Our Car-Centered Society

The 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, which was also a cross-country march seeking to change the world, lost one marcher to a vehicular collision. The Great March for Climate Action has gone for seven months without incident, but that awesome track record came to an end on Friday, Sept. 26. While walking along Route 65 out of Maumee and toward Toledo, a pick-up truck operated by a sleeping driver struck me head on. Unlike the unfortunate Peace Marcher in 1986, I can live to tell the tale.

Letter to the Future

During my time on the Climate March I have come to realize that the climate crisis is more dire than I could have ever imagined. The reality of the situation has affected me very deeply and has begun to lead me down paths I didn't even know existed. Since this transformation in my thinking about the future has been very personal, I thought it would be more appropriate to share this in a letter rather than a typically-formatted blog post. The following is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Chris, the Climate March's Colorado State Coordinator and my companion, while on the bus from Montpelier, Ohio to New York City.

Pushing My Weight

A response to the Climate March I hear a lot is, "Isn't it hypocritical to say you're walking to fight climate change while you're using all of those gas-guzzling vehicles?"

Yes, you caught us. The Climate March is not fossil-fuel free. We have a gear truck, a kitchen truck, a truck to haul our Eco-Commodes and several personal vehicles. We rely heavily on these vehicles to make it through our days, and attempts to reduce our number of vehicles are often stymied due to the wide variety of needs from our diverse community.

In response to people being skeptical of the March because of our vehicle use, I'd like to quote two of my fellow Marchers. During one of our emotionally-intense group meetings about our fossil-fuel usage, Jeffrey Czerweic pointed out that it takes fossil fuels to produce wind turbines and solar panels. My fellow marcher Mack McDonald often cites the following statistic: if every single American started living a truly sustainable lifestyle tomorrow, it would only cut about 20 percent of our emissions. The other 80 percent comes from industry and corporations.

It's true; we need to drastically cut our carbon emissions if we have any hope of even a bearable future on this planet. While it is important to make changes in our own lives, it is even more important to tackle industry, consumerist capitalism and wasteful individualism. Currently, our daily lives and the resources we use and think we 'need' encourage this system, and one way we can bring down the giant is to remove our monetary support from it.

That's why, inspired by my fellow marcher Kelsey Erickson, who has been carrying her own gear in a cart or a backpack for most of the March, I decided to start using a cart in Nebraska and I am still going strong now.