Yeah, so I did get around to writing. Partly because I’m in a ghastly New Jersey hotel room at 6:30 a.m. with nothing to do for the next two hours, and partly because I’ve got the usual head-full of notions.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t travel a lot these days. My wife Kory and I take day trips on occasion, but that’s about it. That’s a big change from back in the day, to be sure. Kory traveled all over the country for her film work and lived in Manhattan for about 15 years. Of course, I did the same in pursuit of a meager living as an itinerant musician and as a low-rent roadie, tag-along in my very very early years.
Living in a tiny little burg in upstate New York as we do, you tend to intellectualize big problems like climate change. Nothing makes it more concrete than an afternoon on the Garden State Parkway or the New Jersey Turnpike. Millions of vehicles in a mad crush, turning the road into a massive parking lot around the major exits, everyone struggling to get just one car length ahead of the next fucker. At one point in a particularly slow-moving traffic jam on a railroad overpass I was flanked by a tractor trailer carrying fuel while beneath us passed one of those amazingly long tanker trains. When no one’s moving, there’s little to do but think, and it’s moments like that when I start thinking … we have a little problem.
So … how do we turn the supertanker around? That’s the challenge of our age. We need somehow to get to a more sustainable way of living. It’s silly to deny that we have made some marginal progress over the years; those millions of cars are substantially cleaner and more fuel-efficient than previous generations of vehicles. And there are other factors, like the energy industry, that are major contributors in climate change. But this isn’t a problem that will be solved on the margins. We need to work out a different way of doing things – one that doesn’t involve burning all these hydrocarbons.
Those folks hanging from ropes in front of that icebreaker in Oregon had the right idea. Next time maybe they (or rather, we) should do it in the Capitol rotunda. Or in the main portico of the White House. Because that’s where you stop the drilling.
luv u,
jp
