In the long run, it’s also the greatest thing you can do for the kids.

Human bodies are such frail, susceptible, fickle things of gross matter. Life as a temporary preoccupation would be an easier idea to promote were it not so hard, cold, and rough.

Similarly with today’s leftwingism.

BTW, I can remember when the environmental wackos were on the right, not on the left. (Similarly, back in those days the anti-Semites were on the right, too.) Somewhere I have an issue of a right-wing publication from the early 60s that was cheering Rachel Carson. The anti-fluoridationists were on the right back then, too. It was kind of an anti-establishment thing, before the Vietnam war and the days of the hippies.

I also remember how in 1970, in the fall of the year of the first earth day, I got the message loud and clear that much of the right now saw the environmental movement as a threat.

“Here’s something funny: my German father-in-law – no friend of big government, and about as anti-60s one could find – describes this way of life (including the solar panels, etc.) as conservative. And what could be more conservative than the Swabian motto – “schafe, spare, Häusle baue” (work, save, build a house)? Of course, the high finance boys in NYC never got a bonus house in Westhampton based on THAT ethic.”

Now when i go back to visit the downtown looks like a catalog photo-shoot and there is a political row going on because the HS won’t provide parking for the student’s bemmers and mustangs, and its not like its all Nouveau rich. Today’s conservatism is riddled with consumerism and entitlement. just because you can afford to spend $200 fill your vehicle up doesn’t mean you have to. And many of the professed conservatives I know dismiss energy conservation and re-cycling even though they still clip coupons and have a fridge full of leftovers, that’s just weird, cheering on a proliferate lifestyle for people they don’t know while also harping on their children’s spending habits.

I starting thinking about this after reading the blog of Patrick Deneen where he comments on the thriftiness of his German in-laws.

http://patrickdeneen.blogspot.com/2007/08/what-i-saw-in-europe.html

Depends on which environment you’re talking about.

If you want more of a rail system and less of an automobile culture, how about supporting a netzero gas tax instead of things like CAFE and cap-and-trade….Having governments spend more on mass transit while allowing things like CAFE to stand is not going to accomplish anything good.

For what it’s worth, I’m not really a big fan of emissions trading of any sort. I recognize that there are a lot political contexts where it’s much more likely to work than any kind of direct tax scheme, and for certain fuel standards and such have had some good impact on the environment–and, of course, there’s the whole “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” thing. Still, you’ll get no disagreement from me regarding your point that, in the long run, making our dependence upon the automobile and other polluting industries cheaper and cleaner won’t, in itself, do anything to build the culture of mass transit which we really ought to have.

Polistra,

Spokane’s bus system is still pretty good, and still a good mixer. Obama’s infrastructure spending will help it even more, enabling it to buy 24 new buses.

Are you a Spokanite? If so, well met! It’s a good city: big, but not so big that the egalitarian and empowering consequences of social and economic actions are lost. I’m glad to hear Spokane’s bus system is still functioning, and will even expand further. (My parents and my siblings still in Spokane live out in the Valley and Otis Orchards now, but I consider the whole metro area my home.)

JS,

DON’T HAVE KIDS.

And if I were a radical Green and believed the “natural” environment was absolutely the only thing that mattered, I’d agree with you. Fortunately, I also happen to believe that human beings–including their culture and society–have a place in that “natural” world, and so I think in terms of sustainability and sovereignty, not extinction.

I’ve been able to live without a car for 18 years now
because of this good bus service, and because I listened
to my father when he quoted the old “make it do” philosophy.

Livin’ small may not be as exciting as livin’ large, but
it’s a whole lot less precarious when times get hard.

The current level of support for programs of mass transit across in the states–and within the various states–is indeed a good indicator of how much we are still beholden to those early 20th-century shenanigans which resulted in the buyout and bankruptcy many communter railroads and railway companies, while preserving the big freight players, all the while ceding more and more land and money to the addictive cure of the automobile. I’d like to think more and more people are realizing this, and perhaps the paltry amount devoted in Obama’s stimulus package is a step in the right direction, but it is a tiny step.

The possibility of building a culture of mass transit will be difficult, and perhaps impossible, given how our movies, our music, our patterns of life while growing up, have become so conditioned by the promise of private travel afforded by the automobile. But the fact that, in limited places and in different contexts, it has nonetheless made a comeback, gives one hope. The light-rail transport through the Salt Lake Valley is one example; Spain’s commitment to rebuilding their deteriorating system is another. And I should not that it is a culture, or at least a habitus that can plant deep roots; I sometimes wonder if my own beliefs were not in some small way shaped by the regular exposure I had to the egalitarian intercourse one would find betwixt bus riders, as I caught the bus to downtown Spokane, WA, Saturday after Saturday as I was growing up.

As for Luddism, I confess some real sympathy to it as well, but also, D.W. said, an awareness that there are ways in which new technology, and even new gizmos, can actually make like simpler, more amenable to our own collective control over it. One shouldn’t throw the baby with the bathwater–sometimes, in the midst of all the environmentally destructive, needlessly complicated and compromising crap, some genuinely good stuff bubbles up. (If Caleb can have an iPhone, then anything is possible.)

As to the vaguely luddite quality of the essay, a general policy I have a lot of sympathy with, I have a minor point. I will assert that a new, small and well designed house with new technology in windows, doors, plumbing, heating etc may actually be quite a lot greener and more economical than buying that old inner city house….no matter the abundant charms of that house. I’d endorse an economy of both.

Josh – I think a decent rail system is vital. Good mass transportation, I believe, is necessary if we are to have strong communities in a modern world.