Traffic, transit, and transport

Allow me to make two closely related points.  The first is more general, and the second one that follows from it is more specific.  

First, the more general one.  We've gotten to the absurd point where the simple act of moving our bodies around has become a major consumer of fossil fuels and contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States (to say nothing of our petro-shenanigans in the Middle East).  For reasons too complicated to recite here, it was decided several decades ago that we should ensconce ourselves in several hundred pounds of metal, glass, and rubber and rely on petroleum-burning motors to move said inert poundage and ourselves around at high speeds (at least ideally, like in the commercials). Aside from minor additions such as seat belts and cup holders, this is still the basic configuration for how most people in this country go to and from work, school, errands, church, and weekend getaways.

There was a moment over thirty years ago when this peculiar way of moving ourselves around came into question, at least in some quarters.  Back in the 1970s, in the midst of the Arab oil embargo and the "energy crisis" that ensued, a lot of new ideas were being proposed: not just cars with higher gas mileage, but solar panels, better insulation, geodesic dome houses.  Some of these ideas were acted upon, many were not.  When oil got risibly cheap again in the 1980s and 1990s, most Americans went back to driving everywhere (actually more than before) in gas-guzzling cars.  

But in the midst of the "energy crisis" of the 1970s, a public intellectual, Ivan Illich, came at it from a singularly novel perspective.  The following is an extended passage from Illich's Energy and Equity (1974):

The discussion of how energy is used to move people requires a formal distinction between transport and transit as the two components of traffic.  By traffic I mean any movement of people from one place to another when they are outside of their homes. By transit I mean those movements that put human metabolic energy to use, and by transport that mode of movement that relies on other sources of energy....

The product of the transportation industry is the habitual passenger.  He has been boosted out of the world in which people still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at the center of his world.  The habitual passenger is conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to cars, trains, buses, subways, and elevators that force him to cover an average of twenty miles a day, frequently criss-crossing his path within a radius of less than five miles.  He has been lifted off his feet... The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of growing inequality, time scarcity, and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more traffic by transport.  He stands in wait for technical changes in the design of vehicles, roads, and schedules; or else he expects a revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control....

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport... He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role.  Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man's feet.  The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed.  He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it.

 

I bring up the distinction Illich drew between transit and transport as a way to preface my second, more specific point: an alternative transport movement going on right here in sunny Santa Cruz.  The Citizens for Personal Rapid Transit, or cPRT, are pushing for a solar-powered, computerized, semi-personal moving pod system.  I have heard the PRT advocates speak at several eco-shindigs around town, and I was impressed by the vigor with which they pursued their cause.  As far as I'm concerned, almost anything is better than the car-centered system we have now, so I applaud their efforts heartily.  But I fear they are symptomatic of a much larger and deeply held assumption: habitual passengerhood.  If unchallenged, it will hamstring any sane approach to traffic and urban design.  Should we be spending the limited resources we have on perpetuating our dependence on motorized transport, or should we prioritize human-powered transit? 

Much of the discussion about "green" alternatives to our current car dependence overlooks an obvious point: we can build our towns and cities around muscle-powered traffic.  Humans had been doing it for millennia before cars came along.  Actually, there are two obvious points: many of these towns and cities are perfectly nice places to live.  Indeed, tourists burn ungodly quanta of fossil fuels flying across the planet simply to photograph them and try out the local cuisine.  But there's no secret to their success: they were built at the human scale.  Everything else--the pleasant public squares, small shops, walkable neighborhoods, public art, neat truck farms and countryside minutes from downtown--followed from the need to build a living arrangement around the limited reach of the human body.  

Rather than have tourists ruin the "authentic feel" of places like Venice, Siena, and Salzburg by virtue of their sheer crushing mass, why not allow our own native urban spaces to follow the logic of the human scale?  Then perhaps people wouldn't have such a pressing desire to escape from the ugliness and hectic pace in their own little corner of the world.  If our towns and cities became places to dwell in, and not just to move through, then perhaps people would start seriously investing in comely urban amenities rather than, say, yet another trip to the big city or multimillion-dollar bond measure to expand the highway system.  Before you know it, we would have hundreds of charming towns and cities to rival Venice, Siena, and Salzburg.  Most of our population could actually be living in them!  

Don't get me wrong: there's clearly an important place for motorized modes of transport.  Rail, automobiles, busses, trams, etc. all have their place in a civilized mode of living.  This would especially be the case for farming and bulk goods transport, long-distance travelers, and the ill or infirm.  Now that we know about these technologies, we should use them.  I see no reason from an environmental perspective why we can't employ them, where appropriate, for the foreseeable future.  But their place has to be a peripheral one in the overall urban scheme.  Even if we were to somehow devise an ingenious carbon-neutral "green" replacement for our fossil-fueled transportation system, it wouldn't address the basic fact that desirable urban spaces require a certain density of activity that is best and most cheaply attained by building around the limits of the pedestrian's foot and the bicycle's pedal.  We should see climate change and Peak Oil as yet more reasons among many for reshaping our built environment around the time-tested principles of the human scale, not for trying out the latest techno-utopian phantasma that would keep us imprisoned in a web of motorized transport. 

I'll close with a relevant quote from Leopold Kohr's The Breakdown of Nations (1957!): 

Cars seem thus to have brought us less satisfaction than a good old steed or pair of sturdy shoes brought our forefathers.  However, one may say, cars and other highly efficient means of modern transportation such as tubes or bus services are no longer a luxury to satisfy our travel wants.  They have become a necessity to satisfy our basic needs.  That is quite true.  But since when is the creation of new necessities a sign of progress?

Why am I doing this? A long-ish apologia

"Recently... most Euroamericans have been happily paying no attention to the way their world works even though they have theoretical access to vastly greater quantities of information, a word I use here as a term of contempt.  Information has been able to mislead us because we did not put the bits together properly in the form of shared historical knowledge.  That has been our fault.  Instead of rethinking our possible role on the planet, instead of qualifying or revising our anthropocentric habits, we have shamelessly used the decline of theology relative to science as an excuse to elevate our own importance further.  Logically we should have replaced theology with ecology, before enlarging the parameters of our behavior by the heavy use of fossil fuels.  We have learned the ecology just in time, but we must act immediately to curb ourselves.  In order to avoid similar future folly, we must review more closely how we came to be so careless, even while we deal with the emergency."  --Colin Duncan, "The Practical Equivalent of War?", December 2007

To anyone who is paying attention, things are currently going really badly.  Of the many unintended outputs of industrial activity, global climate change is making acid rain and mercury contamination utterly quaint by comparison.  And what were only a few years ago pessimistic estimates about the pace and impact of climate change are turning out to have been quite conservative.  On the input side, it looks like we're in the midst of Peak Oil, or soon will be.  Stagnating petroleum supplies amidst inexorably rising demand is, in all likelihood, one of the main factors underpinning our current economic recession.  Peak Oil might be a blessing in disguise for climate change, but it could also lead in the short- and medium-term to a massive increase in the use of coal, as well as the destruction of our remaining intact ecosystems as the search for biomass becomes more desperate.  Nor does it take a stretch of the imagination to see that whatever is left of decent statesmanship could be thrown out the window in an atmosphere of relative scarcity  and chronic economic depression.  Electorates that expect two cars in every garage can be easy to terrify.

I won't belabor the point.  What is clear, overall, is that we need to stop extracting so much dead carbon fuel from its underground storage areas and burning it.  But that leaves the question of what we're supposed to do instead, and what we can do to minimize the impact of our past transgressions.

Our only way forward, as I see it, is to embrace a new agrarianism.  We need to make ourselves right with the land.  Stated more prosaically: No sustainable future can be built unless the centrality of the soil and vegetation to humankind is properly recognized.  This was the case before global climate change and Peak Oil came on the scene; in fact, these recent phenomena reinforce my point.  All the recent monetary and emotional investment in "green" technologies such as hybrid cars and solar panels is certainly a good thing, and we need more of it.  But I think it's pure fantasy to see them as more than window-dressing on a fundamentally soil-based economy.  We've lived 99.9% of our existence as a species without fossil fuels, but we've always depended on soil and plants.  We need to jettison the idea, still pervasive even among many "progressives," that we can simply replace our current arrangement with a roughly similar "green" version, Caribbean vacations and all.  This set of expectations is based on many of the same assumptions about technology and science that got us into our current predicament in the first place.

But to be clear, I'm not arguing that we need to return to living like hunter-gatherers or peasants, or even that the majority of the population needs to be rural.  There have been plenty of primitivists and rural romantics who have made this argument, and even acted on it.  Needless to say, such a line of reasoning betrays a naivety regarding the darker aspects of radical self-sufficiency.  On the other hand, though, one of the most damaging and widely held assumptions of the past century or so is that advancements like democracy and sexual equality require masses of people moiling away in factories and office complexes, daily consuming their weight in finite resources.  Going back to relying on living cycles for most of our energy and material does not also mean that we will have to lead half-starved and threadbare lives.  Democracy and the more general set of institutions and practices we call "civilization" require cities, the division of labor, and people with free time, but there is a lot of room for variation within those requirements.  Looking back from the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can see that most of the variations we have tried out, including our more recent flirtation with fossil fuels, have been failures.  

Fortunately, an accumulating mass of evidence from ecology and environmental history has been improving our understanding of life on this planet.  All this evidence should give us grounds for optimism that we can devise purely "organic" methods of farming for food, fiber, and building materials that are massively productive and indefinitely sustainable.  Only by recovering and refining past agricultures, horticultures, arboricultures, aquacultures, etc. can we eventually become certain that humankind will someday experience levels of meaningful abundance and low workloads for generations to come, without fouling our nests.  In other words, we're sunk unless we in the "developed" world can figure out how to rebuild our agricultures and make them the basis of our economic activity.  A major step is simply getting more people interested in this rebuilding process, and, beyond that, getting more people working with the land directly, part-time or full.  The main objective of this blog is to raise awareness of the many historical and present-day examples of interacting with living nature in way that is sustainable, or even beneficial.  I am constantly surprised and delighted by new discoveries in this area, and I thought others would like to know about them.  

I'm even more hopeful about what might be possible in the near future.  Learning to live intimately with carbon in living tissues will enable us not only to wean ourselves from dependence on dead sources of carbon, but there could also be a number of other beneficial knock-on effects.  In many ways, the fossil-fueled industrial mode of living that we were born into is needlessly complex, inhumane, and unhealthy.  Thoughtful people have been making arguments to this effect for a long time--since the beginning of industrial civilization a couple centuries ago, really.  So an ancillary purpose of this blog is to dig up who I think are the most perceptive of these people, many of whom are now undeservedly obscure.  Even though a number of them didn't take an explicitly "environmentalist" angle against our energy-drunk and speed-stunned society, their viewpoints can only reinforce it.

That's the general theme of this blog.  Mostly it's about thinking through how we can rearrange our priorities so that the soil and living green things are given their proper due by our entire culture, not just hippies.   I'll try to stick to this theme in subsequent entries, even when I'm commenting on, say, urban design, alternative currencies, or the mess that academia is in.  There will probably be a preponderance of material on food and nutrition, since that's my current area of focus.  Suffice it to say at this point that I find the "industrial" mentality to have invaded far too deeply into our thinking about health and sickness, which is great news given that we have to drastically curtail industrial activity to keep the planet in a condition amenable to civilized living.  And I might not be able to keep myself from posting photos of my garden or trivial reflections on the wonderfully temperate Mediterranean environment I currently inhabit.