A Blast from the Past

Hank Garfield

Kenduskeag Canoe Race today. Easter tomorrow. Earth Day on Tuesday. Seems like a good time to re-post this one from eight years ago.

It’s Earth Day All Over the World / April 22, 2017

In June 1989, five months after running aground and spilling its cargo all over Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the Exxon Valdez limped home to San Diego, still leaking a trail of oil.

I went down to see it at the shipyard, but the public wasn’t allowed in close and there wasn’t much to see. The costs of the American car culture are often hidden from view.

I’m reminded of this as Earth Day approaches, on the heels of Easter. The two celebrations of spring occur within a week of each other this year, thanks to the configuration of the Earth and Moon.

Though only 47 years old, Earth Day is now observed in more than 180 countries. Which makes sense when you think about it. Humanity has many religions, but, so far, only one planet.

The first Earth Day was a response to a massive oil spill near Santa Barbara, twenty years before the Exxon Valdez disaster. It was the brainchild of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat and early opponent of the Vietnam War. Nelson toured the California coastline in the aftermath of the spill and thought that the energy of the anti-war protests could be brought to bear on environmental issues.

From Nelson’s 2005 obituary in the New York Times:

More than 20 million Americans marked the first Earth Day in ways as varied as the dragging of tires and old appliances out of the Bronx River in White Plains and campus demonstrations in Oregon. Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York closed Fifth Avenue to vehicles. Congress shut its doors so lawmakers could participate in local events. Legislatures from 42 states passed Earth Day resolutions to commemorate the date.

Senator Nelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, who praised him as “the father of Earth Day.”

The Santa Barbara disaster occurred in the heart of America’s car culture, within view of the Pacific Highway. More than 3 million gallons of crude oil fouled some of the most popular beaches in the world, and killed untold thousands of birds, fish and sea mammals.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

The Jan. 28, 1969, blowout was caused by inadequate safety precautions taken by Unocal, which was known then as Union Oil. The company received a waiver from the U.S. Geological Survey that allowed it to build a protective casing around the drilling hole that was 61 feet short of the federal minimum requirements at the time.

The resulting explosion was so powerful it cracked the sea floor in five places, and crude oil spewed out of the rupture at a rate of 1,000 gallons an hour for a month before it could be slowed.

It was the worst oil spill in the nation’s history – until 20 years later, when the Exxon Valdez dumped 11 million gallons of crude off the coast of Alaska.6

In those twenty years, California and the United States, with bipartisan support, passed reams of environmental legislation. There is little doubt that these laws have improved the lives of every American. Los Angeles still has smog, but not like it did in 1969, thanks to the requirement that all vehicles pass an emissions test before they can be registered. We still have bad oil spills, like the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but we also have an enhanced awareness of our impact on the planetary ecosystem.

In the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill, Greenpeace ran an ad campaign with the slogan: “It wasn’t the tanker captain’s driving that caused the Alaska oil spill. It was yours.”

Even the car-happy cities of southern California are starting to take this to heart and invest in public transportation. If we are serious about the environment – and the expanding observance of Earth Day shows that we are – there is no mission more important than promoting alternatives to the private car.

Worth its Weight in Emissions

Hank Garfield

The astronomer Carl Sagan was just 62 when he died on the second-to-last day of December 1996. I shook his hand once, when he came to speak to the astronomy club at my high school in the early 1970s.

Sagan was among the first scientists to warn us about the dangers of carbon emissions from motor vehicles and industry, pointing to Venus, where surface temperatures are hot enough to melt lead, as an example of a “runaway greenhouse effect.”

It was Sagan who prevailed upon NASA to have the Voyager 1 spacecraft take the “Pale Blue Dot” photo of Earth from outside the orbit of Saturn, though it had no scientific value. But its symbolic value was immeasurable. Like the Apollo photo of the whole Earth taken by the astronauts on the way to the moon, it drove home the reality that we are all passengers on the same vessel, the Mother Ship, whose resources are vast but not indestructible.

My own environmentalism was spawned and shaped by my childhood on the Maine Coast. I swam in its clear, cold waters and ate food from its ocean, lakes and streams. I also saw open-air dumps, untreated sewage, and beer cans tossed casually by the thousands into the roadside trees. I saw the Santa Barbara oil spill on TV and imagined with horror the same thing happening to my beloved Penobscot Bay.

The world’s population of motor vehicles now numbers approximately 1.2 billion. The United States is by far the worst offender, with five vehicles for every six people. If the Chinese owned cars in the same proportion as we do, they would need a billion vehicles just for themselves.

The average weight of a car or light truck is 4,079 pounds. An average gas-powered vehicle spews its weight in carbon compounds into the atmosphere each year. That means that our automotive infrastructure is annually pumping 4,894,800,000,000 (4.9 trillion) pounds of greenhouse gases into the clear blue sky. (And that’s not even counting the impact of the trucking industry, the byproducts of road construction, and vehicle manufacturing and disposal.) While these gases won’t turn our planet into Venus, they will continue to contribute to rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, disruption of food supplies, and other life-threatening challenges.

Sagan’s contemporary, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, was only sixty when he died in 2002, leaving a lifetime of research and provocative theories, and a trove of extraordinary essays on a wide range of subjects for general audiences. Like Sagan, Gould had the facility to convey complex concepts in ordinary English, and to skewer popular perceptions.

“We pitiful latecomers,” he wrote, “are stewards of nothing in the long run. Yet no political movement is more vital and timely than modern environmentalism – because we must save ourselves (and our neighbor species) from our own immediate folly.”*

The Penobscot River near Bangor was an industrial dumping ground when I was a child; now people swim in it. We regularly see bald eagles from our kitchen window half a mile from downtown. Fifty years ago, they were nearly gone from Maine. These are two great environmental success stories, apparent to anyone who cares to look. By not owning a car, I hope I am contributing, in my own small way, to another.

* from Bully For Brontosaurus, copyright 1991 by Stephen Jay Gould.

A Convenience and a Catastrophe

Hank Garfield

The private car is a convenience for its owner, and an ongoing environmental disaster for the planet.

We’ve known this for a long time, of course. Yet because we Americans live in a First World country whose transportation infrastructure has been built for cars, we rarely stop to think in any comprehensive manner about the destructive habits of our car-driven way of life. Those Americans who do care about the environment invest in electric or hybrid cars, as if carbon emissions were the worst of the problems caused by ubiquitous car ownership.

A study in the 1990s by the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health in Germany details how the automobile impacts the environment during all three stages of its existence, from manufacture through its operational lifetime to its disposal. Last year, a new study was published in the Journal of Transport Geography entitled “Car Harm: A global review of automobility’s harm to people and the environment.” Its research and conclusions are sobering.

The study divides the harm done by cars into four broad categories: violence (car crashes and intentional violence such as bombings, drive-shootings and road rage); ill health (air quality, isolation, sedentary lifestyles); social injustice (unequal distribution of harm and access to resources); and environmental degradation (resource extraction, pollution, land use, climate change). It’s hard to argue with the thesis stated in the study’s introduction:

“Cars are the default mode of transportation in thousands of cities, suburbs and towns around the world… While some people benefit from the default position of cars, nearly everyone – whether or not they drive, is harmed by it.”

The study contains some eye-opening statistics. Currently, there are about 2 billion motor vehicles in use worldwide, about 1.3 billion of which are cars. (The study defines a “car” as a vehicle used to transport people and small amounts of cargo, including sedans, SUVs, pickup trucks, vans and taxis.)  But those 1.3 billion cars are distributed unevenly among the world’s 8 billion people. Although China now has more total cars than the United States, we own cars at four times their per capita rate. The Netherlands, a small, flat, bicycle-friendly country, has more cars than Nigeria, which has 12 times as many people.

The harm done by cars is also uneven. It falls hardest in places where car ownership is not widespread. Lead batteries from cars are dismantled in poor countries whose citizens lack the mobility provided by cars but nonetheless suffer the harmful effects of automotive lead exposure. Rubber for tires comes from plantations in Liberia where workers earn slave wages so that we can drive to weekend sporting events.

Traffic crashes kill 3500 people per day worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for children over four and adults under 30. Africa has the highest crash death rate per capita, Europe the lowest. In the United States, crash deaths per capita declined in the early years of this century but have since begun to climb again.

Those crash deaths include victims outside of the car, such as pedestrians and cyclists, who have become much more vulnerable with the proliferation of SUVs. A 2023 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that “pickup trucks, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are 45% more likely to cause fatalities than shorter vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less.”

The devastation wrought by cars is not limited to the cars themselves but is distributed throughout the whole automotive infrastructure. Limited-access highways and their attendant exit ramps, interchanges and service areas consume acres of land that serve no productive purpose and cause problems through chemical run-off and radiation of heat back into the atmosphere. Parking lots, built for the express purpose of temporarily storing cars, are even worse offenders.

None of this is news. We have it within our means to address all these issues. Yet many of us would rather just keep driving and owning cars, and damn the consequences. “The current status quo,” the JTG report concludes, “prioritizes the movement and storage of cars above the safety, health, dignity, and wellbeing of people and the environment. It took just a few decades for nearly every city on Earth to be remade from a pedestrian-centric place to an automobile-centric place. Perhaps in a few more decades, [we] will have once again remade cities – this time into safer, healthier, and more just environments.”