Sit still for a minute

Even though I use cloth napkins, have CFLs in every bulb socket, buy organic carrots and recycle and reuse, I like to get in my car and drive whenever and wherever I want to go. I don’t give it a second thought. I think of my car and the fossil fuel that runs it as my birthright and my freedom.

However, years ago my husband and I conceived of the “No-Car Day,” a day-long moratorium on driving. We were tired of driving all the time, so we scheduled our grocery shopping, dentist appointments and workouts for weekdays after work. Then we designated one day each weekend to religiously refrain from driving, a kind of automotive Sabbath we honored and kept holy.

We didn’t think about conserving our precious and diminishing energy source. Gas was still a dollar and change a gallon. We repressed the grim and painful reality that the Iraq wars were fought for oil, and soldiers died so we could mindlessly fill up at the pump.

At first our No-Car Day took a little getting used to. It was hard to slow down. But as we managed to rest in the silence and let the hours pass by as we relaxed, moving only as fast and as far as our bodies would allow, we began to look forward to our days of peace and quiet.

We live in a different world now. The price of gas is double what it was when we first started our No-Car Day ritual. Democrats and Republicans alike have acknowledged that the Iraqi War was waged to protect our oil fields. Experts are talking about “peak oil,” postulating alarming future scenarios unless we completely rethink and revolutionize the systems that demand that we drive to access every necessity. Even former President Bush famously acknowledged in his 2006 State of the Union address that Americans are “addicted to oil.”

Like all addicts, we won’t admit we’re addicted. We continue to shoot up, destroying the living world around us to extract from the earth every last drop of non-renewable fossil fuel instead of rethinking our dependence on the automobile. The threat of tainting the drinking water of 20 million people has come to our beloved river valley, underscoring the extent to which some of us are willing to sacrifice the environment that sustains us.

We still don’t get it. Consider these statistics:

As of 2003 America had more private cars than licensed drivers.

Transportation accounts for about 28 percent of our total national energy consumption.

The average American household emits 3.7 tons of greenhouse gases per year through the use of cars, light trucks, SUVs and minivans.

It is a mistake to suggest that curing the fossil fuel addiction is solely up to you and me. Policy makers and corporations have given us few viable choices. Consider the misguided actions of General Motors, which crushed its fleet of electric cars in 1992 and opted to sell Hummers, and the Bush administration’s huge tax breaks for consumers buying gas guzzlers.

In the long term, we need a transportation revolution. In the short term, we can reassess our driving habits, set goals to decrease our personal vehicle use by making fewer trips and eliminating non-essential driving, carpool or use public transportation wherever possible (for trips to NYC, for example) and trade in our SUVs, trucks and minivans for hybrids.

Experimenting with a No-Car Day can change your perspective and give you time to dream about solutions, share them with your neighbors and legislators, and maybe even start a movement to end our dependence on fossil fuels.

- Marcia Nehemiah