What better way to celebrate Earth Day, an annual shindig for the environment on April 22, than to ditch your car, give the atmosphere a break, and stretch your legs a bit? For Earth Day 2008, we at Carectomy beseech you to take a look at what life can be like outside of cars.

If you're a regular reader of the site, I'm sure you've been sufficiently bludgeoned with the drawbacks of a car-centered society and the benefits of minimizing your driving. Cars are one of the most offending contributors of global warming; they affect our health and our habitat through pollution; they make us fat; and they're a huge financial burden both to individual owners and to society as a whole via subsidized parking and pavement.

The transition from behind the wheel is not an easy one: there's a bit of a catch-22 going on with large sections of our communities constructed to support – seemingly necessitate at times – driving. Houses are spread out with nothing within walking distance; box stores litter the perimeter of towns and are accessed my multi-lane roads that don't typically accommodate cyclists or peds; and these layouts make efficient, comprehensive public transportation systems extremely expensive and less practical.

What to do? Baby steps are the key and a partial carectomy is the most viable solution for most of us. This Tuesday, when you're celebrating our planet and the history of the environmental movement, you'll have a profound impact if you leave the car at home. Walk, bike, carpool, take mass transit – and embrace the spring. Maybe this one day will inspire you to go car-free more often in the future.

It's easy to treat the earth as disposable from within a hulking metal box, driving through a take-out window to pick up Styrofoam-encased “food.” Getting out, experiencing our world, and interacting with people more often will help us all to respect our planet more often than once per year.

SUPER-Cool illustrations courtesy of World Carfree Network.

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fred said:

Check out this interactive US Carbon Footprint Map, an interactive United States Carbon Footprint Map, illustrating Greenest States to Cities. This site has all sorts of stats on individual State & City energy consumptions, demographics and much more down to your local US City level... http://www.eredux.com/states/

April 21, 2008

Josh said:

thanks, fred - that is really cool. I wonder how Arizona manages to kick both NM's and TX's butt per capita, with basically the same climate... and less than progressive politics!? Maybe it's that the retirees aren't driving as much...

April 23, 2008 | url

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