Our Addiction to Space and Going Against Our Hard-Wiring

The next time you're stuck in rush-hour traffic, look at the cars around you. How many have only one person in them? Are you the only occupant in your car? How often do you have someone ride with you? Of the cars around you, how many are designed to seat only one or two people? The answers are semi-rhetorical but few people stop to think about it. Most of the time you and everyone else who drives on a regular basis drive only yourself in a car designed to seat at least four people. Think of the space and energy wasted hauling around tons of plastic and metal and empty space. Now consider this: as urban areas grow, cities are forced to expand their highway systems to accommodate more traffic (which temporarily causes the situation to worsen). More traffic because of more people? No. Most of that expansion is for hauling around more empty space. Sure, more lanes mean more cars on the freeway, but most of the space is taken up by empty passenger seats. Where are all these cars going to anyway? To homes in suburbia, to empty, spacious homes. So why is this a problem? Because there's nearly seven billion of us on the planet.

We humans are somewhat territorial; we value our space. And we get pissed if someone violates it. In a lot of causes, it's illegal. Someone breaking into your house? That's a space violation. Picking up a hitchhiker? Many don't do it because they say it's dangerous, but I suspect that the real reason is that it's a space violation: "I enjoy sitting in my empty car." It's an almost unconscious fact, like a hard wiring, perhaps even on the genetic level: we humans need our space. That's why the environmental movement is all about recycling and driving electric vehicles and reducing our carbon footprint. But it's rarely about reducing our actual footprint, reducing the space our civilization takes up. Few ever say, "Live in the city where you can actually walk or ride (bike, bus, or subway) to work. If you need to, get a one or two person electric vehicle with just enough space to put groceries in."

No, one usually thinks the opposite: a home in the woods, with passive and active solar energy, maybe a wind turbine, and maybe even a small farm to "live of the land." And the transportation? Maybe an electric car's the way to go in this "environmental" home, but it probably sits at least four. What if this home is far from town (because, after all, this home is "environmental" and needs to commune with nature), say twenty miles. That's a forty mile commute, pushing the range upper-limits on some electric cars. OK, fine, make it a hybrid. But what about winters? The city isn't going to make that neighborhood a priority (those pesky "unenvironmental" city-dwellers have priority). What about a small Jeep to navigate the snow? But if the snow is high, a small Jeep isn't going to cut it. Better get something a little heavier. A pickup, maybe, with a plow attachment, to get rid of the snow. But you need to take the kids to soccer practice, so make it an extended cab. But they don't like to be crowded--they always fight over that--so make it a four-door extended cab. Lots of room for growing girls and boys. Oooo! You know what? You could take the neighbor's kids to soccer practice too. Carpooling sometimes, now that's "environmental!" Better make it a large SUV, you don't need the pickup bed anyway. By the way, I don't mean to be disparaging you and your choices. If you're a stranger reading this, I obviously never met you. So when I say "you," I often mean the generic "you." It just sounds better than using "one" to refer to a generic person. OK, now back to the rant.

So you totally threw out your transportation environmentalism out the window. But you're living off the grid--on renewable energy--and communing with nature. But how much space you take up? Don't just include the actual footprint of the house, but also the road that goes to your house. Is the road that goes to your house only for you, or is it shared? If it's shared, what's its traffic density? What's the traffic density of all the roads you use to go to all the places you go to? Say you took your house and made it an apartment unit. Same size, but now it's part of a larger building instead of a stand-alone structure. Say it's a two story house and now you've moved it into a twenty story apartment building. What's its footprint? It's taking up the same amount of space as in the woods, so it's the same, right? Wrong. It's at least ten times smaller because it's shared space by ten other two-story apartment units. Now I know ground space is saved by building up, not out. But resources are still saved. Heat escaping the "roof" of your apartment home becomes heat for the apartment above you. Whereas, in the woods, it's lost to the environment, even with super-good insulation (no insulation is perfect). And, remember, when I said at least ten-times less a footprint? Well, you no longer have your own road, you have a shared road by a lot of people. More shared resources. More environmental. Not the sarcastic "environmental," but truly environmental. That forty-mile commute in that giant SUV? Well, ideally work now will be within walking or riding (bike, bus, or subway) distance. And the streets are plowed!--because a million people demanding clear streets carry a lot more weight than the ten living in the woods. And if you need to, you can buy that one or two seat electric vehicle (not the four-seater) to run errands. Your kids and the neighbor's kids can walk or take the bus.

Obviously, I have a lot of issues with the current environmental movement. I think wasted space and lack of shared resources is of paramount importance. Of course, the reason we got to this point is because--to put it bluntly--we fuck too much. Sex just feels good, and despite birth control, we have the fundamental Darwinian urge to reproduce. Study-after-study has shown that people derive much satisfaction from raising children even though those same people also say it's hard work and sometimes more stressful than their jobs. So what should we do? We need to first acknowledge that our hard-wiring is working against us; we need to be less territorial, less horny, and less desiring to propagate the species.

Much of what I've said I've taken from other sources. I think the genesis came when I read an article arguing how New York is one of the most environmental cities, and how living in the woods is not. Much of what I said above is simply paraphrasing that article. I've tried to find that article to cite, but unfortunately I could not. So sue me; this ain't no academic treatise. The actor Nathan Fillion posted on twitter info on a car company he and actor Jon Huertas had found. That car company Arcimoto Motors will make small three-wheeled two passenger electric cars. The actors flew out to the company's headquarters in Eugene, OR and became unpaid celebrity endorsers, which gave the company publicity and spurred R&D contributions from fans of Nathan Fillion (and crashed the Arcimoto website). Finding this company spurred me to write this blog post. I can cite them as a source: www.arcimoto.com.
From their website:

Stand on any busy street corner and watch the cars go by. What you typically see is a single person driving upwards of 5,000 lbs. of steel. Ask those folks where they’re going and it’s usually a 5-mile trip to the store, or their 10-mile morning commute. Tack on fuel and maintenance costs for that vehicle, and the expense in wasted resources and energy adds up quick for an individual, let alone the multiplicative effect across the whole of society.

Why haul around thousands of pounds of steel and many cubic feet of unneeded space for daily commutes, a trip to the grocery store, or visiting grandma across town? Drive something that fits. Drive the Pulse[their model they will be selling].

Of course, this is an advertisement to get you to buy their car (or to put down a $500 deposit to reserve your car when they start production). But the point of showing this is to showing that there is some noise out there that's an alternative to the "environmental" cabin in the woods. It's a start.

And it's a start for me as well. I don't live the ideal outlined above: living in a high-rise apartment complex, driving a tiny electric vehicle when I need to, and paying more for my electricity to support the cost of my power company's wind-power farm. In fact, I think it's somewhat scary. I wrote a sci-fi novel fragment once where everyone lived in a super-dense city known as an archology (essentially a city within one building--talk about shared resources). The city was so dense that for most people, the closest thing to a home was a bed they would get for eight hours. The beds were stacked one-atop-another on a huge wall. A person would climb a ladder to get to their bed at the beginning of their sleep shift, sleep for eight hours, and then wake up and leave, only to have someone else sleep for the next eight hours. Three sleep shifts a day, every day. Because the beds were never unoccupied, a saying in that society developed to indicate the hyper-sharing of resources: "Box beds never get cold." The novel was not intended to portray that society as Utopian. In fact, just the opposite. So yes, the idea of being stacked into box beds is not appealing to me. My hard-wiring doesn't like it. But I think I can overcome it. We need to. Otherwise we and the environment are screwed.