Monday, July 05, 2010
Do you really want to hurt BP?
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Jeremy Holmes
Holmes is the program director for RIDE Solutions in Roanoke.
I've encountered a considerable amount of desperation as people struggle to react appropriately to the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster is so huge and pervasive that it's impossible to figure out where an individual can take action outside of some physical presence at the spill site, cleaning beaches or scrubbing animals.
One common, understandable response has been to boycott BP. The most popular Boycott BP Facebook group has more than 700,000 people in it already, and there are several other similarly named groups with tens of thousands of members among them. Unfortunately, this response -- while, perhaps, emotionally satisfying -- is not necessarily effective.
Moving your money from one oil company to another doesn't really do much to affect the voracious appetite we have for oil that drives companies like BP to make risky and reckless decisions about where to drill. Blame BP all you want -- and you should -- for failures, but the company wouldn't be there in the first place if not for our demand for gas and our demand that it stay cheap.
So, if you want to act in a way that really has an impact, there are two main things you can do:
n Drive less: This should be obvious. Replace oil-powered trips with human-powered ones. Use the bus and carpool to work whenever possible, even if its only one day a week. Simply walking to the corner store for milk instead of driving is an excellent start.
The more trips you can take off the road, no matter how small, the more real impact you have on reducing our dependence on oil. Not only that, but driving less has additional positive benefits that a boycott, even a successful one, wouldn't; you're polluting less, helping keep the air in the Roanoke and New River valleys clean.
You're contributing to the conservation of our amazing natural resources -- less driving means fewer roads, less sprawl, fewer parking lots and more parks, trees, greenways and other greenspace. You're reducing your carbon footprint, and you're probably going to get physically healthier at the same time -- if you're feeling particularly aggressive toward BP, work out that aggression on your bicycle commute.
n Go local: The energy required to get goods from one side of the country to another is incredible and a significant component of the country's transportation fuel consumption. Everyone knows that shopping locally keeps money in the regional economy, provides employment opportunities for our friends and neighbors and brings us fresher food, but it also means that the stuff you're buying didn't travel nearly as far to get here.
Bicycling to the local farmers' market and filling your basket with fruits and veggies is a double-punch to BP's gut; neither you nor the food you're buying took much oil to get to the market. These markets are popping up everywhere -- the downtown Roanoke Farmers Market is packed every day; the Saturday morning Grandin Village market, the new Wednesday market at the West End Center in Roanoke, and the newly renovated market in downtown Blacksburg (among others) means there is probably a source of local food and other goods within a short bus or bicycle trip from your front door.
It's not easy to change transportation behavior, and not just because it's tough to break any kind of habit. Our cities are built for driving, but with a little planning almost everyone can take some trips off the road, and the more people who do it the easier it becomes and the more likely our region will develop in a more human, less automobile-centered way.
The more we walk and ride bikes, the more we demand sidewalks and bike lanes instead of new roads; the more we ride the bus, the higher ridership helps justify more and better service; the fewer cars on the road, the safer those roads are for cyclists and more efficient they are for buses.
Even though it will take time for cities and transportation infrastructure to change course and develop in less oil-intensive ways, the personal benefits of changing transportation behavior are immediate: saving money on gas, parking and automobile maintenance; having more free time; getting healthier; and contributing to improvements in local air quality.
The oil spill is a catastrophe that we'll be dealing with for years to come, but it exists only because we have not suppressed or gluttonous hunger for the stuff now floating on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
Unless we curb that gluttony, unless we take a fundamentally different approach to our transportation and buying habits, this will certainly not be the last disaster we'll see.
