Driving ourselves sick

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Posted on June 30, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

I’m not sure how much ecological hope I was emitting yesterday.  The traffic in the DC area has become so bad that one wonders where this is headed.  I try to avoid commuter traffic like the plague, but the past few days, with some family in town, I was being the cheerful tour guide –

And then at 3 in the afternoon found myself in a nightmare of congestion.  We looked out before us over four lanes of absolutely trapped packed vehicles as far as we could see and wondered about the meaning of our lives.  If this is what we make a living to do, then what in the world has become of our souls.

We seem to have become helpless before this absurd lifestyle.  This is worse than addiction; it’s a mental illness.

Yesterday’s Washington Post had an article in its Business section about a new report indicating what terrible polluters we are — and then some — still the worst in the world.  And while the report once again points to US automakers and their reluctance to change technology to reduce emissions, it also reminds us that we are, after all, consumers, making choices about all of this.  In urban/suburban areas where commuters insist on more roads and parking places instead of more mass transit, those commuters make choices that poison our air, add to the global warming/climate change crisis, and make the urban commute a daily nightmare.

We now have laws against second-hand tobacco smoke, the science and the political culture making clear that smokers have no right to make the rest of us ill – but how about this source of deadly air?!?!

So, this new report comes from the group, Environmental Defense, and the WP article sums up some of their findings:

We are 5 percent of the world’s population but source of 45 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. 

“Americans own 30 percent of the world’s vehicles, drive farther each year than the international average and burn more per mile… Additionally, the sport-utility boom of the past decade put vehicles on the road that could be spewing carbon dioxide for years to come.”

The consumer culture could have said no to this a long time ago, and then those SUVs would never have been made.

And the politics of this is equally sick, if not sicker.  I mentioned the other day that the Supreme Court will hear a case regarding the authority of the federal government to regulate auto pollution.  Says the Post:

“The Bush administration is seeking to convince the court that the federal government has no obligation to restrict greenhouse gases.” 

What in the blazes is government for if not to protect us from precisely these kinds of threats?!  Air pollution kills far more people every year than all the terror attacks across the globe.

Well, folks, this is why ecological hope depends on you, on me, on the choices we make and on whether or not we are ready to demand a politics of love of earth, self-love, upon which we must insist fervently and passionately.  Can we change?  Can we change in time?  And can we live as if life depends upon the choices we make?

Because it does.

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