Drive My Car

Nearly 40 years ago, Joni Mitchell warbled about the industrial prostituting of America, how they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Time travel to the present and “they” are offering a slice of that paradise by touting environmentally friendly products: Leave your carbon footprint along the highway as you park in big-box lots and race to the cash register to buy greener you. If you’re lucky, the “tree museum” might be right next door.

Money can’t buy you love and it won’t buy you a green world. In fact, some people believe the recession plaguing the global economy and resulting in reduced spending is the best gift anyone could have bestowed upon Mother Nature.

“The economic downturn is the best thing that’s happened in a long time,” believes Peter Thompson, an educator at the Atlantic States Legal Foundation, a Syracuse-based entity founded in 1982 that provides legal, technical and organizational assistance to individuals and groups to try to abate threats to the natural environment. “If Obama’s stimulus package works the way it’s designed to work, then all we’ve done is dodge a bullet. If the recession does what it needs to do, which is to be the great economic leveler, then we will have no choice but to do things more intelligently.”

The president has already doled out more than $17 billion from the $787 billion American Recovery and Investment Act to help struggling U.S. automotive giants General Motors and Chrysler, and more bailout cash could be on the way as the pair continue to flirt with bankruptcy. The automotive industry has long been criticized by environmental advocates calling for tighter emission controls as well as the production of more fuel-efficient and alternative-energy cars to wean our petroleum dependence.

“We knew in the 1970s that this was going to happen and knew oil was a finite resource,” continues Thompson, “and the American automobile industry has had lots of opportunities over the last 20 to 30 years to bail itself out and go down a greener road. So why didn’t they get ahead of the curve and instead of making huge pickup trucks that they advertise as being able to haul 69 elephants on the flatbed, start thinking about more fuel-efficient cars? They didn’t do that and now General Motors is talking about bankruptcy and maybe that’s the pill that needs to be swallowed to straighten this out.”

Thompson states the obvious that Barack Obama is a definite improvement over his predecessor, George W. Bush, who opposed binding commitments for reducing greenhouse gasses with a June 2007 refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty intended to bring countries together to reduce global warming as part of an amendment to the U.N. Framework on Climate Change. But he also cautions that “even a man as intelligent, bright and hopeful as Obama is still won’t change it overnight.”

While some products are indeed more energy efficient than previous incarnations—compact fluorescent energy-saving light bulbs come to mind—others pitched as green are, as Thompson says, “a little questionable.” In the industry it’s known as greenwashing. “I think many companies are trying to market {green} to make money,” says Thompson, “and that is the same concept our economy was running on before the economic crisis and nothing is going to change by labeling merchandise as green. It’s an ideology, not a commodity.” 

As an educator, Thompson believes the next generation must be taught about the environment in a hands-on way. “We don’t need another college course on public participation where you do it all in the classroom,” he says. “We need to get a core of people who can go out in the community and take a bunch of kids and say, ‘Look, what do you see?’ We need to be teaching people to live where they live.”

For example, he recounts when he took a group of kids from the Dunbar Center to Elmwood Park not too long ago. As they approached the headwaters of Furnace Brook, which Carpenter’s Brook Fish Hatchery personnel stock with trout every year, he posed what he thought was a simple question to the children. “Furnace Brook is crystal clear; it’s spring-fed,” he recalls. “I wanted them to feel the temperature of the water which would tell them ‘cold water, why is it cold?’ Because it’s coming out of the spring and it’s nearly the same temperature year-round. But the kids would not put their hands in the water because they believe that every body of water in Syracuse is polluted. 

“I said to these kids, ‘What you’re standing by is probably one of the most pristine habitats you’ll ever see in your entire life.’ A lot of kids don’t know what’s outside their door.” 

Part of the reason for that, Thompson believes, is the consumer-driven American Way, which explains mansions and elaborate housing developments built on attractive land that’s been stripped of anything natural—meaning fewer and fewer natural playrooms for kids to go out and discover.

“I think the standard American dream is as much as you can possibly consume, as big a house as you can possibly buy, as many boats and cars as you can buy, and for the infinite level of high income,” continues Thompson. “If you can think it you can do it, and if you can dream it you can do it—and that’s just not true. There’s not enough to go around anymore; we’ve used it all up.”

Thompson mentions that most of us are now wired to spend our days in cubicles with no windows and have lost touch with what’s going on outside. But he rationalizes that we need to make do with our immediate surroundings in order to really become one with the harmony of the elements. Further, it’s a misconception that we have to get out of Syracuse to be in nature. Nature is everywhere.

“I walked my dog here on West Onondaga Street yesterday,” Thompson says, “and as I’m always looking for birds I looked up and there was a falcon. A couple of years I walked out my back door and looked up and there was a bald eagle flying overhead. Thirty years ago you were lucky that if in your lifetime you saw one bald eagle, but now they’re becoming commonplace.”

—Tom Kahley