Doing Something About It
In the mid-1800s, Charles Dudley Warner (Mark Twain's early writing partner) quipped that, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."
Little did he know that even then we had, in fact, begun to "do something" about the weather, through the burgeoning large-scale use of fossil fuels. Blindly and without intention or care, but we had begun. Smog--man-made weather--had already begun to afflict London (where the term was coined), as coal became the free ride of choice for the new industrial capitalism. Ships gave up their sails, and the electrification of railroads was still at least a half-century in the future (and is yet to be achieved in the US).
Around the same time that Warner made his wisecrack, a fellow named Semyenov set up the first oil derrick in a field in Russia. Less than half a century later Daimler and Benz (yes, the Mercedes-Benz folks) built the first gasoline-powered automobiles. This set off a frenzy of oil exploration, and the trouble began.
Not that long afterwards, GM, Standard Oil, and an assortment of other auto-related industries were collectively convicted in federal court of a conspiracy to destroy rail-based urban transit in the US--but the fine was only $5,000.00, and the damage was done. Efficient, community-friendly electric transit was gone, and US denizens were trapped into a round of suburban development by highly coercive zoning laws, heavy government subsidy of road travel, and a nearly total lack of alternatives--since lobbyists consistently succeeded in portraying mass transit as some sort of communist plot.
The result has been the destruction of community in this country, with the populace atomized into lonely individual units shielded from human contact by their cars, lawns, and televisions, and neighborhoods sundered from each other by concrete moats filled with snarling metal monsters.
And now, fulfilling almost to the letter predictions climatologists first made over thirty years ago, comes Global Warming, and the very real possibility of destroying not just our economy, not just the emotional substance of our lives, but the very planet and most of our co-denizens on it in an agonizing biological chaos that the rocks and roaches may survive, but that culture probably won't.
We can't blame volcanos or asteroids this time, nor the sunspot cycle, nor anything else but ourselves.
But we can change the future--if we act right now. Here's your chance to do something about the weather:
- Get your ass out of that car
If you're going someplace less than 2km. away (less than a mile and a half), just walk. (If you're incapacitated, you probably already find it easier to roll out the electric wheelchair than jockey yourself into a van for that short a trip.) - Get your ass out of that car
If it's less than 10km. away, and the weather's not too bad, ride a bicycle. Bicycles are so efficient that, if humans could digest gasoline, you'd get about 3,000 miles per gallon riding one. Instead, you'll get good health and increased vigor, and come to know your neighborhood as you never have before. And parking's always easy and free. - Get your ass out of that car
Ride the bus, catch the train. Sit back, relax, read the paper, look out the window, chat. Why condemn yourself to being an unpaid chauffeur, after all? Give up hurrying--I allow myself an extra fifteen minutes to get to work, and arrive at the office relaxed and happy. Sometimes my wife, who works a mile away, meets me at the nearby coffeehouse where I stop every morning; she walks in tense and worn after her twenty-minute rush-hour drive. Most of us have it much worse. - Get your ass to the farmers' market
Buy local produce. You'd be surprised what a difference this makes. Most often your tomatoes and lettuces have traveled over 2200km. to get to your table; in the US, where trains are not yet electric and trucks are filthy (four times dirtier than train for the same weight and distance), buying local reduces pollution hugely. (A recent British "secret shopper" investigation showed that foods in the test basket had traveled an average of 5,000 miles to market!) - Get your ass out of that tract home
You say you live where there's nothing but rows of cookie-cutter houses and an onramp to a distant mall? Then move! It's now not just irresponsible, but actively evil, to indulge your fear of human contact at the expense of the entire world. Become human again, live in a community where goods and services can be provided you without a comprehensive dependence on fossil fuels and government road subsidies, and where you and your neighbors can nurture each others' souls (and patronize each others' businesses, of course). Come back home to that uniquely human invention, the city, fountain of all progress in business, science, art, and pleasure.
Humans have been grumbling about the weather for millenia--and now, at last, you can do something about it!
I'm counting on you now.
Go to A Word from Eric Miller
