Ecologically and Socially Sustainable
Transportation.
A very
important issue is hardly ever mentioned now-a-days--what should be
the ideal model of sustainable transportation? Most ideas dealing
with ecologically correct transportation merely suggest forms of
transportation that would be less harmful to the environment--less
polluting, not petrochemical resources based, and also included
might be improved mass public transportation, car pooling, and
such. Rarely, if ever, the ideal ecologically and socially
sustainable transportation is presented as such that would not be
needed at all, following the principle that the best solutions are
such that are as simple as possible.
Consider: If everything that is needed for a comfortable life could
be obtained within a walking, paddling, and sailing distance of one's dwelling, what
transportation would there be necessary at all? Ways of growing of
all the food at home one might ever need have already been
researched and are known; materials needed for construction of
dwellings can be found and grown in the vicinity of one's dwelling
also, and the solution to visiting relatives and friends (that
"normally" might involve traveling great distances across the
globe, at times) would be solved by concentrating of all those
within one's walking distance, and if that could not be done, than
walking the distance could be the way, providing that one could
stop and work for one's upkeep along the way with the understanding
that a similar courtesy would be extended to any travelers passing
through one's own locality.
A good reason to consider non-transportation of person and goods as
the best way of transporting is that no matter how much more benign
any form of transportation could be made (be it by lowering fuel
consumption, or by making mass public transportation more
available), the result would be still doing harm to the
environment, no matter how much lesser that harm would be. Consider
the advantages of not having to support any heavy industry
necessary for production of any means of transportation (even that
of bicycles); an industry that could never be made sustainable even
socially, if not only ecologically, because of the high degree of
social organization necessary for sustaining of such industries.
And the last, but not the least, reason for promoting
non-transportation of anything (by the virtue of having everything
necessary for life within walking distance) is that usually the
simplest solutions are the most efficient and elegant ones.
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