Earth Daze

I spent the better part of Earth Day solo-motoring around Sacramento in my private automobile...leaving several hundred pounds of carbon in my wake.

It just so happened that on Earth Day I had shit to do that could more reasonably be accommodated by vehicle.

Earth Day is commendable, but falls kilometers short. Guilty white Americans band together for one day out of three hundred and fifty odd days and declare their support for the environment...by buying supposedly eco-friendly shit they don't need with money they don't have. Then they return to their normal private motoring lives for the remaining 99.726% of the year.

I noticed that traffic on Earth Day Wednesday was just as bad as any other Wednesday, with just as many cars. The air quality on Earth Day was just as bad as any other Wednesday, and with an early heat wave the air took on a ochre tint, not normally available until summer. The next Thursday was even worse it seemed, although I observed all that from my bike seat. There are options.

And indeed, there are other options for nearly everyone nearly every day of the year, but they are often hard to find and exploit...but if you so much as ask an American to take a few extra minutes to take the bus, pedal to the store, or hint that they ought to walk from shopping at one end of the plaza to a store at the other end, they'll throw a fit. Earth Day is largely a mindless, consumer engagement by throwing this celebration on only one day a year.

I drive to work about 3 days a month. It has never, never! been about eliminating the car, it's only that it shouldn't dominate our daily activities. It is too bad that all we've done for the last four decades, since the first Earth Day, is destroy any relationship between us and our environment through suburban sprawl and auto dependence and then try to assuage our sins by repenting on some nice April day by sticking a solar cell on our foreheads or watching a PHEV demonstration.

Not gonna be enough, folks. Not gonna be enough.