Ruth Carruthers: Car troubles
The beauty of nature is very enticing but do you really have to use a car to enjoy it?
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I wish I had a car. As an environmentalist, I’m probably not suppose to say that out loud but it’s true. Moreover, I wish I had my own set of wheels right now so I could escape Glasgow in all its grey glory.
If I had it my way, the first weeks of the year for me would look like the Howies winter catalogue: all beaches, blankets and riding mountains. But instead they always end up resembling something more like student life: watching telly and eating tinned custard. These are wasted days for me.
But it’s not just now that I feel this way. I have burst of frustration throughout the year, mainly when the sun is at its zenith or there’s snow on the hills and I want to enjoy nature at its best. Not being able to enjoy the beauty of these wild places is the one thing that stings the most for me.
I hate to give in though. I’ve always believed that by driving to the beach or mountains, you are inadvertently spoiling what you came to enjoy, both directly through the building of roads and indirectly through pollution and consumption of natural resources. 'I don’t want to get a car until I can afford to own an environmentally responsible one,' I used to say, sounding sickeningly righteous I’m sure. But there’s only so far my legs and a bike can take me in a day, and any car I own would have to be big enough to fit a board or two – not one of those wee eco-friendly Smart Cars, that’s for sure.
So what do I do? Save up for a regular petrol or diesel car and suppress my guilt? Wait 10 years until I can afford an eco-friendly model? Catch public transport to the mountains? Apply to the Protest Fund? Look into converting an engine to run on chip fat? Or maybe join a car-pooling scheme?
The last suggestion sounds sensible both for my pocket and the environment. It’s just that carpooling to the mountains or beach from the city on a regular basis is seldom viable. It sounds great in theory and it's good for getting to work, school or taking a long trip to the Alps. In practice though, it's like waiting for the stars to align when a car owner and I both have some free time and the urge for the same adventure.
I did get public transport up to the Cairngorms once. By the time I caught a bus, a train then another bus, I arrived on the hill at 1pm, leaving me approximately three and a half hours before the mountain closed. I’m not going to tear public transport apart here. Sure it’s often under-developed, expensive and unreliable, but it brings people together and should be one of the best solutions to our problems. After all, isn’t protecting the environment a collective challenge? Cars are insular and keep us apart – another reason not to get one maybe? Perhaps if more people used public transport, we would realise that we are all in this together?
But the crux of the matter is that unless you live on the shore by a break or under the shadow mountain, you are never going to find those sweet spots without a car.
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Car troubles (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
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As a Londonder who surfs but can't drive a lot of my time is spent making my way down to Cornwall. This often involves, one tube journey, one train ride, two buses and an up-hill walk to even get close to where I want to be (camping kit and surf gear in tow) and I can't help thinking that the surf tastes all the sweeter for my troubles.
Perhaps then the question that has to be asked (and probably has been) is are we a society that craves immediacy too much in all that we do, especially with regards to travel? Have we forgotten what it is to have to take our time and that humble feeling of having to spend a whole day traveling by various means to get to our goal? For sure, I don't deny it would be great to drive, own a car and be able to scream down motorways and A roads and be at my destination in half the time and yes public transport is shoddy at the best of times, but I think it would be a great thing if there could be a collective shift in how we approach and think about the way we move from A-to-B especially from those who rely on mother nature for their leisure.
However, unfortunately Olly is right in that the issues are much more complex than this and not everyone is able to adapt in such a way, practically or financially.
So where can we go from here as whilst not exactly tangible the benefits are there in the potential good feeling that you can find and the people you may meet along the way?