It is my hope and expectation that our addiction to automobiles will follow the same trajectory in both our popular opinion and cultural imagination as our addiction to cigarettes.
The GP who delivered me and subsequently performed my tonsillectomy and gave me my allergy shots all through my teenage years was a two-pack-a-day smoker. He’d light up in his office in the middle of a consultation. Later, he had to curtail his practice because he suffered an MI while skiing. A graduate of Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons, he was not a stupid man. I expect he was fully aware of the accumulating evidence linking cigarette smoke to a wide array of health issues. Nevertheless, he was addicted to nicotine, and refused to do anything about it until an MI shook him out of his state of denial.
During a health class in grade 9, my teacher offered me and my classmates a powerful demonstration of why cigarette smoking was a stupid thing to take up. There in the classroom, in front of twenty or so pubescent boys, he lit up, took a long drag, then exhaled through a Kleenex tissue. The Kleenex acted as a filter. There was a circular brown residue on the tissue. He held it up and said: “This is the shit you put into your lungs.” Then he did some math. Suppose 20 puffs per cigarette and 20 cigarettes per pack and one pack a day for 20 years. That would be 2,920,000 of those tarry brown circles in our lungs. Even if we didn’t get lung cancer, we’d still be labouring to breathe with all that tar in our lungs. Nowadays, the presumption is against cigarette smokers. Their presence is considered an imposition and second-hand smoke is treated as a violation of rights. Today, a doctor who smokes must do it secretively or be subjected to ridicule and charges of hypocrisy.
We put shit into our lungs with cars too – and into the lungs of every living creature for that matter. What is the equivalent of a Kleenex filter to demonstrate what that looks like? And what is the equivalent of an automotive MI that would shake us out of our collective state of denial? Should non-drivers start to campaign against drivers for redress based on rights violations? A snowstorm yesterday offered me a distinctively Canadian answer.
When snow first falls, it is pristine and beautiful. You can see an example of that at right – a photo of my street taken yesterday morning after a night of snowfall. My impression is that people who live in more temperate climates tend to regard Canada in the wintertime as this vast expanse of clean white snow. In fact, winter is the filthiest time of year. All the crap accumulates on the snow and doesn’t go away until it melts. Last year, the Toronto works department produced a minor environmental disaster because of this. We had an inordinate amount of snow last year and when the plows cleared the roads, they had to put it somewhere, so they piled it in a great mound by the Downsview airport. But all the dirt and grime acted as insulation, and so there was a black mound of ice even into June, a giant breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria that drained into the sewers and ultimately into Lake Ontario.
If the snow sits undisturbed for a long time, especially in urban and well-traveled areas, it gradually turns brown, then black. Snow is like my health teacher’s Kleenex filter. It captures all the oil and a good portion of the exhaust from our cars and leaves it on display for everybody to see. Through our catch basins, it gets carried into the rivers that drain into Lake Ontario. Some of it settles into our lawns when things thaw in the spring. We even track it into our homes on our boots where it melts into puddles by our front doors.
At right is the “after” photo. This is the moderately traveled road outside my house one day after a snowstorm. The snow has captured the many hydrocarbons which are by-products of our addiction to automobiles. Now imagine this multiplied in the same way that I multiplied my health teacher’s circle of tar on his Kleenex. There were more than 600 million cars and trucks operating in the world in 1997, and that number was projected to double by 2030. My photo represents the output of several hundred cars passing a single section of road in the space of less than a second. Suppose the average vehicle operates for an hour each day (3,600 seconds) and multiply this by 600,000,000 and multiply this by, say 3,650, to represent ten years of global vehicle use. The numbers become so staggering that it is impossible to offer a visual representation that’s meaningful. What becomes apparent is this:
We have to end this unhealthy dependency.
We have to change.
We have to change right now.
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Mon, Dec 22, 2008
Half-filtered