The New York Times today ran an article on hybrid SUVs and the hope manufacturers have of using them to rehabilitate the SUV's image...proving once.... The New York Times today ran an article on hybrid SUVs and the hope manufacturers have of using them to rehabilitate the SUV's image...proving once again their cluelessness (or perhaps venality).

Hybrid SUVs provide merely a dab of makeup on the face of a very ugly problem: the distortion of our world that cars, especially very large cars, create. More cars require more roads, spreading our homes and businesses farther apart, which in turn requires more driving, more cars, and more roads. We end up trapped in a blandscape of bleak gray, ever alone in the steel boxes we now call home....

The alienation car culture causes; the arrogance and aggression that often result and which these stylized tanks are meant to emblemize; and the more subtle but more devastating effects resulting from the obliteration of watershed and habitat, may surpass the damage cars do to the atmosphere through pollution.

A world populated with giant cars is a world with no place for our humanity...or for the rest of life, upon which we still, and always will, depend.