Braving England

After 11 months, the Gubbins Experiment finally put up a bit of a challenge during my visit to the UK for my brother's wedding. Before I continue, let's address a common bit of criticism: "So, you aren't going in cars but you are flying?" Yes. My experiment is highlighting car dependency, it's not trying to be everything. Is that okay?

My brother Phil was getting married November 14th just outside of the tiny town of Ticehurst, south of London in that classic English countryside of rolling green hills and endless fields. The nearest train station was 5 miles away in Wadhurst ("Wadhurst" - sounds like a car for spit, doesn't it? Don't you love these great place names?). To make the journey, my brother lent me his bicycle and I rode from Wadhurst to Ticehurst.

It was decidedly unpleasant. Against the unrelenting wind and rain of English November, I was forced to ride with my heavy backpack, stuffed with two weeks of everything I needed. Because of the backpack's weight, I couldn't stand on the pedals to get up hills so I was forced to sit down and rely on my thigh muscles. Oh how they burned!

At the same time, cars whipped past me. These narrow two-lane roads really weren't built for cyclists and motor vehicles to coexist. Every time something came up behind me, I feared some giant smack into my back, followed by a coma. The anxiety would peak when I'd be round a corner. A careless driver could zip around without seeing me and that would be it. But I realized that I'd been merely spoiled in the past few years by San Francisco's wide, straight roads. When I was a kid, these English roads had been the norm and I never had much of a problem with them. Nobody ever went smack into me once in all those years.

Painful inch by painful inch, I pea-rolled up those hills, feeling sorry for myself but visualizing the day I'd be chuckling about it on this blog. And now indeed do I chuckle! Eventually, I reached my destination. A few days later, I was to repeat the process but on the way back and without the rain. That day was, I think, the only dry day I saw in my entire two week stay in the UK.

After the wedding (which I was able to MC without saying anything stupid - wow!), there was one more testing experience in England. I rode to Wadhurst train station and made it back to central London. Instead, of returning Phil's bike back to his place, I thought I'd take the bike across London and ride the two miles I would otherwise need to walk from St Albans train station to the house at which I would be staying next.

BIG mistake. London transport - especially on a Sunday - is not wired to your bicycling needs. Unless you know the city very well, leave your bike at home. Most Underground Lines won't accept bikes, they won't go on buses, and many train stations can only be accessed once you have first caught the Underground. Of course, I didn't know this at the time, leading to three pointless, sweaty hours of bad decision after bad decision as I tried in vain to cross London with my bicycle. Some train stations I visited three times or more. I got lost multiple times. In the end, I threw my hands up in defeat and returned the bike back to Phil's house.

After that, most of my time in the UK was spent on my birthplace island of Guernsey, in the English Channel. Somehow, although it rained daily, I would miraculously avoid rain almost every time I left the house. That said, I wouldn't have minded much if the rain had hit me more often. Unless you have ridden in rain (and preferably been raised on it as a child), you wouldn't realize that bicycling in rain is not anywhere near as unpleasant as it might look from the carbon comfort of the car, provided you have thought ahead and obtained rain gear. I actually quite enjoy riding in the rain.

The rain did strike me once, on my final day on the island, during my ride to my dad's house for lunch - yes, with that big, heavy backpack on my aching shoulders. On that journey, I faced my old arch enemy: the formidable Rectory Hill. They should call it Rectum Hill because of the shitty time it puts the cyclist through. As a child, I lived in fear of riding up Rectory Hill. It only takes a few minutes to ascend but, boy, how slowly do those minutes go. A gentle climb gets steeper and steeper, levels out, then busts out another steep one up to the finish. As you go, a line of cars backs up behind you, with little chance for overtaking. Gnnn... these narrow roads. As an adult, I've mastered the hill but it was a different story on this day with the backpack. My heart almost exploded. This wasn't no love affair. But of course, I made it. With Rectory Hill over, so was the hardest part of the Gubbins Experiment so far.

Now I'm back in cushy San Francisco and it's back to easy cruising. Now, there's a question mark over what I do for Christmas. I usually join family friends up north in Lake County but will this be palatable without taking a car? We will see.

The positive vision

Nine months in, The Gubbins Experiment hasn't turned out like I expected.

For a start, going car-free has been surprisingly easy. I wish I could relay tales of stealth, ingenuity, hardship, and triumph... but no. Without any fanfare, I merely readjusted the parameters of my sphere and proceeded much as I did before. Although I've made my errors of judgment in my life, when it comes to transport, my decisions were good ones: living in a dense city and close to places of study and work, traveling light, raised on bicycling as a form of transport - and no kids, yet!

Many say "It's okay for you but I work 20 miles away and have to get my kids to three different schools". My response? "Fair enough". But with peak oil and other resource peaks looming, you better start thinking ahead or else you're screwed when it's too expensive to drive to the next town for work and beyond to Target. Soon, we'll have to think more wisely; there'll be no other way.

But the biggest unexpected side-effect of my car-free vow has been the sideways jolt to my mindset. Some call it a "consciousness-raiser". On the outside of the car world, cars now appear to me ugly metal cases killing children, degrading our public spaces, poisoning the air. Then more appears: Vandalism of the natural world has become the norm. We have become a civilization of death. How unspeakable the native people who lived on this land three hundred years ago would have found our madness - the species we've exterminated, the peoples we've butchered, the water we've poisoned. So much has gone and will never return, so much is now toxic, a legacy for which our successors will look back and hate us.

2009 has turned out to be my angriest year. I'm angry all the time. Everywhere I go, I see the rape and pillage of everything. Saints and sinners alike wallow in junk, puke trash, consume like viruses... and there's precious little evidence anyone cares. And among those who do care, who is really challenging the system that's doing the bulldozing? The system that produces our computers, electricity, cellphones, clothes, food, buildings, and materials is the system killing everything but who among us would give up our Dell laptops, iPhones, and LCD TVs?

For therein lies the Catch 22 for the concerned: If the fresh thinkers give up what needs to be given up, we'll be socially alienated and paralyzed in communication. We need Facebook to tell the rest of the world that we should give up Facebook. What a perfect, horrible trap.

The awful unthinkable fact: The root of the peak resource specter and of the destruction of everything is Industrialization. Advanced technology is simply unsustainable when adopted at a mass level. We must give it up. But of course we won't. We'll busy ourselves producing guides, hosting block parties, installing new shower heads, going to talks, reading magazines, even bicycling a little more. But we won't stare the demon in the face. We'll intellectualize ourselves into inaction.

I dream of a day without cars and computers, without the ghastly and expanding exploitation of life, without the anger and guilt of living in this unspeakable and inescapable culture. We will never know a pure clean earth. We live at the apex of humanity's ability to steal, torture, destroy, poison. Every ordinary person in this technological civilization does it.

Heavy thoughts from a guy who merely asked not to ride in a car for a year! But these sad musings would be all for naught were they not to lead to action. Yes, I'm car-free, meat-free, and a small-time gardener. It's all great - the few actions that don't feel tarnished (unlike, say, this blog which depends on the environmental bulldozer that is the internet). These things do make a tiny difference and I encourage everyone to follow suit. But these actions will never really make a true difference. Not enough people will adopt them and even if this happened, the effects would still be negligible because "the system" would remain intact.

But, as The Gubbins Experiment has been for me, these actions can be incredible consciousness-raisers. This can mean a critical mental break from the flock that might open the way for real change. But that change must address the system, not its innumerable offshoots.

Nonetheless, here I sit, paralyzed, squirming in my seat, working out how to even lift my leg to put the first step forward. But if I don't do it, who will?

This blog entry has violated a rule I try to follow: Paint a positive picture and make positive suggestions. Otherwise, people have no way to move forwards, to change. I've been struggling of late to offer positivity. No happy future vision seems realistic to me.

But I can offer this: The ship might be sinking but dammit let those swashbucklers among us rise up and fight with all the hopeless, foolish, humored, brave energy we can muster. There may be a bright future for some of us, and there may not, but with smiles on our faces, let's wade into the battle and fight for all we're worth.

That's my positive vision for you. It's not wind turbines, smart grids, and hydrogen cars - it's not even cob ovens, permaculture, and yurts - but I honestly, truly like it. Will you join me?

Questioning industrialization

I imagine that some people thinking about my car-free vow, perhaps even those who respect such a vow, probably wonder what difference I'm really going to make. It's a good point. Although carbon will be saved by not riding in a car, the difference won't make any impact on a noticeable scale. So, there are two main reasons why I do this:

1. To raise the consciousness of others

2. To raise my own consciousness

This post addresses the second point. One of the strangest parts of going car-free (and remember, my definition of car-free is both not driving a car and not even riding in a car at all) is that it's sent my mind off in all kinds of directions. It's pulled me from my old groove of thinking and helped me to question a lot of new things. In the process, I've begun to travel back to the very root of modern life: industrialization. Here are my reflections:

Hard times ahead

With drought, spiraling government budget woes, peak oil, and environmental degradation, people living within US borders are going to experience the partial or entire collapse of the current industrialized system worse than most, although the US is so vast that there will be wide regional differences in how things play out.

But certainly in California, it's going to be really ugly. The water situation is going to worsen, the economy is destined to collapse (to see why, I highly recommend this amazing series of web videos, entitled "The Crash Course"), and people are totally unprepared for peak oil and other peaking resources.

The problem of industrialization

I've begun to realize that it's taboo to discuss the fundamental causes of the situation into which we are cornering ourselves. Take the environmental movement, for instance. By buying into the litany of falsehoods promoted by corporations and governments, the environmental movement has become perhaps more harmful than helpful. The main source of this assertion is the falsehood that you can solve the environmental / oppression of other peoples / limited resource dependency problems caused by technology using technology. Wind farms, solar panels, green holidays, and so on. Even bicycles!

What they don't seem to get is that even these "solutions" rely on the whole ecosystem of industrialization - and industrialization depends on extraction of finite resources, destruction of landbases, processing, consumption, disposal, and oppression of peoples abroad and at home. To that last point: industrialization didn't just magically happen, it required a sustained campaign of oppression on the parts of governments and peoples (good examples are the genocidal British economic colonial policies in the late 1800s as described in the book "Late Victorian Holocausts" and the oppression and genocide by European settlers of the North American indigenous tribes). Every industrialized country has had to engage in this war to modernize. Our countries must continue to crush other cultures and wipe out animals and plants to continue being industrialized. There is no other way.

You cannot use the tools that are creating the problem to solve the problem

To get back to the point of industrialization, you cannot use the tools that are creating the problem to solve the problem (Einstein said "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them"). If you do so, you may slow down the pace of destruction (but probably not as economic systems requires constant expansion to survive, thus offsetting or sufficiently eroding advances made by technological improvements so as to continue to make us ) but you won't address the fundamental error of industrialization: that it depends on the destruction and exploitation.

That means, renewable energy is not sustainable and you cannot buy your way out of an environmental crisis. It also means there is no such thing as "green" in an industrial society. I take green to mean something that is good for the environment. How can anything that relies on extraction be green? Another common - perhaps dominant - definition of green is something less bad for the environment than other alternatives. But if we use this definition, we almost certainly commit ourselves to doom. For example, isn't driving an SUV green compared to flying the same distance in a plane? What isn't "green" when comparing it to something less so? This definition of green stops us addressing fundamental issues and makes progress slow, cumbersome, and ultimately ineffective. We may as well not bother and await collapse.

Questioning my own direction

Questioning capitalism is a minority interest in society. Questioning industrialization itself is almost a taboo. People say you just can't do it. But isn't anything questionable? Of course it is. Now, people might rightly ask what the alternatives are and how can we get there, but even if that cannot be answered that doesn't mean that it's wrong to question; it just means that we don't have all the answers.

Considering these ideas makes me question everything I've done and all the hopes I'd previously had for the future. As a media practitioner, if I use those tools in the hope that my efforts will one day lead to a lesser dependence on those tools, do I really believe that I'm making much of an impact? Or do I hope that someone else will make the hard choices - and in the future?

How to move forward?

The problem is that if you doubt the whole of industrialized civilization this can lead to paralysis. How the hell can you move forward if you have issues with the fabric of your surroundings and everything you know? That's the big question and I'm in the process of trying to answer it. But these questions need to be addressed since it's obvious to anyone who cares to look that the environmental movement is, on a macro scale, not making any difference - carbon emissions continue to rise and show no signs of slowing. And what about our apparent ethical progress as a species? There are more slaves than ever before (including us, if you consider the wage economy slavery, which many do). That's our "progress".

Very few people ask these fundamental questions, partly because the media and power centers (mainly corporations and governments) that so effectively (but not entirely) control our public dialogue and our minds don't facilitate this kind of dialogue. And these entities would never let us address the destructiveness of our species because those entities' existence depends on the very processes that cause the destruction. Corporations and governments will try to sell us solutions, distract us, fool us into thinking we're really doing something, slow us down using law and bureaucracy, and send police and armies against us. They'll do everything they can to stop us making necessary and fundamental changes while perpetuating the destruction. It will be very hard overcoming this.

There is so much we can do!

In thinking about the future, I don't subscribe to the concept of hope because, as the Buddhist saying goes, "Hope and fear chase each other's tails". By abandoning hope, we abandon fear. We also abandon a fixed vision of how the future should be, which also works because it may be beyond us to know what kind of future to head towards.

However, let us not be downhearted. I'd be sad to know that your reading this post contributed to the despair and inaction that movements such as the environmental cabal so often perpetuate. Even in the gloomiest times there is much we can do and much we can achieve. You must believe that you can do something, you must act. Do not remain motionless.

Think of all that we ordinary people have: intelligence, wisdom, energy, community, family, love. We are amazing creatures and we stand together in facing the future. Inspired and strengthened by each other, we can stride ahead. Let's start talking honestly, let's start thinking big, and let's not let anyone tell us otherwise!

Solid as a rock

Could it be? A new Gubbins Experiment blog post?! Yes indeed. Were you fearing that the experiment had ended in defeat? I'd finally caved in one night, unwilling to ride up California street and hopped in a passing friend's car to the top of the hill?

Worry not. My vow not to ride in a car in 2009 is still being kept, solid as a rock. Thanks to a centrally-located house in the walkable Inner Sunset neighborhood and all destinations being easily within bicycle/public transit distance, the Experiment has been smooth sailing thus far.

Yes, there have been some compromises. Today, I had to miss the wedding of an old acquaintance from graduate school who is getting hitched up in Sonoma. Once the shuttle had been canceled, the idea of getting up there by bike in time didn't rub me the right way and I had to bail. There have been a few other occasions I decided to pass on, although to be honest, forgoing the option to go by car only puts one's actual enthusiasm for the event in sharper contrast. Any place or event can be reached with sufficient will-power.

But there have also been some great occasions where being forced to forgo the car was a really empowering experience. A few months ago, I needed to get about 50ft of redwood planks (cut into shorter pieces) to construct two vegetable boxes from the Mission back to the Inner Sunset. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition lent me a bike trailer (see image below) and I piled on the wood. This was a really heavy load and I wondered if it was really possible to get this all home.



To my surprise, pulling even this kind of weight was amazingly easy. The majority of the weight is borne by the trailer's wheels, meaning that forward momentum is only impeded to a manageable degree. And once you're moving, the difference between pulling weight and pulling no weight is not so great. When the rider stops pedaling, the mass of the load keeps pushing the bike along, which is a bonus. Andy Thornley at the Bicycle Coalition tells me that people can pull 800lbs and upwards - several times what I was doing.

The lesson is that transporting large and heavy items by bicycle is easier than you'd think. I recall last summer when a cyclist pulled me, my bicycle in a box, and a month's worth of my baggage all on the back of his bike trailer to the Greyhound Station. He said he could barely notice I was behind him. Isn't that great?

My hope for the Gubbins Experiment is not to simply change what people do, but to raise their consciousness and get them talking. We need to start seriously questioning the entire way our modern world operates. Being a transportation "outsider" has given me just enough distance from business as usual to realize that our society is on a very sick, very sad, very dangerous path. We are bulldozing our heritage and once it's poisoned, it's poisoned. There's only one planet Earth and every time we ruin it a little more, that's a small part we'll never have back.

We stand here so apathetically, making excuses for our ruinous ways. In the coming world of climate change and peak oil, we rich world polluters deserve all that is coming to us. The sad thing is that the poor, who will be the true heirs to our madness, will not deserve their fates.

Friends, do you find yourself standing dumb, frozen in comfort? Perhaps you need your own experiment. Don't let the critics hold you back. Do something, anything... get moving. Time is not on our side.

The denial industry

Have you heard? According to Honda, the FCX Clarity, a new hydrogen car, is set to go into mass production. Technology is going to let us all drive forever!



How many times have you heard people parrot these kind of sentiments? If you're anything like me, quite a few times. I gnash my teeth whenever I hear the "technology will save us, let's just sit back and wait for the inventors to come up with the solutions" line.

James Kunstler, puts it thus: "The widespread belief that hydrogen is going to save technological societies from the fast-approaching oil and gas reckoning is probably a good index of how delusional our oil-addicted society has become."

The hydrogen car plays to the sad desperation of those who cannot fathom a post-carbon world or a ravaged planet and would do anything to pretend that the mass car-ownership world is not about to expire. Promises of hydrogen transport encourages doing nothing. It's a dangerous idea.

Don't be fooled when car companies like Honda roll out seductive prototypes like the FCX before a gullible public. Writing for the LA Times, Dan Neil says the FCX "may be the most expensive, advanced and impractical car ever built." Car companies demo futuristic prototypes, we keep driving because we believe we can switch to the futuro-model when it's out, and the auto show demo car is never seen again. It happens all the time.

The proof is in the pudding. Is the prototype scalable? In other words, are enough resources cheaply available enough for its adoption across society? Can the infrastructure necessary for its use be implemented in the short time we have left before peak oil pulls the rug out from under our feet?

Read into the subject and you'll quickly realize that hydrogen-powered vehicles are a joke. Hydrogen, with its low atomic weight, requires an incredible degree of compression for a car to travel a reasonable distance, making hydrogen prone to catching on fire. This means that if your car doesn't just explode in a crash, it would probably leak all the hydrogen anyway since hydrogen small atoms allow it to easily escape through tiny holes. It's extremely corrosive too.

These considerations also make the distribution of hydrogen around the country a daunting prospect. Hydrogen would corrode the seals and damage the pumps required for pipelines to push gas across vast distances. Filling stations would necessitate approximately 21 times the number of trucks as for gas to deliver hydrogen. And how would these trucks move around?



You should know that hydrogen is not actually a fuel; it is more accurately thought of as a form of energy storage. Pulling hydrogen atoms apart form oxygen atoms, often by electrolysis, delivers a poor return on energy invested. In fact, you get roughly 1 unit of energy for every 1.4 invested. And that energy has to come from somewhere. Don't believe Honda, or any other car company, that hydrogen cars can be carbon neutral. It's impossible, they're lying.

It should be obvious to everyone who does the reading that hydrogen is a dead-end. But be aware that the proponents of every process, technology, and activity whose days are numbered will attempt to convince us that, with a twist of technology, we can update the old ways and continue on more or less the same as before. I've discussed it with hydrogen cars and we certainly have heard about it with coal.

Of course, arguing that hydrogen is a false savior is not an argument that mass car ownership in general is ready to die. But in an energy-constrained future, such an inefficient, energy-intensive way of moving people around as the private car just isn't going to wash. We may as well accept it.

Technological, non-renewable energy-dependent industry is itself an industry of denial. Every day we are drenched with its fantasy-addled messages. We cannot afford to be fooled.

Adam

ps. Yes, the Gubbins Experiment is still going swimmingly. Thanks to all who have asked. Spread the word - you can do it!

Crafting a message

The weeks roll by and my memories of looking out through the windshield of whoever's car recede further and further into the distance. At the beginning of 2009, when The Gubbins Experiment commenced, I wondered what I'd be blogging about all year when my experiment revolves around not doing something.

To my surprise, the psychological journey has been decidedly noteworthy. The experience has enabled me to craft my message much more effectively. The kind of sentiments, just two months ago, that really lay behind my reasons for avoiding car use for a year (greatly exaggerated for clarity's sake) went something like:

1. Cars are bad for the environment.
2. We should feel bad about using them.
3. I'm going to prove that we can get by without them.

Of course, my highest powers of word choice softened these ideas but that's what I was really saying, perhaps not fully consciously. However, extensive thought since then has changed my mind somewhat and altered the way I think and communicate ideas about the automobile. Here's how:

1. Yes, cars are bad for the environment, but they also depend on resources - particularly oil - that are either peaking in terms of world production or will peak shortly. I'm now of the opinion that peak oil is a better way to attract interest in the future of the automobile than the environment. Environmental discussion too often involves gas, ice caps, and other things that are too far from people's everyday reality to connect with. The idea of oil running out is easier to grab because we can better visualize not being able to run our cars or have food on the store shelves better than temperature rises.

At the very least, a message that combines the environment and peak oil is far more effective than a message that involves either one.

2. Should we feel bad about using cars, especially when alternatives are within our reach? For far too long, too many voices in the environmental movement have crafted their messages around fear-mongering and guilt-tripping, which usually makes people feel hopeless at best. That's why the transition movement is so exciting. It provides wonderful pictures of life beyond a carbon economy, images of a newly localized world where neighbors know one another, spaces are designed with humans (not machines) in mind, and we better understand the value of what we have. I recommend finding out more about the movement.

3. What will not using a car for 12 months prove? It will only show that I can get by without cars. But how can I say that my conclusion will apply to someone else who's situation will differ from mine in some way or other. It won't prove much to the parents who have got to get their three kids to three different schools by 8am and then get to work 20 miles away by 8:30am.

No, my goal should not be to prove anything, it should be to encourage people to start talking about car dependency and where this dependency will lead. I believe that informed people generally know what's what - but they need to arrive at the right conclusion under their own volition.

It's been a great experience learning these things and I hope they might be of use to you too. Let's learn, think, and talk. Let's start now.

Until soon,

Adam

What to do about parked cars?

We humans have incredible powers of adjustment. And for those of us (most of us) who have spent our whole lives in the mass auto-ownership world, here are some of the things we take for granted:

- Death strips (traffic-ridden roads)
- Tarmac blight (parking lots)
- Road plaque (roads lined with parked cars)
- Houses of the Ugly Auto (garages, gas stations, etc)
- ...and really, traffic-related injuries and deaths

Think back to the first half of the twentieth century when the auto manufacturers were running their highly successful campaign to put a car in every family. Would the public have bought into such a false dream if they had known what it would do to their communities?

I think not. A significant impact of cars relates to the fact that the auto is parked for over 95% of its life. These chunks of metal demand lots of space, which has been facilitated by vast swathes of land, public and private, being handed over to the auto world. Some cities, particular ones in Europe, have been wiser and more successful than others in dealing with parked cars. "Variable rate parking" is one such tool that's already in use in Europe and is starting to dip its toes here in the US.

You should know about variable rate parking. The system works like this: Instead of parking rates set at one particular level, variable rate parking allows parking fees to fluctuate over the course of the day in response to demand. Parking expert Donald Shoup (The Cost of Free Parking, 2005 - a great book) recommends that cities aim for 85% of parking spaces to be used at any one point. This ensures that drivers can find a space whenever they need it, reducing congestion and cruising. Then a variable parking rate system is implemented that sets pricing at levels that guarantee this 85% figure. It's a great system and San Francisco, Washington DC, and New York are all trying out the idea.

Unfortunately, back in my native island home of Guernsey, the situation is far more backwards. In Guernsey, there is still a debate raging over whether or not to introduce paid parking in the first place! (Note: Oklahoma City was the first place in the world to adopt paid parking, in 1935). The ability of humans to normalize the bad can certainly be seen there. In an island of 35 square miles and a population of 65,000, there are 54,000 registered vehicles. It's impossible to drive in a straight line for longer than 10 miles and yet almost nobody believes in anything but driving. It's one of the purest examples of how the car mentality warps perceptions. A quiet, charming island tucked away in the English Channel has become a mini-car hellhole.

As a former resident, I have been incensed enough to campaign for the introduction of paid parking in Guernsey. I may lose my battle but I've had a stab at it anyway by producing a 9-minute Youtube video. If you want to learn more about the harms of free parking and the benefits of paid/variable rate parking (as well as see me - I present the video), check it out:



Until soon, may your movements be happy and ethical,

Adam