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PDF versionOur incessant motoring is a failure to face reality
Jul. 23, 2010
Earth and Spirit
While in Louisiana last month reporting on the human and environmental effects of the Deepwater Horizon crude oil spill, my wife and I made a side trip to Cypremort Point in Vermilion Bay. The highway wound its way through marshes bordered by moss-draped live oak trees. At the water’s edge we walked along the narrow beach picking up oyster shells and water-carved pieces of driftwood. Coffee-colored debris at the water’s edge looked like oil from the spill but a local told us it was detritus from the marshes that washes out then drifts back onto the beaches. The oil hadn’t arrived yet.
That morning we interviewed Providence Sr. Helen Vinton, assistant director of the Southern Mutual Help Association in New Iberia. She had just returned from a visit to areas near the Gulf where the oil directly threatened fragile marshes.
She spoke with both fishers and with members of a community of the first Louisianans, the native Atakapa people.
She said the fishermen -- tough guys used to daily struggles with the sea, a tough economy and five years of devastating hurricanes, would tear up, walk away from her in mid-conversation then come back, composed for more talk.
The Atakapa families live at the mouth of the Mississippi, in a village only accessible by boat. This community is wholly dependent upon the waterways as a means of daily nutrition, in addition to commercial ventures. Members of this group liken the water to a grocery store; most of what they consume comes from the marsh. Their ancestors are buried in mounds in the marshes.
Rosina Philipe, a spokesperson for the tribe, told Sister Helen: “The Atakapa have survived smallpox, manifest destiny and a millennium of hurricanes, but the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which represents a complete unknown, is the scariest threat of all.”
Rosina’s 16-year-old daughter, Ani, handed her a braided sampling of native marsh grasses and blooms neatly tied at the bottom with a large strand of reed, and with tears in her eyes said simply, “My home is being destroyed, and I don’t mean my house.”
As I sat near the beach with an offshore wind at my back, I heard the piercing cries of killdeer and watched towering cumulus clouds out over the water moving like stately galleons into the West. Looking out to the not-too-far Gulf waters where the sticky red-brown globs of oil approached, I thought of desert rat and environmentalist Edward Abbey’s lament that cries out in the deepest, most inconsolable anguish at the ongoing destruction of the Southwestern landscape:
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“Oh my desert, yours is the only death I cannot bear!”
Indeed, to see your place -- the woven, quilted mosaic of weather, trees, vegetation, landforms, rainfall, birds, animals and wildflowers particular to that one locale that nourishes you and gave birth to your culture -- to see all that go down has to be a death that is well-nigh unbearable.
As we assess the fallout from the spill, geopolitical realities and growing resistance in the developing world to exploration are likely to keep the focus of U.S. energy independence on our own offshore areas, where high-tech rigs like the Deepwater Horizon poke and prod at the seafloor to yield up its diminishing stores.
James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, a critique of America’s car-dependent suburbanization, said: “Scaling down is apparently not an option, though it will happen whether we participate or not. The United States is like Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener who, when asked to do anything, replied, ‘I prefer not to.’ ”
Kunstler’s book indicts, often hilariously, the hideous inversion of the idea of public transportation, in which every individual drives to work for long distances every day in his or her own bus (an SUV, van or oversized truck). Kunstler decries the ubiquitous strip mall, big box store, fast-food chain, dreary, soul-slaying sameness of the U.S. landscape.
We’re going to have to import even more oil than the two-thirds-plus we already depend on. Meanwhile, no one in office or in the media will speak a word about our massive, incessant, sometimes purposeless motoring.
Few want to think about living with fewer cars, driving fewer miles. We’ll be dragged there kicking and screaming, but that’s probably our destination, like it or not. The effort now going into developing alternative fuels and hybrid cars is just a form of bargaining on the Kübler-Ross spectrum of dying.
Traveling around the United States, it’s not hard to understand our failure to face reality. As Kunstler describes, the nation is fully configured almost everywhere for extreme car dependency.
I remember as a kid in the 1950s traveling with my grandmother from Kansas City, Mo., to Parsons, Kan., on a train. It was a hot summer day, and all the windows were open. You can’t get from here to Parsons on a train anymore, and I consulted Greyhound schedules as I write: You can’t even get there on a bus.
We spent all our collective national treasure building the road and highway systems and the extensive suburbs and malls suited for one mode of existence. We incorporated it into our national identity as the American way of life. Now, we don’t know what else to do except defend it at all costs, maybe waving the magic techno wand, murmuring incantations like “ethanol,” “hydrogen cells,” “electric.”
We pay for this car dependency in the coin of ever-diminishing prospects for better places and lives, and in the ever-expanding geography of nowhere.
[Rich Heffern is an NCR staff writer. His e-mail address is rheffern@ncronline.org.]
My wife and I have often
My wife and I have often asked ourselves what we could do to reduce our environmental footprint. We can't come up with much. But we're both pretty confident that it won't be too long before we'll find ourselves coming up with several. We'll be forced to, simply because the cost of 'business as usual' will be beyond our reach. Difficult as I'm sure that will be, I think it will also be a good thing.
I don't defend what suburban
I don't defend what suburban sprawl is or does..
But what it means is up for interpretation.
I so dislike it when people and pundits and politicians and culture critics get on their soapboxes and accuse everyone else of being ' addicted' to oil and all that this means.
We have no options, as consumers. Neither government nor business nor experts who get air time started any efforts to move us off the oil standard 20 to 30 years ago when the first major modern gas shortage manufactured shortage (?) occurred.
Oil is the problem it is black gold and it is the economic exchange system we live by. Capitalism, business and profit above all.
As citizens our votes count and we need to educate all to become citizens who participate in society so we can make a difference when we can. Citizenship citizenship discipleship...
An excellent commentary.
An excellent commentary. I've been trying to cut gasoline usage ever since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. My main means has been through the combined used of a motor scooter and the local mass transit. I still own a car, but use it mainly for bulking carrying. The result has been that I've reduced my gasoline usage to about 20 gallons per month. If I didn't use my car, it'd be about 8 to 10 gallons per month.
I wish many Americans would just come to understand the importance of dismantling the 'car culture' and re-building our mass transit system which according to N.Y. Time article published today (07/25/2010) would take about $77 billion dollars to do.
What's happening instead? Monies are going to repair the roadways that keep the car culture alive and well while monies to keep mass transit systems running are being pulled away.
Whenever I see articles like this I remember a saying of Winston's Churchill's which I came across not too long ago: Americans will eventually do the right thing only after they've tried everything else. Would that we Americans run out of 'everything else' as soon as possible.
We just need to keep on
We just need to keep on trying to change, then. Maybe it'll require a location change to where public transit is; maybe it'll be using the car as little as possible and using an alternate kind of transportation - like, the bus (where possible), a bike or a motor scooter or just walking. Maybe it's changing what ya live in. Stepping down; going smaller; going simpler as per your life's situation - these things get ya ready for what's coming. And, of course, one thing's gotta go ASAP - that 'drill, baby, drill" mentality. All that's a start. Any steps here are, I think, IMHO, the right steps.
We will not be dragged
We will not be dragged "kicking and screaming" toward fewer cars. Rather, we will find newer and more innovative ways to produce the energy we need. The United States is the most innovative and creative nation in the history of man, and it is absurd to think, for even a moment, that the problems we face are so insurmountable that we cannot overcome them. Unless, of course, one presumes that the government will solve the problem. If we count on government to solve any problem, we will always be sorely and profoundly disappointed.
For those who live in rural America, huge numbers of people, public transportation is not an option (unless you subscribe to the ludicrous idea that we should all ride bikes). The railway is not a viable option, given the utter and complete failure of Amtrak, a company owned and operated by the US government. It is fine if you desire to live closer to your work, or to use public transportation, more power to you! But do not presume to deny me my right to do otherwise. This is America, after all, and we are a free people. The car that I drive daily to work is testimony to that freedom.
Finally, I see nothing "soul-less" about the urban landscape in this great nation. Rather, when I drive by stores and shops, I see businesses that are providing jobs for workers, goods and services for people, and profits for investors. I see skyscrapers, buildings that touch the sky, as evidence of the greatness that the people of this nation can rise to, when they have the opportunity. I see these things, these places, these innovations, as enduring and powerful testimony to the Heavenly Father Who has endowed human beings with imagination and creativity, talents and abilities. There is absolutely nothing "soul-less" about that.
Try taking a break from liberal ideology and talking points, and open your mind to see the beauty of human ingenuity that our modern culture represents and see the creative work of the Father present in that beauty.
People resist change.
People resist change. Reasonable change is needed. Please do not blame "liberal ideology." The Church teaches moderation. That means more reasonable sized housing, vehicles, and better use of what we have. It does not have to mean a lower quality of life. Actually, if we continue on the current path, our children and grandchildren will see a lower quality of life. We have to be more inventive and receptive to changes to keep the core of what we like.
Few people would choose to
Few people would choose to forgo scientific and technological progress for oil-free oceans. That's the tradeoff.
You constuct perfect societies in your imagination, but the benighted populace won't go along with you. Humanity, in one form or another, will survive, though. The kildeer and the oyster may not prevail, but not very many people care all that much. You think they should, but you can't control that. The best you can do is make your case and let everyone decide. The worst you can do is force your vision of heaven on earth on an unwilling world. Do your best, and then let it go and get on with pulling up the weeds in your own garden.
I frankly am tired about many
I frankly am tired about many of those who complain about our dependence on oil and then will not back the best avenue to eliminate that, nuclear power. Until these critics are willing to back nuclear I can't take them seriously. And don't give me that worn out argument about what to do about nuclear waste. That is being handled even now. Some can be recycled into new fuel rods and the rest used for other uses such as medical imaging and treatments.
Good, a volunteer. Now we
Good, a volunteer. Now we know whose backyard we can bury the radioactive waste in.
THe eventual solution is for
THe eventual solution is for people to live, like the Europeans, in concentrated population centers linked by public transportation. THe Europeans are car crazy, too, but, when the cheap energy party is over, they'll be in better shape than we. For the first 14 years of my life , in the 50's and early 60's, my family didn't own a car and I could get around just fine. I used a bicycle and didn't have to be ferried around like a little invalid. As I got older, I could take public transportation, even getting around the suburbs. Of course, much of electric transportaion was bought up by the car companies and dismantled. Thanks, GM et al.
"much of electric
"much of electric transportation was bought up by car companies and dismantled." There is no hope for you!!!
it is interesting that people
it is interesting that people think Europe will be better off than the US re energy useage and carbon footprints. it's something I've never considered before but I suppose it is true as our motorists are more concentrated and we don't have as many rural communities or homes cut off from the rest of society other than by car.
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