Climate, Part 1: Little Boys Love Trucks
I’ve been thinking about trading my truck for an electric car. I spend a decent amount of time pondering this question, a little bit because I like shiny new things, but more so because recently I’ve been actively trying to be part of fighting climate change rather than contributing to it, and this is one way I’m positive I can do so. As someone who lives an active outdoor-based lifestyle, occasionally builds things out of lumber, likes to camp, also cares about the future of the kids with whom I work, and more so every day understands the urgency of the climate crisis, plus lives with a lot of privilege and who benefits from things that hurt the planet, I’m trying to find a way to navigate it all and, like a true American, still come out on top and have what I want. Still, as my friend Evan so eloquently put it, I don’t want to be “just another white dude in a f***ing Tesla.” What to do?
To start, I need to say that I love driving a truck. The little boy inside me who used to get strollered down to the fire station in the early hours of the morning is STOKED. Also, besides it being eminently useful when I need to do truck stuff, and when I need 4-wheel-drive to get me anywhere, I am 6’7” and have done my fair share of body-smashing. I don’t fit in a lot of cars, and my injured parts don’t like to be squished or placed at odd angles for too long. Still, I’ve folded myself into plenty of rides, including (because I’m an Oregonian! It’s a rite of passage) more than one Subaru. Among those many vehicles, for my body and lifestyle and hobbies, trucks have just worked the best – probably because I haven’t had a 4x4 van yet (#lifegoals).
This is not a country song; I’m not going to write you an “Ode to my Ram” or whatever (always thought I was a Chevy guy, but here we are). I love my truck in the mostly-unemotional way that we value extremely useful and reliable tools. For example, my mom has a KitchenAid mixer that she’s had as long as I can remember, and while I’m sure she really likes it and I know she uses it, if it broke she wouldn’t weep. We are consumers in America, after all; she’d be annoyed because whatever she was making would have to wait, then she’d mix it by hand, and then she’d go get a new one that works better, runs quieter, and is a fun color. This is how I feel about my truck, with one added consideration: I drive A LOT for work – way more than my mom makes bread – and unlike the mostly-dormant vintage KitchenAid, my truck is very expensive to use and very not good for the Earth.
The science on the burning of fossil fuels is conclusive. By some accounts, it has been since the 80s, but now we see – feel – the devastating effects of humanity’s love affair with oil and industry every day and in every place. I live on the west coast of the U.S.A., so my day-to-day experience of climate change largely has to do with decreased rainfall, increased heat and drought, and explosive wildfires. Maybe you live somewhere else, where it’s flooding or tornadoes or mudslides, massive hurricanes or dwindling water tables or warming oceans or rampant disease. No matter who or where we are, it is – and we are – all connected; there is no escaping it or each other.
Of course, as with all negative human impacts since the dawn of stratified society, the damage is felt most severely in places other than where most of the benefit is reaped. In 2023, that is in what’s called the “global south,” a designation that basically encompasses what used to be called “third world countries.” Many of these countries are located south of the equator – hence the moniker – and lack widespread modern technology, industry, medicine, infrastructure, economic and political power, and material wealth. Not incidentally, many of them do possess valuable natural resources which are extracted and exploited by companies from wealthier nations, adding to multiple levels of calamity.
There is. like in most things, some nuance to it, but essentially we up here in the North have created and embraced a sort of psychological insulation (one might go as far as to call it willful ignorance), a very “out of sight, out of mind” attitude when it comes to our continued and future impact on the rest of the world. This is still the case in most corners of society, even as our thirst for the new, the advanced, and the quick drive us ever more irrevocably toward cataclysm. As the climate crisis worsens, our denial is getting harder to maintain, and yet our short-sightedness exists for a reason and is built into our very DNA; it actually started as a vital survival mechanism.
Oh, Man
The first versions of the homo genus – homo literally means “man” – appeared around 300,000 years ago. Modern homo sapiens – “wise man,” the definition of irony – is about 160,000 years old (1); what scientists call “behavioral modernity,” or the beginnings of social organization and behavior that we would recognize, came around 40,000 years ago during what we call The Stone Age (named so because it is when the first evidence of stone tools show up in the archaeological record). What about “modern” humanity? The last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago, and the earliest modern civilizations appeared in and around the Indus Valley in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq, part of what is called The Fertile Crescent) and in Egypt between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago. By 2,500 BCE (about 4,500 years ago), human civilization was thriving.
That seems like a long time ago by the standard of a human lifespan, but when placed in the context of the age of the planet…well, look at it this way: If the age of the Earth is a football field, the Age of Humans is the width of a single blade of grass. Of the 4.54 billion years of Earth, all of humanity exists within approximately .0001% of that time. Within that tiny fraction of a blink in the eye of the universe, we have created marvels (not to be confused with The Marvels, which I heard isn’t much to write home about) and we have evolved technologically at a pace that wildly outruns the natural progression of evolution. Therein lies our first challenge in dealing with the massive threat – and prevents us from grasping the massive opportunity – that is our current climate situation.
Gettin’ By
For much of human history – especially before the advent of agriculture, industry, technology, and the aggregation of wealth with its attending inequalities – human beings were frail compared to their competitors for survival. Before the Stone Age, when we began to use fire and tools and stepped onto the path of technological innovation and increased safety that has led us to this moment, every piece of our attention had to be on surviving; there was no “long-term forecast,” only what the sky told you about the weather that was on the way.
What we are dealing with now is the fact that for such a fundamental and critical survival mechanism to evolve out of us, 6,000 years is not nearly enough. So, despite the intellectual understanding that many of us have about the threat that our daily activities and choices have on our environment, and even though we KNOW that what we are doing is hastening our own end, we are biologically programmed to focus on the imminent demands and desires of right now and so that’s what we do.
The bottom two tiers of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (2) tell us that before we can consider anything more broadly existential like “the survival of Planet Earth,” or achieving our human potential, we must first fulfill our own basic needs: Food, water, shelter, sleep (Tier 1; physiological) and health, stability, and safety (Tier 2; security). A lot of our evolutionary programming is geared towards these two mandates, because the vast majority of our approximately 300,000-year history was spent just trying to get by. Today, there are vast swathes of humanity that are still grappling with this most basic level of survival; these are the people that suffer the most as the rest of us, who have exploited our way – intentionally or not - up the pyramid, seek to fulfill higher mandates. These Maslow determined to be our psychological (Tiers 3 &4; intimacy, friendship, prestige, sense of accomplishment) and self-actualization (Tier 5; creativity & realizing one’s potential) needs.
So, some of us are still stuck – or oppressed – in the needs of moment-to-moment survival, and although those people must certainly feel the increasingly catastrophic effects of climate change, the main concern is still staying fed, housed, clothed, safe, and generally alive. Others of us, mostly in the so-called global North, have our basic needs fulfilled and COULD look beyond ourselves if we chose – what I see as the central, massive, individual and collective opportunity provided by this situation – but are mostly governed by our still-present and strong evolutionary short-term survival/pleasure/fulfillment mandate. That, and we are conditioned to “look out for Number One.” Nature, and nurture.
For many people – I’m one of them, for sure – it is SO HARD to look past what we want right now, especially in a tech- and convenience-driven society that celebrates instant gratification and the option to “buy now, pay later.” The problem is, although the post-WWII generation has certainly given it the ol’ college try, you can’t live on credit when it comes to the Earth.
So what do we do - especially those of us who are in a position to do something? Stay tuned for Part 2…
References
1. Key components of Civilization. National Geographic, accessed on December 14, 2023. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/key-components-civilization/#
2. Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-96.
Originally published on December 18, 2023