Driving to oblivion

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

By Richard Anderson

This past weekend, my little family and I went to Idaho Falls. We wanted to get out of town and IF was hosting a “cultural walk” in its historic downtown and there were a few things we needed to buy that we thought we could pick up there – replacement parts for our grill, a few small items for our kitchen, maybe something special for the boy.

We pulled into downtown, parked and set out to look for some artsy cultural events, but were rather disappointed. Downtown was dead. Deader even than Jackson Hole was. “Where is everyone?” we asked ourselves.

We decided to move on to the shopping phase of our day and found where everyone was hiding. They were all stuck in traffic on 17th Street, trying to get to the malls. It must have taken half an hour – maybe longer – to drive the three miles from Yellowstone Avenue to Hitt Street.

I haven’t seen traffic like that, and I have recently traveled to Denver, New York City and New England. OK, I-95 outside of Springfield, Mass., was pretty infuriating, but you kind of have to expect that back East. This was Idaho Falls – population 50,000.
Besides, why weren’t all those people downtown at their cultural walk?

I don’t mean to knock IF. That’s really not my point. The point is that while I was stuck in traffic on 17th Street, trying to figure out how I was going to get into the right lane, I had the sickening feeling that we – humanity – still just don’t get it.

Everywhere we turn, we’re confronted by warnings about global climate change, about how our old wasteful ways are what got us in this pickle, about how we’ve got to change or we’ll soon be little more than the fossil fuels of whatever intelligent species takes our place (bees, I’m told).

And yet here we were, stuck in a three-mile-long phalanx of greenhouse gas-spewing, mall-hopping, landfill-filling, reflex consumers on a weekend bender.

My own culpability was not lost on me. I was not being part of the solution. I was being part of the problem. I was one of THEM. How many pounds of carbon did I add to the atmosphere driving the 180 miles to Idaho Falls and back, not to mention tooling around, looking for my idle entertainments, my petroleum byproducts, my stuff that would inevitably clog the Sublette County landfill?

As if to underscore the waste of time and resources, we didn’t even find the things we went to IF to buy. So basically we spent the whole day contributing to global climate change. Sorry.

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Driving to oblivion | Planet JH News Article: Editorial

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