September
1995
Car
Culture’s War on the Environment
Part IV: The loss of farmland, forests, and wildlife
By Philip Goff
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This is the last of a four part series of articles
examining the effects of the automobile on our culture and landscape.
The author has argued that profligate use of cars has had a detrimental
impact on many parts of our lives ranging from the lack of community,
to ecological destruction, to the massive squandering of public funds.
In the previous issues of Satya, I brought to light the natural
tendencies of a car based transportation system to facilitate suburban
sprawl. This system has, in the past 40 years, destroyed more land than
in the 300 years before and the environmental damage has been unprecedented:
the dwindling quality of the air and water, the loss of natural resources,
and the destruction of farmland, forests, and wildlife. The ameba-like
suburbs, left unchecked, will sprawl further into the deserts of the
Southwest, the forests of Pacific Northwest, the mountains of Colorado,
the farmlands of the midwest, and the last few remaining wild places
in the Northeast.
From the perspective of the use of natural resources, the automobile
oriented suburbs are perniciously inefficient. Consider the environmental
impact of a car-oriented suburban style community of 500 households,
and an urban community for the same 500 households. The land use requirements
for the former are enormous as each house occupies a quarter- or half-acre
lot and is connected by wide roads. The 500 individual homes require
vast amounts of materials to build and must be connected by a myriad
of power, water, and sewer lines, putting a strain on our dwindling
natural resources. Although urban communities are not perfect, they
have a much lower ecological impact considering their compact land use,
efficiency of materials and infrastructure, and maintained distance
from wilderness and wildlife.
The common piece of infrastructure that is necessary for all suburban
and exurban developments is the paved road. Every square foot of pavement
represents an ecological dead zone, a completely sterilized environment
that allows the runoff of oil, antifreeze, and brake fluids into the
water table. When a road is built in a remote area close to wilderness,
it not only brings polluting and dangerous cars, but also brings with
it the constant pressure of continued development. The close proximity
to nature brings in items not native to a bioregion such as noise, garbage,
dogs, vehicles, and guns. Roads also allow the hordes of hunters, poachers,
and trappers to drive into remote areas to exterminate wildlife.
The recent rise in popularity of campers and 4-wheel drive vehicles
have accelerated the complete commodification of the natural world.
Now we can all have a packaged environment, seen from the safety of
mobile fortresses as if the planet were one big theme park. Television
advertisements convince viewers that the appropriate 4-wheel drive vehicle
will allow them to cross rivers, blaze through forests, and drive to
remote mountain vista points. Car culture has clearly brought too many
people to places where they do not necessarily belong.
The Tragedy of Roadkill
A great tragedy is the quantity of wild animals who are struck and
killed every year by speeding automobiles. More than half a billion
animals,
including 250,000 people, are killed every year on the planet’s
roads and highways. This is ten times more creatures killed by cars
than by the American pork industry, for comparison. The average American’s
car kills three to four vertebrate animals per year and has contributed
to the endangerment of some species, most notably the Florida panther,
65% of whose documented deaths has been at the hands of motorists traveling
through the Ocala National Forest. In Pennsylvania alone in 1985, 26,180
deer and 90 bears were slaughtered by automobiles. In the Mikumi National
Park in Tanzania, more animals, including baboons, wildebeest, zebras,
antelopes, jackals, and even elephants, have been killed by cars than
by poachers since the 1991 road improvements increased the maximum
speed
from 20 m.p.h. to 60 m.p.h. (Earth Island Journal, Spring 1995)
Some species are attracted to roads, while others are averted, both
of which have disastrous implications for the animals forced to deal
with the intrusion. Animals averted to roads run the risk of genetic
deterioration due to inbreeding. This is created by the fragmentation
of their populations, hemmed in by roads on all sides. This also affects
the healthy migration of animals, and forces them to stay in unnatural
climates. The noises due to road construction and the resulting traffic
can alter an animal’s pattern of activity, and raise their stress
levels. This is especially true of birds who rely heavily on auditory
signals.
Exacerbating the quantity of roadkill is the unfortunate fact that many
animals are attracted to the typography of a road. The dense vegetation
at road side attracts grazing deer and a multitude of rodents. The proliferation
of rodents, along with previously killed animals attracts scavengers
such as coyote and raccoon, who in turn are often struck by cars. Other
large mammals also come to the roadway to innocently use it as a travel
corridor. The proximity of the large mammals attracts curious and naive
onlookers who frequently harass the animals or try to feed them human
food. Wild animals also come to the road to eat de-icing salts in the
winter season, increasing the potential of a collision, but also poisoning
the animal due to the sodium and calcium chlorides present in the salt.
Keeping the Profits Rolling
Another way in which automobile ownership and use is detrimental to
the environment is the vast quantities of natural resources required
to sustain a transportation mode. Besides the seemingly infinite amalgam
of wood, gravel, asphalt, and steel used to build and maintain the
Earth’s
roads and highways, the world’s 400 million cars require excessive
amounts of resources and energy to manufacture. In a culture less reliant
on automobiles, the inner city street’s ubiquitous abandoned
car, the monumentalized pile of worn tires, or the junkyard cache of
flattened
cars would be greatly lessened.
Although most cars can last much longer, many are passed on after only
a few years. This keeps car companies profits rolling in. Complicit
designers are all too happy to continually churn out the latest models
with improved aerodynamics, racier colors, and the newest gizmos of
convenience. In 1955, Harvey Earl, the head of the GM styling division
said, “Our biggest job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934, the
average car ownership span was five years; now it is two years. When
it is one year, we will have a perfect score.”
The environmental problem most apparent to the public is air pollution.
Within urban areas, cars are the single largest source of air pollution,
and create 13% of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, 28% of chlorofluorocarbons,
and between 30-40% of nitrogen oxides, the primary chemical responsible
for acid rain, according to the Marland Energy Magazine in 1983. The
E.P.A. reports that automobile air conditioners are the single largest
source of ozone depleting chemical. Despite the fact that these days
cars produce half as much carbon monoxide as they did twenty years ago,
this has only had beneficial results within the purlieus of urban smog
quantity. At the same time, the amount of carbon dioxide released from
cars is the same and will always be the same, for it is the inevitable
byproduct of fossil fuel consumption. The invisible and odorless CO2
cannot be reduced no matter the filter or catalytic converter on the
newest, most aerodynamic car, and it is this insidious CO2 gas which
is contributing greatly to the greenhouse effect. (NY Times Magazine
7/23/95)
The High Price of Oil Consumption
The profligate use of oil, in many ways, may contain the most ecological
destructive component of all: the ubiquitous oil spill — ubiquitous
in a sense that the Exxon Valdez disaster was not an anomaly; spills
of that magnitude occur quite often and have disastrous implications
on the ecology of the world’s oceans. Greenpeace estimates that
one billion gallons of oil are directly spilled into the oceans every
year. Valdez was only the 14th largest spill in history, but, because
most others occurred off shore and did not directly reach a populated
land mass, there was a dearth of media coverage. Accidental spills only
represent 17% of the total oil which enters the marine environment.
The rest, according to the National Research Council in 1985, enters
the oceans via the routine flushing of carrier tanks, and the daily
byproducts of the petroleum industry. Another 50 million gallons of
petroleum seep into the world’s fresh water supply through the
daily run-off from roads and do-it-yourself mechanics. Although the
estimation of the total death of sea creatures and birds due to oil
spillage is incalculable, the toll from the Alaska Valdez incident,
according to Greenpeace, led to the deaths of 5000 otters, 200 harbor
seals, and perhaps half a million birds.
The demand for petroleum constantly pressures the oil industry to search
for oil in more and more remote places. The oil companies’ thirst
for profit leaves them with no concern for the consequences of their
actions. They would drill in the Grand Canyon or sink a derelict oil
platform in a whale sanctuary if they thought they could get away with
it. Their powerful lobbyists are constantly persuading the U.S. and
other governments to open up fragile wilderness and marine habitats
for oil exploration, whether it be in a tropical rainforest, a spectacular
mountain range, or the Arctic tundra. When habitats are opened up for
exploration, great damage is done even if oil is not found in sufficient
quantities to warrant refining. Seismic studies destroy habitat and
terrify wildlife, and the myriad of abandoned roads are often subsequently
used by logging companies to get to areas that were initially off limits
to them. The predicament can only get worse, for as Asia, especially
China, develops its system of roads and opens its markets, the numbers
of cars are expected to double globally by 2010.
Conclusion
This installment concludes the series of articles exploring “Car
Culture and the Landscape of Subtraction”. The point was to educate
a generally uninformed public about the reasons why cars have had such
a detrimental impact on our neighborhoods, our cities, our countryside
and on our planet. Many of the Earth’s most pressing problems
such as deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, ozone depletion, global
warming, and water pollution, can be traced to the overuse of automobiles,
and unchecked suburban development. Cars are here to stay and they
certainly
have their uses, but too many people have deemed these uses to mean
every single trip, whether one mile or one hundred miles. Until this
type of behavior within the industrialized world is curbed, our decadent
lifestyle will continue to decimate communities and cities, and precipitate
the ongoing destruction of the natural world.
Philip Goff is an architect in Manhattan who is
deeply concerned about issues of public space and ecology.
For previous issues featuring Philip Goff’s articles (Satya 12,
2:1, and 2:2).
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