BIRDING, VEHICLES AND SUSTAINABILITY

I love birds and I love reading the emails about all the wonderful birding trips and birding in our amazingly diverse county.  I also love my grandchildren who live in Seattle and I drive over to visit them every week that I am not working out of the state.  My innate love of nature and my need to drive my vehicle around to do the things I deeply enjoy leaves me, and many of us I think, in a deep and constant dilemma: how to live a worthwhile life and also be kind and gentle to this delicate planet. I have been studying and writing journal articles about systemic sustainability for humans on this planet for a few decades (I would be very happy to send journal articles or book chapters to anyone interested: Larry@inlandwhale.com); and by my research, humans are putting about 100,000 times the amount of carbon into the atmosphere than would be normal for our species, as one member of the infinitely complex ecosystems of which we are a part.  Those kinds of numbers are pretty hard to relate to so here is another and I think rather surprising number:  a passenger vehicle emits about 1 pound of carbon per mile of travel (20 pounds of carbon per gallon of gas if you get 20 miles per gallon) mostly as carbon dioxide.  That's a lot of carbon!  So here is the dilemma which I and, I think, all of us as conservationists face daily:  how do we relate to the fact that we are putting a pound of carbon into the atmosphere per mile we drive our automobiles (be that for work, visiting family, shopping or birding)?  I personally don't think that guilt and shame are a very good answer to that question but I do believe that it is essential for us to be aware of our personal part in the global environmental crisis, to somehow include this significant impact to our environments in our awareness and perhaps even in our birding trip logs.  Blaming others, like corporations, is a pretty normal way for humans to deal with difficult issues (both personally and collectively), but that seldom solves problems and often creates more problems.  Some simple things that I do to offset my consumption of fuel include: furnishing my new (very old) home in Roslyn only with used items, never drive to the post office or library (even in horrible weather!), ride my bicycle whenever possible and minimize electricity use (turn off lights and all things that have little red or green lights like chargers and electronics and shut down all heat, refrigerator and water heater when I go away for over a few days). Personal awareness and responsibility seem a better approach than guilt, shame or blame to turning the tide of the huge problems we face on the planet today.  I believe that each of us can and must do our part , whatever that is (it might just be awareness of our contribution) and however small that might seem.  I am grateful for all that Kittitas Audubon does to promote conservation and would love to see what others are doing to offset consumption in the pages of the Hooter.

Larry Hobbs