The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.
- Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" 71
Nothing says 'Look to the future' like rail travel. And bus travel. And bicycle travel. And ZipCars, community shares, carpool lanes - and while we're at it, walking. But first we need to shift a major ideological roadblock out of the way.
It's another big one, although it's made of only two letters: MY. My street. My car. My lane. My commute. My time. My parking space. "Home on the range" thinking. Where seldom is heard a discouraging word—especially from an administration that made only occasional mumbled gestures toward change during eight years in national office, then followed with zero action.
When Great Britain began to crowd the early colonists, Americans responded by flashing a rattlesnake at the Redcoats with a warning: "Don't tread on me." Seasoned cowboys a century later saw that "the range's filled up with farmers and there's fences ev'rywhere," so the old cowpokes "got to be a-movin' on." Cole Porter paid tribute to these sad fellers in the 1930s with "Don't Fence Me In," asking that he be allowed to "ride through the wide open country that I love," and the Dixie Chicks echoed Porter seventy years later with "Wide Open Spaces."
Elbow room. Personal space. My space. Personal expression. Rugged individualism. Four thousand pounds of steel to transport two hundred pounds of American ideology from one point to another, at an average of fourteen miles per gallon. Queen's Roger Taylor sang, "I'm in love with my car - such a thrill when my radials squeal." Rammstein's Till Lindemann growled a tribute to petroleum: "It flows through my veins/It sleeps in my tears/It leaks from my ears/Heart and kidneys are motors." Donna Haraway, in her "Cyborg Manifesto," pointed out that we've become so attached to machines that we've partially become them: "There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic." 72
My job. My paycheck. My budget. My groceries. My meals. My car producing 22 pounds of CO2 per gallon, my wallet screaming each time it pays a higher price than last week's to fill the tank, my local news reporting that there's a global food crisis worsening by the day because my president and my Congress decreed that my car should run on corn ethanol, and my country's farmers have stopped planting other crops because that's not where the money's at. My meager math skills creak into action, though: ethanol has the potential to fuel ten percent of the cars on American highways now, and maybe thirty percent two decades from now. 73 Estimating conservatively, at current trends there'll be about 100 million American cars on the road in 2030, all of them driving in separate directions, four thousand pounds of steel to move two hundred pounds of person at an EPA-required rate of, let's say, 30 miles per gallon. Ethanol can't fuel this. Earth can't sustain this.
Vinod Khosla, writing in Wired, defends ethanol by claiming there's plenty of wide open space for growing fuel: "I estimate that 40 to 60 million aces can replace our gasoline needs. By taking land now used to grow export crops and instead planting energy crops, it's feasible to eliminate our need to import oil for gasoline." 74 Now let's look closely at that statement. What did this writer suppose "export crops" were, if not literally crops to be sent to other nations, other humans? The syntax of the statement makes "export crops" the lexical equivalent of "petunias" or "flowering cabbage"—nice for landscaping, but certainly not necessary. And even if we give "export crops" the conceptual importance they merit, there's the bright shining ideological blinder in "eliminate our need to import oil."
Our excess crops, our choice to export or not, our need for imported oil. Nobody else's. Don't tread on me.
My house. My neighborhood. My community.
Two years after writing the words, Khosla can look out into a world where the export of "export crops" has dried up like the oil fields of Pennsylvania, and the least of us are rioting—while there is energy to riot, before the debilitation that comes with starvation sets in. While these insignificant humans express their needs and weaken by the hour, our need to import oil strengthens by the day.
Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), campaigning for re-election, proposes these solutions to soaring gasoline prices: "...advanced automotive technologies such as hybrid electric, advanced batteries, hydrogen and fuel cells... [also] increase our production of renewable fuels and to do that in a way that will also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a strong push toward biofuels produced from cellulosic materials...." 75 Now, let's clarify that Mr. Levin was rated one of "America's Ten Best Senators" by Time magazine in 2006, and I like him. But he, too, has ideological blinders firmly in place, and his gas-price solution could just as well have been written this way: "Car, car, car, car, car, car."
Of course the senator from Michigan would support the automobile, you might counter—it only makes sense. And that's how ideology works. Ideas that appear to be mountains carved from granite need no questioning and no challenge; after all, would you stand before a mountain and yell at it to get out of your way? Senator Levin is my senator, from my state, defending my fellow citizens' rights to hold good jobs for GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, and even Hyundai (yep, we've got one of their tech centers around here, too).
Revise: Senator Levin is a senator from a state in a nation in our world.
Ooo, roll that version around a few times. Doesn't it sound... strange?
Story time. During the last summer that I spent in Germany, my sister, two cousins, and I got money from our parents to travel from Wiesbaden to Mainz, 14 kilometers south and across the Rhein, to catch an equestrian show. My cousin Michael and I were the same age, 14, his sister Gisela one year older. My sister was nine. We were supposed to take the train, and then the bus, but Michael suggested that if we hitchhiked, we'd have more money to spend at the parade grounds. It was a simpler time then, so we put out our thumbs and made the 30-minute drive there in the back of a U.S. Army truck, surrounded by uniformed soldiers being transported from one base to another.
Later, leaving the event site, we passed a cherry orchard dripping with ripe cherries. My sister asked for some, so I broke off a branch for her, and when a white Mercedes pulled over to give us a ride a few minutes later she slid across the big back seat with the branch in hand. Gisela and I followed, and Michael sat up front with the driver, a businessman. The ride was quiet and comfortable, and as the Mercedes drew closer to Wiesbaden, Gisela tapped on my leg, motioned for me to be quiet, and pointed to the white leather seat fabric between herself and my little sister. It was stained blood red with cherry juice.
"Hauptbahnhof, bitte," she said politely to the driver, gesturing toward Wiesbaden's giant train station coming up in the near distance. Michael turned around to challenge the request, but his sister gave him the same panicked shut up! look she'd given me and led his eye to the problem.
My sister was frozen rigid in fear, but as the train station loomed, Gisela nudged her; the white Mercedes pulled up to the Hauptbahnhof main entrance, and three teenagers and one terrified child ran straight for the train station doors, calling out Viel Dank für die Fahrt! over our shoulders to the confused driver.
Then he saw it—probably because we'd left both back doors of the car open. "HALT!" he bellowed behind us. "Mein Auto!"
Then we were inside the train station and swallowed up by late-afternoon swarms of passengers heading to their platforms. If the man came in to yell some more, we'd never hear him. We got lost in the sea of other people and eventually made it to the far end of the station where we could slip out onto Fischerstraße, and from there to the safety of neighborhoods with concealing alleys and trees.
Sanctuary: the Wiesbaden Hauptbahnhof
Although I think of that unlucky Mercedes owner every time I see fresh cherries, eternal guilt isn't the moral of the story. That's trivial compared to a more important theme: the comforting presence of strangers and others. Army guys, businessmen, and hundreds of nameless train passengers—these people, these fellow travelers across the Atlantic, who today gladly share their "export crops" with me and shake their heads in confusion at the fact that the Hauptbahnhof in my state's biggest city is a hulking ruin—were part of my growing up. They are significant. Their community and my community are farther than hitchhiking distance from one another, but together they're our communities, and together our communities make our world.
My car doesn't get to burn anyone else's food, any more than my dogs get to dig for moles on anyone else's lawn. If allowing the latter is rude, then what's the former, if not obscene? "MY" is a two-letter word with four-letter impact, and until we can start shifting the ideology of the open road to an ideology of the open mind, a place for right-brain creativity and right-thought wisdom, even leaders on the Ten Best list will be blind to the solutions offered by technology with real possibility: mass transportation.
====SOURCES====
71 Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991: 149-181.
72 Ibid.
73 Biofuels Could Meet One-Third of U.S. Fuel Needs by 2030 If Bush, Congress Act Now." JeraOne InDefense Technology News, Jan. 23, 2007.
74 Vinod Khosla, "Six Ethanol Myths." Wired, October 2006.
75 "Statement of Senator Carl Levin on Oil and Gasoline Prices: 5/12/08."
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