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TODAY Monday 10 November 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Mea Maxima Culpa

Abnormally faithful readers may recall that at this time last week ("Green Loafing") I told the story of a torpid weekend in New York, where your correspondent didn't do much of anything except walk around, eat at diners, and read the paper. If every American did as I did, the story went, the country wouldn't be grappling with pollution and climate change. Be slothful and save the planet. It was a "funny" piece. Not ha-ha funny (which is to say, not really funny) but whimsical funny (labored).

Put aside for the moment the consideration that if everybody in the country did what I did last weekend we would probably plunge the world into a bitter recession. There's also the bothersome item that such environmentally-friendly weekends are quite unrepresentative of what I do and what I want to do.

This past weekend was more typical. On Friday, I took a train from Penn station to Amherst, Massachusetts. There is only one such train per day, and it is subsidized by a combination of Amtrak general funds and funds contributed from federal transportation allocations to the State of Vermont, which believes it is in its interest to maintain rail service up the Connecticut River Valley to the Canadian border. Trains are more energy-efficient than cars, but only after a certain point. As an extremely crude measure, you can figure that a train that is less than one-third full consumes more energy per passenger than if you lent each person a Chevy Cavalier for the day. On sunny October foliage weekends and during college transition periods, the Vermonter can almost fill up. But most times, like last Friday, we passengers barely reach that one-third environmental break-even mark. (As a consequence, everyone gets two big seats. The pace is slow [4 hours, 40 minutes to travel 170 miles, and that's on a good day] and the service inconsistent, but you can read or daydream comfortably.)

On arriving in Amherst, I walk to a little house that I maintain for the purposes of exercising joint custody of a 16-year-old girl, a product of my first marriage. The other product, her older brother, has already been shipped off to college, where he shows high artistic and low financial promise. Until Annie gets institutionalized herself, considerable energy and materials are expended on my getting to Amherst and back, keeping up a house there, and driving Annie and her friends all around Hampshire County in a car.

When Annie finally goes, I'll probably sell the house in Amherst, pay off the home equity loan, and junk the '87 Subaru. At which point, I plan to design and build another weekend house (this time closer to New York City and therefore more expensive) and buy some new wheels that (if I'm rolling in dough) I can garage in the city and use to zip upstate via the Taconic Parkway. All this excess of desire is justified by a pile of graph paper which indicates that my 1900 square foot dream house will be well insulated and topped by a heliotropic photovoltaic array for guilt-free solar electricity.

I also intend to occasion the burning of jet fuel by visiting my neglected mother in Florida and by cashing in some frequent flyer miles someday for a trip to South America. I could really use some new clothes, trousers especially, though I'll wait until after the diet, which probably would be a lot more effective if I could keep one of those Cycle II rowing machines next to the bed. Maybe one each for city and country. Upgrade the laptop, inspect new mountain bikes, check out high-definition TV. Try the new restaurants.

You know how it is. Today in the United States, 95% of the people who have no significant inherited wealth will manage to spend most of their available annual income on something or other; that something or other will, within a few transactions, occasion a net loss of natural resources. Maybe someday we'll be able to spend money in an ecologically sustainable economy, but not now. If you want to be less a part of the problem, either stay home and spend less cash or invest your surplus in some start-up company of young engineers working on a new fermentation process for deriving hydrogen from poplar branches.

And then there is this. Today in the world, 75% of the rest of the people want to increase their available annual income to spend in ways not very different from Americans. I read the studies and reports which say that the carrying capacity of the biosphere simply will not allow six billion people to live like you or me, and I have no reason to doubt them. Yet I will never be able to advise those people not to try. It's a religious problem. I have jettisoned most of the doctrinal ballast of my Catholic youth -- just a tad weird on questions of sex and death -- but it's not easy to shake the parables of Jesus, who lashed comfortable hypocrites with memorable ferocity. The last shall be first, the first shall be last; easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter paradise; better to be a repentant outcast than a grateful success. For whatever reason, I just think it's a (gulp) sin for an Irish American who drives a car and visits Europe to advise a Chinese to pass up a Ford and a junket to Hawaii. Lots of other sins I'll commit (and look forward to it), but that one will require hell to boil over. Which, judging from the latest climate projections, appears to be the direction in which we're heading.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Good news! Bill McKibben, the world's greatest prose stylist on climate change -- the dark muse of global warming -- will be covering the big Kyoto conference for this little Website. Here! Live (almost)!

 

Recent "Today" columns:

11/07: Inflexible Flyers
11/06: Meaningless Votes, Really
11/05: In Praise of SeaWeb
11/04: Reality Check
11/03: Green Loafing
10/31: Guilty Nationalist Pleasures
10/30: Europe Alone
10/29: Duck! (Again)
10/28: Civil Society and Conservation
10/27: Who Owns the National Forests?

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