This is a part of something much larger that I’ve been working on. I’ve talked to a lot of people about this topic. Most largely agree, but that says more about my friends than it represents any public opinion. I have been met with some resistance as well. How does that saying go? First they will hate you, then they will fight you, then they will accept you…..something like that.

There is one thing I know for sure, and I’ll echo the words of James Kunstler to say it: “We must imagine a future without cars.” And to echo Derrick Jensen, “we will be living sustainably one day, or we won’t be living at all.”

The trouble is, we don’t know how to live sustainably because our civilization has never been sustainable. As our culture has metastasized across the globe, it has destroyed, in whole or in part, everything in its path. We’ve never had to live sustainably on the planet because, in truth, we don’t really live here. We live in pop culture, and use it as a lens to experience the world; we live in cities and atop thick, seemingly indispensable, layers of concrete. We identify with products and fictional characters on television. We don’t have any relationship with the land, our food, or our nonhuman neighbors. We have forgotten that the land is primary. Both literally and figuratively, we separate ourselves from the real world. Our lives are far more complicated than they need to be. In truth, sustainability is an easy concept and that we still don’t “get it,” even with all the apocalyptic challenges we face, means that this separation is as oblique today as was a hundred years ago.

Every system from which our lives are structured (social, economic, industrial, religious, dietary…everything) must be conformed to the needs of the land or it is not, by definition, sustainable. At the very least, it shouldn’t mess up the land (to the point of inhabitability).

The negative affects of our way of life have been building significantly in recent years. I remember hearing about global warming when I was a kid, but it is only recently that it has been regarded as a legitimate term to describe our current situation. The urgency of our environmental dilemma is finally becoming a mainstream concern. Environmentalists are even getting some press! The wheels, I’m afraid, are not turning fast enough. Most people remain stuck in that fantastic dream-world that separates us from reality; one that has people believing that technology will save us, that somewhere, in some laboratory, there are genius scientists working ‘round the clock, figuring out ways to make everything we own and consume sustainable. Everything will be fine with a tall glass of technology, have some!

While there are a lot of people doing this work (Arizona State University is poised to open the nations first “school of sustainability” ironically, in Tempe, Arizona. And Ford just announced that one of their vice presidents, Susan Cischke, will be promoted to “senior vice president for sustainability, environment and safety engineering, ironically attaching sustainability to automobile production), and while I do believe in the majority of this work (that which does not lead us into denial), our culture is going about these problems in a way that distracts us from real possibilities. They also prohibit much needed discourse about the larger institutional details from which these problems are based.

Instead of asking, “how can we continue living the way we do in a sustainable way,” we should be thoughtfully considering what sustainability really means, and asking, “What aspects of our way of life can ever be sustainable?” “What needs to go, and what can stay?” To truly believe our current way of life can ever be sustainable is delusional, irresponsible and, frankly, dangerous.

Let me break down our dream world: have you ever accidentally turned your alarm clock off in the morning and, while dosing back to sleep, you imagine yourself going through your morning routine….you make coffee, brush your teeth, get dressed, and suddenly wake up and realize you’re late and haven’t accomplished anything? Our culture is in that dream-world: we are productive, we solve problems, we’re improving our future (won’t somebody please think of the children?!). Some day very soon, something terrible will happen that will shake us awake (something like Katrina, but instead of it only messing up a city and revealing institutional racism, it will be something catastrophic…like Waterworld catastrophic, or Children of Men catastrophic…you know what I’m talking about…). We will realize that everything we thought we were doing to address the problems we face has amounted to nothing and it will be too late. (I can see it now, “But I followed everything on Al Gore’s list at the end of An Inconvenient Truth!”).

During the last several years, there has been a lot of hullabaloo (I’ve been dying to use that word) about the need to make our automobiles more sustainable. Many of the new hybrids and the like are marketed as “green” vehicles and I have a big problem with this. The term “green” is a general claim that implies that the product or packaging has some kind of environmental benefit or that it causes no harm to the environment. There is currently no standard definition for the term “green,” and the way in which it is used is manipulative at best. It is, in actuality, a form of greenwashing, which is “disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image or product.”

In short, industry knows that people are beginning to wake up and realize that our culture is destroying the planet. For far too long, people have bought into the idea that the only political power the public can wield is through their spending habits. So industry assuages our guilt by having us believe that the crap we continue to buy is actually good for the environment. Terms like “green,” “eco-friendly,” “organic,” and “sustainable” are being used to greenwash the public into believing our culture is turning around and putting the needs of the natural world first. This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s systematic. If nothing else, these terms are simply good marketing—a rhetorical response to public interest. If it suddenly became fashionable to wear lightening bug guts on your face, people would be out on the street sellin’ viles of mass-produced glowing bug guts and everyone would be buyin’; there would be lightening bug cartoons on all the stuff we buy.

My point is, the culture isn’t going to care how ridiculous or meaningless the fad is as long as it can be sold. If the only power we have is through what we choose to consume, the needs of the economic system remain first and that is exactly backwards and should not be confused as a move towards sustainability.

It’s increasingly embarrassing to have to say this, but automobiles are not and can never be made sustainable. “Green” vehicles that still have some carbon output should not be considered green. We still have a long way to go. Sure a Prius isn’t causing as much damage to the environment as a Hummer, but that doesn’t make it “good for the environment.” It’s like if a guy was kicking a dog to death and another guy is kicking and punching a dog to death. The dog ends up dead in both cases, it’s just that one method simply slows this process down, slightly.

The biggest question in sustainable discourse right now is, “how are we going to run our cars?” As each gasoline-replacement is examined to be inadequate, the question of alternative fuels will be seen as the distraction it is; a distraction that sidesteps the inherently unsustainable nature of the automobiles themselves. Forget the fuel question and consider plastics, tires, concrete, production, maintenance, disposal, and even roadkill. Think of all the details and materials necessary for all these systems to function (roadkill isn’t a system…). There is nothing sustainable about car culture (and frankly, I’d rather eat corn than burn it in my gas tank).

Much of the following information can be read more in depth in “The Road to Environmental Ruin,” a chapter in Jane Holz Kay’s Asphalt Nation.

Total Life Pollution
In the mid-1990’s, researchers at the Environment and Forecasting Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, calculated the total pollution output of an average German family car (about the size of a Ford Escort) in each stage of its life. Typically, when we’re talking about emissions, we’re talking about the middle-stage of the automobiles life. We don’t normally think about the energy and pollution necessary for the car’s production and disposal. They concluded that before the vehicle even left the plant, the car-to-be had produced 29 tons of waste and 1,207 million cubic yards of polluted air. During it’s life on the road (85k miles) it pumped another 1,330 million cubic yards of polluted air into the atmosphere and disseminated 40 pounds of worn bits of road surface, tire, and brake debris on the highway. Disposal, the last step in the cars life, produced 133 million cubic yards of pollution. If we’re talking percentages, 33 percent of the cars total pollution output is released during production, 60 percent during it’s stint on the road, and 7 percent during it’s disposal. It’s important also to note that automobiles in America are much bigger and the U.S. doesn’t have the kind of sophisticated recycling facilities for automobile disposal that Germany does. So per capita, our numbers would be much worse.

Tires
Tires contain an average of 2 and a half gallons of oil each. That’s why they burn so well. When they burn, as they often do when pilled by the millions, they foul the air for hundreds of miles, and pollute the water with zinc and heavy metals. After the fire, lead and cadmium remain on the ground, seeping into the soil when it rains. Trashed at a rate of roughly one per vehicle each year (in the mid-nineties, when this information was collected….no doubt it is more than this now), tires actually pollute before they’re junked. Spinning on asphalt, each tire loses a pound of rubber every year and the small grains rise to the sky, filtering into our lungs and waterways.

Concrete
Slowly but surly, we’re covering every pavable surface with concrete, which makes the title of this blog more literal than figurative. Over 38.4 million acres of roads and parking lots accounts for more land devoted to driving our cars than producing our homes. In the wilderness we lay 370,000 miles of road on just the Forest Service’s 300,000 square miles, more than a mile of road per square mile of wooded wilderness…disrupting habitats and abets erosion. These numbers, of course, rise every day. The numbers, also, don’t account for repaving and general maintenance of roads.

Roadkill
Beyond covering wild habitat and disseminating pollution, roads should also be considered lethal corridors. Currently, hundreds of animals go extinct every single day; roads split up wild habitat and speed this process up. “The principal cause of death of southern Florida’s endangered American crocodile is the car.” According to the Environmental Defense Fund, “The most devastating environmental crisis of the turn of the millennium, second only to global warming, is the destruction of wild and rural habitat—and the automobile is the main culprit in that rout” (writes Jim Armstrong in Orion). A silent killer of the road, one that isn’t mentioned often, is the debris of automobile use on the road. Salt, brake linings, anti-freeze and other poisonous fluids like oil and coolants, scatter across the highways and slide off the road into the earth.

It is for these reasons and many more that the automobile will not characterize a sustainable future. People will not stop driving; that’s for sure. Perhaps hybrids and the like should be marketed as a transition to a no-car culture. Investing in our once great railroad system would be an even better transition (we wouldn’t even need to build a lot more track; the train should just stop more…).

A “no-emissions” vehicle is a fantasy and the public needs to wake up. It took me a while to wake up to this reality. I love cars and I love driving them. Cars represent the spirit of the independent American culture that characterize both the good and the bad of who we are. There was a time in my life when I knew the make and model of every car on the road. I had posters (when I was a kid); I dreamed of owning a ’68 Shelby Cobra. There is no other country in the world that has made cars as “cool” as the United States. Would rockabilly exist without the automobile? “Bicycle Sally” would not have been a great Eric Clapton song, that’s for sure. Still, I think it’s time we begin “uncooling” the automobile. The muscle cars that are still being produced—the Mustang, the Charger…etc.—should be revealed to be as lame as they are: symbolic exploitations of constructed male masculinity produced by car culture. Still, there is something deep inside me that fantasizes about driving them.

But you know what? They’re not worth it; they’re killing everything, not to mention the 40 million people who are killed on the road each year. I was almost one of them a few months ago. I remember thinking, when I got out of the smoking vehicle, in the rain, in the middle of the desert, “what the hell are we doing in these death traps?”

Cars were fun while they lasted, but I think it’s time for all of us to sit back and simply admit that we were wrong; that car culture was and continues to be a mistake. We’ve structured our lives around the automobile. Many people in the U.S. absolutely need a car to survive, but deindustrialization is the only path towards true sustainability. We need to think about progress differently, at least in a way that puts the needs of the natural world (and us) above the needs of our economic systems.

We can work together to restructure our lives around our communities, our families, and the land that makes life possible (and beautiful). It is, in actuality, a matter of life and death. The discourse surrounding sustainability has us trying to come up with an answer to: “how can we preserve car culture, sustainably?” Well the answer, evidently, is, we can’t. Automobiles are just machines, machines that pollute heavily, but allow us to get from point A to point B much faster. During the last 100 years, we’ve let these machines define who we are, where we live, and how we perceive our independence. We’re better than that; for over 12 thousand years, we’ve been better than that. We will be there again some day and right now the only question is, what will be left of the world when we get there?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 10:07 pm and is filed under environmental injustice. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.