I am now five days into a road trip from Oregon to Georgia and back to compete in the national dog agility championships. I’ve driven just over 2,000 miles of what will be a 5,550-mile trek.
A trip like this gives one a lot of time to think and to notice.
I first made a similar trip when I was seven years old. My parents packed me, my little brother, and our red and white bird-dog Rebel, into a red Ford station wagon and took off from Kirkland Washington to Oklahoma to visit the passel of relatives we had there. I loved the trip, especially seeing all the wildlife – thick herds of deer and elk, pronghorn antelope, wild horses, coyotes, and much more.
Last summer, I did another epic road trip from my home in Oregon to eastern Oklahoma to clean up my mom’s place and get it listed to sell. I was shocked at how little wildlife I saw along the way. Perhaps saddest of all was an absence of fireflies. Every time I had been in Oklahoma previously, the magical creatures had been abundant. Fireflies are dying off all across the globe due to pesticides and light pollution that interfere with their reproduction.
This current trip is the first time I’ve driven cross country in winter and maybe that has something to do with the paucity of wild creatures. I’ve seen a couple very small herds of pronghorn antelope, two live deer, and a skunk trundling along the side of the road.
There have been literally twenty times that many deer bodies, at least half a dozen dead coyotes, and scores of skunk, raccoon and possum carcasses alongside the ribbons-of-death known as highways.
For the most part wild creatures have been replaced with cows and big-rig diesel trucks hauling stuff, stuff, stuff, and more stuff. You really get a sense of the scale of the trucking phenomenon at the huge, multi-service truck stops that that dot the highways across the middle half of the country. At night masses of diesel trucks sit idling as the drivers sleep inside. The fumes can be overwhelming.
While driving I listened to President Biden’s State of the Union speech, twice, and a bunch of analysis afterwards. As usual, a lot of the talk was about how much the economy has grown under this administration. Growth is the sacred cow of American Capitalism and every politician touts their ability to expand the economy and the GDP.
I understand that we do need jobs so that individuals can pay the bills, feed their kids, etc. However, from a societal/humanity flourishing perspective these jobs really need to be about doing the work solving the problems before us rather than perpetuating the messes by cranking out and hauling around more unnecessary stuff. A small example of this is the Climate Corp that Biden has created. This initiative will train young people for jobs in a clean energy oriented economy putting people to work doing environmental restoration, bolstering community resilience, deploying clean energy and energy efficiency projects, etc. It’s a good small step. We should also be considering real investments to localize agriculture, child care, and a myriad other sectors that will be essential to redesigning society to meet the needs of today.
The ugly truth is we have built a civilization that necessitates the destruction of nature and an economic system that demands more and more growth in consumption. That same growth is what is literally driving the carnage on our highways, converting nature into asphalt parking lots and big box stores, leveling wild places to grow cattle for hamburgers, and the many other ways we are wiping out our fellow species. Our worship of growth is leaving us with a greatly diminished, less beautiful world. I’m reminded of some writings from the late ecological theologian Thomas Berry:
What do you see when you look up at the sky at night at the blazing stars against the midnight heavens? What do you see when the dawn breaks over the eastern horizon? What are your thoughts … in the autumn when the leaves turn brown and are blown away … [or] when you look out over the ocean in the evening? What do you see?
Many earlier peoples saw in these natural phenomena a world beyond ephemeral appearance, an abiding world, a world imaged forth in the wonders of the sun and clouds by day and the stars and planets by night, a world that enfolded the human in some profound manner. This other world was guardian, teacher, healer—the source from which humans were born, nourished, protected, guided, and the destiny to which we returned….
We have lost our connection to this other deeper reality of things. Consequently, we now find ourselves on a devastated continent where nothing is holy, nothing is sacred. We no longer have a world of inherent value, no world of wonder, no untouched, unspoiled, unused world. We think we have understood everything. But we have not. We have used everything. By “developing” the planet, we have been reducing Earth to a new type of barrenness. Scientists are telling us that we are in the midst of the sixth extinction period in Earth’s history. No such extinction of living forms has occurred since the extinction of the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago.
Because Nature speaks to me and fills my soul like nothing else, I am acutely aware of, and pained by, the losses. On the other hand, my longing for Nature causes me to look in the most unlikely of places. On this trip I have found spectacular beauty in desolate appearing landscapes that turned out to be hiding sparkling, multi-hued rock gardens. The first flowering tree I’ve seen this season was a gorgeous lacy white being in an asphalt parking lot in Missouri. Best of all, so far at least, traversing the miles and miles of open stretches of countryside I felt a strong sense that Nature will rebound and revitalize quickly when humans regain sanity and find a healthier way of being.
I titled this post, “Musings from an Environmentalist/Hypocrite” because being a professional environmentalist basically guarantees hypocrisy. Environmentally destructive behaviors are built into our economy and civilization making it almost impossible not to be part of the problem. I try to dance with this paradox by minimizing my damage, avoiding “guilting” myself or others, and doing what I can to witness and educate along the way.
Just in case it might be helpful to some of you, here are a few of the steps I’ve taken/am taking to minimize the environmental impact of this road trip.
· Drive the most efficient car you can. Mine is a hybrid Toyota RAV 4 and gets about 35MPG. Not the best but better than most alternatives. By the way driving produces far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than flying the same distance.
· Keep it tuned up. I had my car tuned up and tires set at perfect air pressure days before I left.
· Do Durable. I brought my own silverware, coffee mug, water bottle, glass and reusable take-out containers (some places will let you use them and some won’t). I still have to purchase gallon jugs of water along the way, but those are recyclable and I do not need to purchase the ubiquitous, single-use water bottles.
· Eat left-overs. Food waste is a huge contributor to landfills and greenhouse gas emissions.
· Haul out your recyclables. I brought a couple of large garbage bags for keeping my recyclables with me until I find a place to recycle them. In the middle part of this country that can be a challenge. I was happy to find that the Purina Farms facility had recycling stations. I’m sure some of my recyclables I’ll be bringing all the way home with me.
· At hotels -- reuse towels and don’t have them change sheets every single day if you don’t need it. That reduces water, electricity and chemical consumption.
I realize all of this is pissing into the wind, but at least it feels like I’m doing a little something and that certainly feels better than doing nothing.
In case the eco-grief I expressed resonates with you and you, here’s a piece I did on that topic that includes some tips and tools for coping.
Life with Livvy
As noted above, the purpose of this big road trip is to compete in the AKC National Agility Championships. So, this whole adventure is about life with my amazing partner and friend, Olive (AKA the Amazing Livvy Lane). Here’s a vid of us taking off from Bend, Oregon, Livvy serving as co-pilot. We were in snow or driving rain almost the entire trip. This is a vid of an early pitstop and Olive was so into pouncing in the snow she failed to do any “business”. We had to stop again half an hour later.
Before long she settled in and found her spots.