Time for a rant

The BP oil spill has been looming in my mind - like the horrible 20-page paper in college that you put off until the last minute to write - and still haunts you in your dreams. I say that because my conscience is nagging at me to do something - anything - about the suffering that my kind is inflicting. Oil-slicked birds, dolphins and whales dying, sea turtles being burned alive! I hear these things, and I feel like the world would be a lot better off if we had never evolved beyond the Australopithecine stage. I might not feel this way if I still lived in Japan - except, wait, yes I would - because in THAT country, dolphins living in captivity in Okinawa are throwing themselves out of their tanks in an effort to end their suffering!!!!! The reports are horrifying and heart-wrenching, I am sitting here in tears and I just cannot take any more.

So I am making a promise - at LEAST one day a week, I will not drive my car. At all. Which sounds ridiculous. I should be able to do better than that, right?? Agreed - how about a series of steps to choke off petroleum use:

1. One day a week, no car.

2. Save enough in gas to get a new bike.

3. Get the iBert baby seat for said bike - see if I can't increase to more days w/o the car.

4. Replace our old 2nd car with the Nissan Leaf as soon as possible.

5. Switch from PG&E to Marin Clean Energy.

6. Buy more of our food from the farmers markets.

7. Re-use petroleum-based products (plastic bottles, bags) with a vengeance.

It pisses me off that so many would-be pedestrians are forced to compromise because of car-centric infrastructure - you don't have a chance in hell of riding a bike and/or using public transit somewhere like Houston, for example. Or Jacksonville, Florida. I can remember getting so incredibly pissed off walking along busy roads - no sidewalk, nothing - and cars whizzing by at 50 mph. You can bet your ass that this design was intentional. It's insidious, it's killing our environment, which in turn eventually kills us. Why should it be so? Can we not save ourselves, or will history go on repeating itself until we've gone extinct? What's the verdict, People?

What I want to see is people giving a shit. I want to see Critical Mass slowing traffic to a crawl on a major highway in Houston, Texas. I want to see the feedlots where cows and pigs spend the majority of their lives mired in their own shit, force fed antibiotics and god knows what, cited for cruelty and shut down for good. Next time you go to a supermarket for a steak or pork chops, think about what the real cost was. Action. Making a difference. For those of you who are wondering about the apparent disconnect between petroleum use and meat-eating in America, I urge you to read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.

If only it were so simple as to promise to eat tofu and home-grown veggies for a year straight in order to prevent an environmental disaster. Like a magic spell. I swear I would do it in a heartbeat.