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Living without a car is something I’ve talked about a lot on this blog, and I’ve shared articles by people living without cars in all different circumstances. But the other day when a friend of mine asked why I don’t have a car, I figured it was time to post again.

Actually she didn’t ask me directly; she asked another friend of mine. Maybe she was embarrassed to ask me directly in case the reason I don’t have a car was that I have some sort of health issue or got a DUI or something. (But for the record, if I got a DUI, I would want to tell people about it, to help convince them not to drink and drive!)

But no. I have my license and have a clean driving record and everything, and I don’t have any issues that prevent me from driving. I just don’t have a car, because … I don’t want a car.

Of course, environmental reasons figure strongly in my choice. But even if there were some perfectly eco-friendly car (which electric cars are not, by the way), I still wouldn’t want to own a car. I have owned cars at times in the past, enough to know!

• A car is a hole in my wallet. I have way better uses for several thousand dollars a year. I actually can’t afford to own a car because it would cut into too many other things I value. What would you do if you suddenly had several thousand extra dollars per year?

• Cars take up a ton of space, and are a pain to park.

• I hate seeing people’s lives ruled by cars. Their car breaks down and they’re totally stranded — can’t get to work, can’t get their errands done. I want to set an example that there’s another way.

• I hate that car ownership is still a status symbol. It seems so yesterday. A dinosaur relic of the petroleum era. We need better status symbols, like how many shade-trees we can plant, or how many pollinators we can attract to our yards, or how much food we can grow in our neighborhoods. Or how much fossil fuel consumption we can reduce by taking public transport, walking, or riding bicycles. You know what’s a status symbol to me? The fact that I have worked as a pedicab driver! And I once pedaled four adults a distance of about two miles! And our pedicabs did not have assistive motors! (Having a motor would have totally ruined the status-symbol aspect for me!)

• When I want a car (which I do on occasion, like once a year), I can rent one. So much easier; the maintenance is someone else’s problem; and it’s not taking up space at my house in the meantime! (Driveways and garages are far too valuable to be taken up by cars. My garage is a she-shed which I could very happily live in, and my driveway is an outdoor livingroom with landscaping!)

• When I’m in a car, I lose touch with how harsh the landscape is for people who aren’t in cars. There’s too much noise, not enough shade. Vast expanses of treeless sidewalk. Loud, heavy mechanized landscaping equipment, belching fumes and scalping Mother Nature’s luscious green curvy beauty into sterile flatness. Multi-lane roads that are hazardous and unbelievably unpleasant to even be near, let alone try to cross. I don’t want to lose touch with the ugly streetscapes we have created by prioritizing the car-driving people over all other people; if I lose touch with the ugliness I can’t help to change it to beauty! If you’ve never spent a day getting around by human-powered transport, I highly recommend you try it. You’ll be shocked at what looks fine from behind a car window but is so not fine in reality.

• Despite the ugliness of many USAmerican streetscapes, something struck me the other day as I rode my bicycle about 15 miles to do various errands: An ugly day on my bike is better than a beautiful day in a car! Because amid the large-scale ugliness there are always pockets of beauty, which can’t be seen or touched from behind a car window. Mini forests, random friendly people, tiny forgotten wildflowers growing at the sidewalk edge.

• By not owning a car, I gather useful information which I can then share with other car-free people, such as which roads should be avoided because they have no shoulders, no sidewalks, no shade, etc. And, which businesses will deliver! (Thank you Edgewater Yard Shop, my favorite source of pine-straw mulch!)

• Even though getting around by foot and bicycle takes me more time than getting around by car would, it’s worth it. Time walking or bicycling is time well spent, and offers benefits not available from a car. For example, I learn all sorts of cool shortcuts and alternate routes, and feel like I really get to know my city on a deep, fine-grained level. And, the overall tempo of life feels much less rushed, hectic, and stressed when I’m walking or cycling than when I’m trying to run errands in a car.

• In my younger days I used to be a gym-rat. Now, I’d rather get my exercise and my transportation from the same source, and eliminate the time and expense of “working out.” As bad as the outdoors smells from gasoline fumes sometimes, it still smells better than a gym! And I just prefer to sweat outdoors rather than indoors! (Of course, some people simply enjoy the gym environment for the camaraderie, professional trainers, and many other benefits it offers.)

Living car-free is fun and exhilarating, and brings out more creativity and strength and resiliency than I thought I had. But don’t take my word for it; try a car-free day sometime! And if you do, I’d love to hear about your experience.

And a final note: This post is to offer encouragement & support to people who are interested in learning about car-free living and maybe trying it out. It is not to shame people who feel they have to own a car because the design of our streets & cities, and our whole mainstream culture, makes it difficult to live without a car!

Further Exploration:

• Check out “Selling My Car … Bought My Freedom” by Rob Greenfield. You think I have a low footprint? This young man is an entertaining inspiration!

Two great articles for you today on subjects near and dear to my heart! Although I started on my low-footprint path in order to be part of the solution to the biospheric crisis, the personal rewards of this path have ended up being huge.

1) Radically reduced financial overhead, allowing me to have creative and occupational freedom;

2) Increase in free time. I truly consider myself a time-millionaire!

• “Lessons in Moneyless Living,” Laura Oldanie at Rich & Resilient Living blog: “Do you often find that the less money you spend the richer an experience or connection is? I sure do. For a recent potluck dinner at a friend’s house I made limeade with limes I’d rescued from a grocery store dumpster and added mint from my garden. The limeade was a hit! In exchange I was treated to homemade chocolate and papaya ice cream, tasty entrees, and engaging conversation on my friend’s back patio overlooking her beautiful gardens. How much of what truly brings joy to our lives stems from money? It all got me thinking about the intriguing stories of those pursuing moneyless living. The point of this post isn’t to encourage people to completely avoid money. In fact, for most of us a certain baseline amount makes life easier to navigate and helps us thrive. There are a number of people in our modern day society though, who for ethical reasons have chosen to eschew it all together. They’re sharing their inspiring stories online to motivate others and get us thinking differently about what is possible.” Visit Laura’s post to read their stories!

• “Time Millionaires: Meet the people pursuing the pleasure of Leisure,” Sirin Kale at theguardian.com: “First named by the writer Nilanjana Roy in a 2016 column in the Financial Times, time millionaires measure their worth not in terms of financial capital, but according to the seconds, minutes and hours they claw back from employment for leisure and recreation. ‘Wealth can bring comfort and security in its wake,’ says Roy. ‘But I wish we were taught to place as high a value on our time as we do on our bank accounts – because how you spend your hours and your days is how you spend your life.’ And the pandemic has created a new cohort of time millionaires. The UK and the US are currently in the grip of a workforce crisis. One recent survey found that more than 56% of unemployed people were not actively looking for a new job. Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that many people are not returning to their pre-pandemic jobs, or if they are, they are requesting to work from home, clawing back all those hours previously lost to commuting.” Great article! The guy profiled at the beginning comes off sounding like a bum (and it seems like he is actually deceiving his employer), but the message of the article is solid.

Not only do I agree that COP-26 has the potential to be a superspreader event (Yessenia Funes, atmos.earth); I also think we need for environmental reasons to stop organizing in-person conferences that require international travel, or indeed any longdistance travel. Especially climate conferences! The pandemic shutdown demonstrated that we have perfectly good technology for virtual conferences.

In-person conferences are also really expensive, or outright unaffordable, for many activists and other everyday people, especially in the Global South. People shouldn’t have to incur the risks, expenses, and inconveniences of longdistance travel in order to have a chance for their voices to be heard! With all the conferencing and communications technology that’s out there, this is just dinosaur-era ridiculous and a criminal waste of resources.

I commend the people who are refusing to go. (I think it’s mostly for pandemic reasons.) We in the rich industrialized world need to be the ones leading the movement away from “conference jetsetting” to low-footprint virtual conferencing.

“But it’s just not the same as in-person,” someone will always say. OK so it’s not the same. But whatever warm fuzzy feelings might be lost by having a conference virtually (or the glam feeling of getting to fly to some cool-sounding destination), are more than made up for by the greatly expanded access for not-so-privileged people who’d be unduly burdened by the cost of plane tickets, hotel rooms, and other conference expenses.

On that note, I am thrilled that The Nature Of Cities Festival will once again take place virtually. Early this year I attended the virtual event, which drew about 2,000 people from 70 countries! The dates for next year’s TNOC are 29-31 March, 2022. Integrating nature into cities is the key to creating safe and sustainable human settlements, and this festival-style conference is full of inspiring real-life examples.

“Do Americans know what a massive ripoff American life really is?” — asks Umair Haque in this astute article at medium.com .

It’s a sad read … But we do have the power to change things. Waking up to our power is the first step!

“I’ve recently moved to the States — shudder — for a year or two. And I’m shocked at how expensive just life is. For no good reason at all.

“When I put my economist hat on, a fact becomes clear to me. American life is a gigantic rip-off, one of the world’s biggest, and that’s why America is now effectively a country of poor people, and that makes it a nation of angry, cruel, and selfish ones, too. …

“Americans are notoriously angry, hostile, aggressive, selfish people. Sorry if you don’t want to hear that — but the rest of the world will tell you it’s true. What makes them that way, though? Well, they’ve fallen into poverty. They’ve become effectively poor. And poverty will make anyone rightly angry, desperate, and afraid.”

For any readers in my local area …

Climate Rally next Saturday Oct 9, 10am til noon, in NSB.

I will be one of the speakers. Building our climate-resilience (both mitigation and adaptation) on the local/regional level needs to be interwoven into all of our plans for creating economic and social wellbeing.

Time: 10am to noon Saturday October 9. Place: Riverside Park, NSB.

PS. I’ll be giving away copies of my book DEEP GREEN, about how your everyday personal choices can have great power to make a difference.

After noticing, recently, that several local political candidates and some fellow citizens don’t seem to have much awareness about climate-resilience, I wondered if the same might be the case in many other places. So I decided to try to boost awareness in my community by writing up a summary of basic examples of how a local government could boost its climate-resilience while also enhancing its beauty, improving its economic wellbeing, and saving money and other resources.

If you find any of this helpful, you are welcome to use any or all of it as talking-points in your discussions or emails with your local government officials, neighborhood association, newspapers, and other community influencers.

This is a rough work-in-progress; I’ll be adding to it.

• Resilience, to me, encompasses both mitigation and adaptation. Those two things can sometimes overlap, blend. For example, a healthy tree canopy helps mitigate heat extremes and drought-flood extremes. It can also help a community adapt better to whatever climate-change effects do hit. For example, switching from buzzcut turfgrass to meadows as a dominant landscaping theme. (Many wild plants are edible and medicinal.)

• I find it useful to approach climate-resilience through a permaculture-design lens (as I do so many other topics). Permaculture sets forth the following six general categories of human needs: Food, Water, Shelter, Transportation, Energy, Community. (But a local government, for example, might find it useful to break it down by department: Public Works, Parks & Recreation, Building, Planning, Health, Social Services, and so on.)

Following are a couple of simple examples of resilience in each category.

• FOOD: Start a farmers market. Have a city-sponsored community garden, and/or support grassroots organizations in setting one up. Loosen or remove restrictions banning backyard chickens, food-gardening in residential yards, etc. Highlight local farmers on your city social-media pages, community newsletter. Organize food festivals around your most popular local produce. Strawberry Festival, Mullet Run, etc. Eliminate “food deserts” by making sure residents of all neighborhoods have access to fresh wholesome food even if they don’t drive or have cars. Invite local elders, indigenous people, immigrant communities to share their food-growing expertise and to lead local food-resilience initiatives; compensate them generously and celebrate them lavishly as treasures of the community.

• WATER: Shift landscaping emphasis from neatness/turfgrass to trees, native plants, shade, heat mitigation. Provide city landscaping employees with basic training in permaculture, native landscaping, tree care, green infrastructure. Have at least one city building as a demo site for collecting rainwater and using it onsite. Sponsor workshops on rainwater collection, rain gardens. Buy rainbarrels in large quantity to sell to residents at low price (or even give to residents). Read the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins; consider a pilot program of humanure toilets in selected areas (such as any sites now served by portajohnsi or chemical toilets). Mitigating heat and drought, repairing the water cycle, and radically conserving what water your community does have is of paramount importance; a community without water will not remain a community for long.

• SHELTER: Aim to add single-room-occupancy complexes, mobile-home parks, tiny-house villages, micro apartments, accessory dwelling units, and “missing middle” housing to your menu of housing options. Look into any codes, zoning, or other restrictions that impede the construction of a full range of housing options, or that make it difficult to repurpose historic buildings or other existing buildings for housing. Consider instituting a vacancy tax on buy-and-hold investors who keep buildings empty for years, or who keep parcels of urban land empty rather than put them into productive use.

• TRANSPORTATION: Eliminate car-dependent residential developments, shopping areas, public buildings, etc., by making sure all major routes have bicycle/walking paths and are served by public transport. Support bus and rail transit as an essential item; don’t take pushback from car elitists. Stop allowing sprawl development, and at least push developers outside the city core to include basic commercial amenities (grocery store, drugstore, etc.) within their developments. Aim to make sure all streets and sidewalks are shaded. Offer bicycle-safety classes.

• ENERGY: Back off on frequency of grass mowing and let wildflowers emerge; keep tree-trimming to absolute minimum necessary. Move the needle on our USAmerican obsession with tidying the great outdoors; consider limiting or greatly curtailing pressure-washing, leaf-blowing, and other fuel-intensive operations by city crews. Cease use of herbicides and pesticides; allow natural predators to reemerge and they will keep insect populations in balance. Conduct public meetings by Zoom (or at least offer it as an option) to encourage people to avoid unnecessary gasoline consumption. Offer homeowners and landlords rebates or other incentives for adding insulation or other energy retrofits to their buildings. Add solar panels as shade over large parking lots such as airport parking lots. (These could also serve as electric-vehicle-charging stations.)

• COMMUNITY: Host community game nights, concerts, karaoke nights, line-dancing at parks in residential neighborhoods. (The focus is on bringing residents together, as opposed to attracting tourists.) Set up community donation boxes for toys, canned goods. Put Little Free Libraries outside of city government buildings, community centers, and on street corners around town. Allow residents to set up a swap meet or rummage sale in a large municipal parking lot that’s vacant at a certain time or day of the week. Promote intellectual development, physical fitness, and community togetherness via fun, challenging programs. Mayor’s Reading Challenge, Mayor’s Fitness Challenge, etc.

Note: An action such as “community composting” or “supporting farmers’ markets” can deliver resilience benefits in multiple categories, including food, transportation, energy, community, and even shelter (by providing job opportunities that can help people secure a roof over their heads). Conducting meetings by Zoom offers benefits in both the energy and transportation categories. Encouraging bicycling and walking not only helps a community conserve energy and be more transportation-resilient, but also helps build community because people are able to see each other out and about rather than obscured behind tinted car windows. And there’s a lot of overlap between food- and water-resilience.

What I’ve written is really just a tiny sampling of ways that a city or other local government can boost its climate-resilience while also fostering economic health and social wellbeing. This post doubles as a grab-bag of talking points to help citizens and activists let public officials know the breadth of what climate-resilience entails. I’m sure you can think of many more! Please drop me a line if you’d like me to add something.

PS. Someone in the Deep Adaptation group just mentioned “Climate Emergency Centers” and “Climate Resilience Hubs” as a way of helping people and communities get through what is expected in some places to be a very hard winter, possibly accompanied by fuel shortages. I’m not familiar with CECs or CRHs, though I can imagine what sorts of services and facilities they might offer. Someone in the group posted this link to a CEC in the UK; I’ll be visiting this link later to read up.

In my neighborhood there’s a young mother who walks around the neighborhood several times a day, walking her dog and pushing her daughter in a stroller. She says hi to everyone she passes, and, particularly for some elderly housebound residents, she might be the only person that they get to see all day! Even though I myself get to talk with a lot of people, this sweet young woman with her child and pup are always a bright spot in my day.

Two businesses, located catty-corner across from one another on a faded commercial street I love, that many people are trying to revitalize, have put tables and chairs out front of their doors. The other evening, the two sets of tables and chairs enticed several visitors/customers to sit down. The presence of the people sitting outdoors, in turn, prompted a number of motorists, who probably would’ve otherwise just kept driving, to stop and say hi and see what was going on. Many pleasant conversations ensued.

In my Little Free Library the other day I found a note scrawled on a scrap of paper: “TY so much for the books!” The little note warmed my heart and totally made my day.

I haven’t yet done this, but I think that when I mount my poster of the ecological activist poem “Hieroglyphic Stairway” on my fence next to my Little Free Library, it’ll add to the quality of people’s day, and contribute to the ongoing rise in the neighborhood’s vibe. (If you’re not familiar with this Drew Dellinger poem, you can read it here.) And here, on Drew Dellinger’s website, is where I ordered a beautiful poster of the poem. (Update: I posted the poem on a cork board on the corner of my corner-lot. Haven’t seen or heard any reactions yet, but it’s out there and that’s what matters. To quote my favorite lines of the poem, “I want just this consciousness reached / by people in range of secret frequencies contained in my speech.”)

My friends, a sweet couple who live in a rural area where the neighbors have not always been friendly and have sometimes been outright hostile, recently put a little stone bench by the entrance to their driveway. My friends noticed a positive shift in the vibe almost immediately. People have been stopping there to rest, and one neighborhood matriarch has even been known to “hold court” there!

My final example isn’t from right in my neighborhood, but I found it on my morning walk today. About a half-mile down the beach, not far from the usual trash can and recycling can, was an adorable painted box labeled “Mermaid’s Lost Toys.” Clearly meant as a place to drop off toy buckets, shovels, and other beach toys instead of tossing them in the trash. This little box conveys a big message about sharing; adds a sweet touch of whimsy; sets a cheerful tone while discouraging a throwaway mentality.

I mention these little things because 1) they do make a big difference; and 2) a lot of people give much of their attention to “big stuff” like infrastructure bills, government programs, large-scale projects — and place a lot of faith in such big stuff. And often wait around for this big stuff, and don’t always recognize how much power we have through the “small stuff” we can do right now with our own hands, and start seeing results right away.

Chuck Marohn’s recent piece in Strong Towns fits in well with this post. “Will We Have an Infrastructure Bill? Who Cares?” “I’ll spend an hour talking with a group about how we’ve overbuilt our infrastructure systems, what this approach is robbing from our local capacity and prosperity, how we need to get more out of what we’ve already built, and how we go about doing that in our cities from the bottom up. …Then someone asks me whether or not there will be a federal infrastructure bill. … I’ll keep answering the question about a federal infrastructure bill, but please understand that it matters far less to your future than what you and your neighbors choose to do in your own community. A nation of Strong Towns — one where the energy of Americans is not dissipated by the inconsequential horse race of political DC, but instead put to work making their own places great — is not something we have to wait for permission to build.”

Update Oct 12, 2021: Home improvement; neighborhood improvement!! By removing a side-gate that I never used anyway, and moving my trash can and recycling bin to the gate-gap which is right along the sidewalk that gets a lot of foot-traffic, I have added a bit of public value to my neighborhood. (Just in time for Biketoberfest that’s coming up this weekend!)

Before, I kept the trash can and recycling bin tucked away in a private spot. By moving it to this public spot, I not only add a community value (by providing a publicly accessible spot for trash and recycling), but also make things easier for myself and other household members, because all I have to do now to put the trash out is push the can and bin the couple of feet to the curb on trash collection day!

This is one micro-step in my experimental, exploratory process of making the public-private boundaries of my dwelling more “porous” and thus, I intend, more enriching to the neighborhood and to my household. You can see a photo of my new private-public amenity here.