A silly meme on Facebook – a paper straw in a plastic wrapper titled “The Green movement in a nutshell” – got me thinking about my own environmentalist leanings, and my commitment to not owning a car.
Growing up on the Maine Coast gave me an environmental consciousness I never thought of as political. I instinctively pick up trash and recoil at litter, much of which includes non-recyclable plastic. But while a ton of straws can break a camel’s back, we aren’t going to save the planet by focusing on minutiae like straws.
What do straws have to do with cars? They both kill turtles, for one thing. But cars do a whole lot more damage than that. Aside from the thousands of people killed yearly in crashes, motor vehicles contribute to a long laundry list of insults to the global ecosystem. They burn finite fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. They necessitate the construction of acres of parking lots, which radiate heat back into the atmosphere, eliminate wetlands, and pollute reservoirs with run-off. They encourage the development of car-centric suburbs with huge per-capita carbon footprints. They foster graveyards of spent tires and dead vehicles that continue to pollute years after they stop moving.
Although I consider myself an environmentalist, I stopped owning cars for none of those reasons. I stopped owning cars because they cost too much money. I resented the idea that I needed a car at my service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There are plenty of cars around. Surely I could find one to use when I needed to, without the economic onus of owning one.
The past 17 years have vindicated this conviction. I now have a savings account instead of a monthly car payment and an ongoing insurance policy. I don’t waste precious minutes of my life sitting in traffic jams. On foot, on a bicycle, or on a bus, I’m healthier and happier than I would be seething and swearing at people from behind a windshield.
It hasn’t come without cost, or without compromises. I have had to adjust my lifestyle and change some habits. I leave ample time to get to the places I need to go, and I sometimes don’t get to other places I want to go. For most of those years, I’ve lived with someone who owned a car. Four months ago, we became a no-car household.
So far, we’ve managed. We did not visit family for Thanksgiving, and we have not yet needed to take the dog to the vet. Have you ever noticed that almost all veterinarians are way out on the edge of town? In October we rented a car and the three of us went to the coast for a weekend, but we can’t jump up and do that on the spur of the moment.
It isn’t only veterinarians. Hardware stores are hard to find anywhere outside of Lowe’s and Home Depot, always built where it’s hard to get to other than by car. The buses stop running before many people get out of work. To live without a car in a small city like Bangor, far from any major metropolitan center, is to endure a multitude of inconveniences.
Are the inconveniences worth the rewards? In my case, the answer was, and is still, “Yes.” But I don’t need a car to get to and from my primary job, and I do much of it on-line. It’s a 15-minute walk to downtown and an even shorter walk to a corner convenience store. Renting a car works out to about a hundred dollars a day, which seems like a lot until you consider that the average annual cost of owning a car is $10,000, equal to 100 car rentals.
I’m lucky, in that I can choose not to own a car. Many don’t have that choice. They either can’t afford one, or can’t drive one, for physical or other reasons. Life is even more inconvenient for them.
Cars are a convenience, and an environmental disaster. Hence the conundrum: how does an environmentally responsible citizen retain the convenience while reducing the harm? Many people are choosing to go electric.
Electric cars are marginally better for the environment, as this article from the New York Times details. But they require lithium and cobalt mining, which aren’t any kinder to the planet than oil rigs and refineries. They will not stop suburban sprawl or the hollowing out of small business districts in favor of outlying big-box stores with massive parking lots.
If we are to be serious about our stewardship of the planet, as I believe we must be, then we can do better than to substitute one environmental disaster for a slightly lesser one. Electric cars won’t do a whole lot of good if we use them the way we use gas-powered cars now.
Instead, we can invest in comprehensive public transportation, promote pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with a mixture of business and residential use, and incentivize development on a human rather than an automotive scale.
Why do you get a straw when you order a glass of water at a bar, anyway? You can drink it just fine without one. Owning a car should not be a necessity. Entrenched interests make it feel like one. We must work toward a world in which alternative choices are equally appealing.
