Using Land to Save Energy is one in a series of books prepared by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) on energy conservation strategies for state and local governments. The book was funded by the National Science Foundation and will be available in June from Ballinger Publishing Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Written by ELI attorney Corbin Crews Harwood, this book examines one generally overlooked opportunity for significant energy savings—more efficient design and location of new residential and commercial development.

Although estimates vary, even the most conservative studies show that a significant amount of energy — up to 15 percent of the energy that will be consumed by transportation by 1985 and 11 percent of the energy spent each year on residential heating and cooling — can be saved by modification of traditional single-family, haphazard land development patterns.¹ Some optimistic studies project that 44 percent of the combined energy for transportation and heating and cooling can be saved in specially designed communities.² Realizing those savings, however, will require long-range planning and abandonment of deeply entrenched energy-inefficient ideas about development.