I often am asked about the fastest and easiest steps which people can take to reduce their carbon footprint and help reverse global warming. Among my favorite responses is to drive more sensibly. In fact, I harp on the subject, perhaps because I commuted by bus for nearly a decade from my home in Orlando.
What I didn’t realize until recently, though, was that everything I advocate about driving was part of a smart driving movement, known as hypermiling. It turns out that people from coast to coast and around the world are so distressed by retail fuel prices (and rightly so) that they have taken to adopting new behavior. You can read what to do at a handy website
I am so impressed with the movement that I call for all drivers to display a hypermiling bumper sticker on their car. If we all drive smarter, we can reduce fuel prices, we can reduce our addiction to fossil fuels and we can reduce our contribution to global warming.
You may ask, though: what does this have to do with getting down? Good question! The simple answer is that being a global warming loser at its core means that you live wastefully. While it is good to park your car and travel by pedal power or shoe leather as often as you can, I don’t expect you to stop driving altogether. However, I do expect you to do more with less, especially less pollution.
Prior to the industrial revolution, most people lived with a relatively benign carbon footprint. Slowly, over the span of more than a century, we in the western world have participated in a fundamental change, one in which the consumption of natural resources is a secondary or tertiary consideration at best against happiness and personal wealth.
That has to change!
The key here is to get down, down to the basics. How many things do you need? How many changes of clothing do you need? How far do you have to drive your car in order to accomplish your tasks? Could you walk from point a to point b at least once a week?
What I’m driving at here (no pun intended) is that our entire perspective of what constitutes basic necessity is way off. Fortunately, we can continue to live comfortably if we trim the gluttony a bit at the time. For example: I am a movie buff. For a period of about 3 years, I succumbed to the temptation to acquire hundreds of DVDs each year in the quest to build a library. I since have stopped. I made the change primarily for the following reasons:
1) Because I love movies so much, tracking all of the titles I wanted to buy became a full-time job;
2) My Orlando home didn’t have nearly enough storage space for a movie library;
3) I began to view each new DVD in terms of the natural resources consumed to produce it; and
4) The coming on-demand Internet-based movie delivery services of the future will render DVD technology obsolete so I’m better off just waiting a few years.
The point here is that if I can train myself to avoid the DVD section at Best Buy when I stop in for an accessory, you can learn to display a hypermiling bumper sticker and to buy less and travel by foot or bicycle from time to time. If enough of us do the same, we can get down together and prove that we care enough about the future of our planet to change our ways.
Sustainable Justice For All!
Corbett Kroehler
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