Walking, an Evolution

So what has all this walking done? It has reminded me that humans were given the power of personal mobility because we like to move around, or perhaps we were designed to move around. Of course many people walk throughout the day, around their house, at work, in stores, and perhaps even across the street to get some coffee, but the majority of us are still driving everywhere we go. What is the purpose of driving for our daily needs, or perceived needs? The society we live in has come rely on vehicles to propel people and things throughout space and time so that our lives can be more comfortable. All this comfort is exactly what got us to relying on our cars.

Mobility then stands for more than moving from one place to another as means of transportation but rather, has come to include social mobility. We view our modern mobility as advancement on an earlier state of social culture, where we walked. However, all good things do come to an end, and our comfort is quickly diminishing with the depletion of natural resources to propel and create our cars.

The sustainable lifestyle has entered American culture and all anyone can seem to think about is how we can transform our cars to rely on other energy sources. What about walking?

The total cost of our transportation-dependent culture only begins with fuel. The cost of producing the vehicles themselves, the infrastructure that the vehicles ride on, and the numerous services that support those vehicles should also be included. But I’m not just talking about monetary cost; I’m concerned with total cost. The cost to our environment, and again its not just about burning fossile fuels. Well not only the fuels the vehicles themselves burn, but also the fuels to transport the fuels, to build the roadways and to build the vehicles themselves. The raw materials to build all of the vehicles and the roadways that have not been properly designed to be recyclable, not to mention many of the recycling processes are also inefficient. The entire system of transportation seems to be working against us, and for what? Pineapples in January?

If humanity plans to truly undergo a sustainable paradigm shift, we have to consider why we have created the transportation that exists today and discover why we need to change that model. Growing and consuming local produce is only a start. Think about everything else we have, most of it was not designed, sourced, built, delivered, and consumed without modern transportation. How will we continue to live modern lives without this transportation?