Take that Road Less Traveled By

I had a dream last night, beneath the soft marmalade pool of the sodium streetlight, somewhere between here and a beautiful future of global cooperation. On my thin, pale sheets, snuggled under a thick spread of pillaged goose feathers, I dream of charting a new course for our culture on the rocks.

I dream of converting auto factories into bicycle manufacturing plants. All this talk of subsidizing the auto industry to keep it alive kind of makes me ill, not the least of which reason is that for several hundred years, western capitalist advocates have jeered and pointed up the failures of other systems' failures, from Maoism to communism to fascism. Now, when you can see the nails popping and the plumbing leaking in this shaky suburban tract house that capitalism built, the old white guys get together and say that we need to bail it out to keep it afloat. Watching rich people help out their other rich friends who just recently were involved in fraud investigations makes me a little ill. It seems extra-infuriating because Marx predicted it over 150 years ago, when he said that capitalism will follow a path of ever-deepening crises if everyone is allowed to maximize his or her own personal wealth and self-interest.

Back to cars. Why subsidize a dying industry, that is increasing the rich/poor divide while manufacturing the instruments of climate change that we are all shamefacedly addicted to, when we could forge a whole new direction? Imagine what a beautiful thing it would be to turn out thousands of well-made, moderately priced, mechanically simple bicycles each year in the rusty heart of an empire dying from its own antiquated excesses. No one has to lose their job after 20 years on the line machining engine blocks - teach 'em how to weld tube steel, aluminum, titanium. Let their powerful hands true the wheels and work the handlebars of our transportation successors. Cuba converted much of their petroleum transportation to bicycles in the wake of their sudden loss of oil imports after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, with pretty amazing results. The automobile has made us fat, paved, asthmatic, and frustrated - what do we owe it? Melt them down, roll them up, and lug weld them into real two-wheeled alternatives. Ride on the Ford forks and Saturn seat tubes. Steal the tires (can you rework vulcanized rubber? I don't know, someone tell me), cut up the leather from the BMW luxury sedans for some fine saddles, and take the Porsche bucket seats for your baby bike trailer. Imagine a new Flint, Detroit, Cleaveland, Pittsburgh, all turning out the soft click of freewheels that take to the streets of America and the world. It'll be like some fairy tale - just like... the Netherlands. It is time to think outside the four-wheeled, oil-powered box.

I've got other crazy ideas that might just make sense. How about getting a discount on the amount of taxes you pay into health care based on how much distance your feet travel each fiscal year? You could have a pedometer that simply tells how much you walk each day, and if you meet a minimum you get a tax break. You can earn more if you're even more active, up to perhaps a regular marathon runner who might represent the upper limit. Am I just saying this to subsidize my own gym membership? Heck yes, and to be more scientific in the fact that exhaustive studies show that we are healthier when we're more active, and therefore cost The System less in the long run.

How about electricity costing MORE for each unit more that you use? Right now it is often the opposite - after a certain amount of time it gets cheaper for the additional kilowatt hour. This is not really helping us into a conservation frame of mind. Pricing schedules like this reinforce our illusions that resources are limitless and relatively inconsequential. If we treat scarce things like they are scarce, I know we'll beat a more direct path to a better future.

I have other dreams that may take a little longer to bring into being, but will be nonetheless satisfying and worth the effort. I'm excited for real dialogue around energy, pollution, resources, and whether or not we actually have a large-scale social contract that seems to be working for everyone. Recently I've been seeing ads on the TVs at the gym (oh there's another wish for my Christmas list - gyms without TVs... mmmm...) that tell me about clean energy options for the future. You want to know what they are? Coal and oil. Hello?? I thought I grasped that concept really well back in... let's see... kindergarten. Coal and oil release climate-changing greenhouse gases when we burn them. Our sandy castles are built (literally) on the non-thinking premise that there will always be an infinite, relatively cheap supply of these. Recently we have discovered that the crazy, bearded, wild-eyed guys who have been writing for decades about peak oil aren't as quite as mad as one of Dostoevskey's characters. Now we are slowly beginning to face the truth that all the black stuff in the ground will run out sooner or sooner, and we will do well to plan with that in mind.

SO... what's with the pictures of kids running through green meadows in white cotton dresses, smiling and tumbling in the daisies while their parents loving stroll along like L.L. Bean models? It's not just for dish soap and feminine hygiene products anymore - coal and gas are the new clean energy. We need to sit down and have a real talk with ourselves about the difference between 'clean' and 'not quite as dirty.' If you catch a few more particulate pollutants on the way out of the smokestack, and bury the CO2 in the ground using an untested sequestration technology that many experts have questions about, does that make you 'clean'? I've got questions. And watch out for the nuclear folks - they're waiting in the wings for their renaissance, and it's on the way. Does it count as clean if you bury it really deep in the ground? How about we build their CEO's mansion on top of that mountain first, and wait to see what happens?

Where was I before this sidetrack? Oh yes, public dialogue. If you take the box we're so often stuck in in our thinking, and set it on the ground, it makes a mighty fine podium for local get-togethers where we can all share our ideas. Let's talk about where our water comes from and whether the aquifer or snowpack is a safe reliable source. How can we make it more so? Do we want to sell it or dump paper mill effluent in it? Or do we want to kick back and read our Danielle Steele novels by the lake while our kids swim in the clean, blue goodness of it?

Let's talk about buying local goods. I'll sign the letter to China where we assure them that we mean no ill will towards their fine people who produce EVERYTHING that we eat and utilize, but that in this less-stable 21st century they will surely understand our move towards local resiliency and self-reliance. We'll post pictures on our blog so they can see our projects, and we'll look at their pictures too. It'll be great. Say it with me... bicycle-powered grain grinders. You'll grow to like having quads like Lance Armstrong.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room too - population. Yes, there are a lot of us on the globe. Yes, perhaps with some heavy-duty tweaking of the whole global system of food production and distribution, we could get food to everyone who needs it right now. My big question is: Do we want to do it into the indefinite future? It seems crystal clear to me that our system is overburdened, and will continue to be even with serious redistribution measures. Do we want to maintain the current population? How about if we don't have any global agreement about growing the population? Do we still want to support everyone who wants to have four or five kids in their family? Do we want to address the inequality that exists now globally as the result of hostorical oppression, slavery, and exploitation? I'm not lining up to be the first to force other people to behave a certain way. However, it seems that as the global population swells, and the voracious middle class bloats along with it, our lifestyles and the number of people who live in affluence are affecting everyone in more and more interconnected ways. The poor folks in Africa aren't using reams of bright white, perfect paper but they've got dioxin in their blood from the mills just like we do. We don't have to live next to the crowded Beijing factory neighborhoods, but their pollution comes across the Pacific and ails our lungs while brightening our sunsets. Steel is expensive because everyone in Asia wants it too. Vietnamese coffee is so successful that it flooded the market and it's own price bottomed out, so the American guzzlers get it cheaper while the farmers get poorer (this is an advertisement: buy fair trade coffee, and drink it in moderation). The web of connections is vast and runs in all four dimensions - three in space and one in time.

We are linked even if we don't want to be, and that is becoming a huge problem. Why is this problematic? Because we don't have any agreement about how many of us we want to feed, how many of us get to have their own automobile, how many of us get to live in a tract home with a chemlawn, or how many of us get to have cork floors or copper plumbing. Now, I'm not talking about rectifying this with all the terrible ways that humans have invented to wipe each other out. If you're still feeling on edge, read that sentence again and repeat until you're not thinking of fascist Germans, crazy Cambodians, or gritty Rwandans. What we need, however is to at least TALK about it. The link between population and resource use is the major one facing our planet today. In many ways, it is the root of other problems like global warming and food shortages. Let's talk amongst ourselves, and see what we can do to CONSENSUALLY and THOUGHTFULLY address this problem now. If you think it doesn't affect us here in the developed world, think again. This is the problem of expanding cities/pavement/electricity use, the loss of farmland, the increase of acid rain, the price of our food, the decrease in measurable happiness over the last generation, the feeling of more competition and less cooperation, and numerous other shadows in our lives.

Whew! That was big. Where to begin? Smile and breathe deep. Yoga and tai chi are nice. Regular exercise gets us feeling better and thinking more creatively. As we take care of ourselves, we live richer lives and are more able to imagine positive and optimistice possibilities. We don't even have to sit and bit our nails about this stuff all the time (those of you who know me are possibly laughing right now... I'm working on getting better :-). Just being aware and informed is an infinitely better place to be than with our heads in the sand. Those of you who are excited to see Obama take the reins from Bush know what I mean. The road may be long and rough, but we'll make it. I just think it will be easier to face that long, quiet highway if we've got friends who share common ground and a bike trailer full of wool sweaters, rice cakes, and peanut butter. May it rise up to meet you...