’s new climate initiative a brave research program or potentially dangerous foray into solar geoengineering?

In 2006, a group of preeminent scientists met for a two-day conference at the NASA Ames Research Center in California to discuss cooling the Earth by injecting particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight into space.

At some point, one of the conference rooms became overheated.

“The room was getting kind of hot, and somebody went over to the thermostat to try and fix it,” recalled Alan Robock, a Rutgers climatologist who was in attendance. “And they couldn’t adjust it. And so many people didn’t understand the irony that you can’t control the temperature of a room, but you’re talking about controlling the temperature of the whole Earth.”

Solar geoengineering—also called solar radiation management or solar radiation modification—was then and is now a fraught subject. Many experts and nonexperts alike consider the idea of deliberately mucking about with Earth’s climate systems to counteract centuries of mostly accidental mucking about in Earth’s climate systems ethically dubious and potentially highly dangerous.

And yet: Last year, the global average temperature was almost 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average, due to the vast amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans have added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. This warming is responsible for a wide range of climate impacts, from more extreme storms and longer heat waves to increased precipitation and flooding as well as more severe droughts and longer wildfire seasons.

As the climate crisis has escalated, some experts have suggested that drastic measures like solar geoengineering may eventually become necessary and so should be researched now.