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Ecology, Freedom and Automobility By Justin Good Cummings & Good Design vood@cummings-good.com

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded

as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

-Henry David Thoreau1

If like me, you’ve lived in an environment where you need an

automobile to get around efficiently, then you’ve

undoubtedly felt a genuine sense of freedom attendant upon

operating and owning an automobile. If you grew up in a

suburban environment in an industrialized nation, you might

very well remember the first time you drove an automobile as

an experience of freedom so deep that it had an effect on

your very identity, as if you became a new person by being

able to drive. As if you were becoming yourself, actualizing

your potential, by becoming auto-mobile, by becoming free.

Call this the experience of automobility as freedom, or

simply, the experience of automobility.2

What is so interesting about this experience is that

there’s truth in it, but there is also falsity. Of course,

in one sense ‘experiences’ cannot be said to be true or

false: you either experience a sense of freedom or you do

not. But when someone feels and believes that driving a car

This essay was presented at the International Society for Universal Dialogue Sixth World Congress, “Humanity at the Turning Point: Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom,” Helsinki, Finland July 2005. It will be appearing in the journal Dialogue and Universalism, XV, Winter 2005. 1 Thoreau 1993: 76. 2 I use the term automobility, as opposed to speaking of driving a car, because I want to refer to the experience of cars as a system, involving not merely the individual vehicles but the surrounding infrastructure of roads, highways and autocentric social organization (i.e. suburban living) which constitutes automobiles as a form of mass transit.

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is an essentially liberating experience, her experience of

automobility is tied up with and shaped by her ideas of what

it means to be free. Now our concepts of freedom can be

wrong. That is, a concept (an understanding) of freedom can

be false if it is internally incoherent (contradictory) or

if the use of the concept presupposes certain ideas about

nature that turn out to be false. Given the central role

that automobiles play in our global energy economy and the

ecological crises which that system has engendered, one

might question the conception of freedom that finds itself

expressed in the experience of automobility. That is, one

might conclude that (a) that conception of freedom is

ecologically-irrational, if it serves to legitimate legally

and reinforce psychologically a political economic system

which cannot be sustained, and (b) that therefore

automobility is not real freedom at all.

Despite its multifarious meanings (actually, because of

them), the concept of freedom is too important a part of our

ethics at the social and political level to avoid. Freedom

is a concept rich in meanings that ramify through the

structure of our society and the contested terrain of our

history. Disagreements in its meaning crystallize

contrasting visions of justice and how American and global

society ought to be structured. New conceptions of freedom

focus and concentrate social energies for radical change or

consolidate resistance to perceived threats to personal

property. No social movement or cause in the United States

can achieve popular support if it does not offer a

compelling, convincing view of freedom that speaks to the

hearts of individuals as citizens, as human beings, and as

organisms inhabiting ecosystems. Given the profound impact

of automobiles on our ecological situation,3 experience of

freedom of automobility should be at the center of public

3 They are, for example, the single largest factor contributing to our ecological footprints as individuals. Collectively, the global automobile fleet of 600 million vehicles contributes the single largest amount of carbon emissions.

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debate on the true meaning of freedom. Here is where my

interest lies. What would that debate look like? What are

the countervailing intuitions and beliefs about freedom that

clash in the interpretation of automobility? What measures

of freedom does the experience of automobility illustrate?

How does ecology undercut the viability of those measures?

How might we understand freedom in light of ecology? Towards

a clarification of these questions, I shall consider five

senses of freedom (or more specifically, ambiguities of

agency) in automobility pertaining generally to the issues

of: 1. mobility, 2. technology, 3. privacy, 4. rights, 5.

nature. Consider these loci of contention in a rational

debate on the ecological ethics of automobility that we need

to have.

1. Mobility

The experience of driving is an experience of liberation

most obviously because of the connection between being free

and being mobile and self-directed. These connections are

rooted deeply in our biology and our concept of freedom as

autonomy, or self-rule. At the most primal level,

automobility answers to the same biological impulse that

drives a crawling infant across the floor. Any technology

which satisfies a biologically-predisposed interest of ours

is going to be felt as liberating. The interest is related

to the kinetic pleasure we feel in speeding down the

highway, and the feeling of power and control that operating

a car can give. More importantly, the mobility which cars

enhance illustrates our concept of freedom as autonomy due

to the ways in which cars give us new choices and options

for movement. In a defense of automobility as an intrinsic

ethical good, Loren Lomasky argues that automobility

essentially complements human autonomy:

In the latter part of the twentieth century, being a self-mover entails, to a significant extent, being a motorist. Because we have cars we can, more than any other people in history, choose where we will live and

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where we will work, and separate these choices from each other. We can more easily avail ourselves of near and distant pleasures, at a scheduled tailored to individual preferences. In our choice of friends and associates, we are less constrained by accidents of geographical proximity. In our comings and goings, we depend less on the concurrence of others.4

Lomasky’s main point in calling attention to automobility as

a complement to autonomy is in fact to defend the ethical

virtues of automobility against criticisms based on an

assessment of the external or social costs of the system.

Actually, he goes a bit further, and his view expresses a

deep intuition shared by many. He says that when we focus on

the social costs of a global economic system like

automobility, we ignore whatever ‘intrinsic goodness’

automobility may have.

…the balance sheet of instrumental values and disvalues ignores the intrinsic goodness of automobility in promoting autonomy and complements – such as free association and privacy. Even if purely instrumental calculations did not unambiguously display a positive balance in favor of automobility, its autonomy-enhancing aspects are so pronounced both qualitatively and quantitatively that any plausibly adequate normative evaluation of the status of automobility usage must give them primary

attention.5

Of course, if freedom is a desired end, then promoting its

conditions may require a legitimate sacrifice, a discipline,

a gaining control over something, for example, the body or

the mind. The more abstract we make freedom as an ideal, the

easier it can be to see the logic of this view. Identifying

freedom as the autonomy of choice is intuitively plausible

because it sounds correct to say that our freedom of choice

is more valuable than any particular choice we might make.

If our overriding ethical goal is more autonomy for more

persons, then we should be prepared to pay the costs for

that autonomy. But when does the cost undermine the agency

4 Lomasky 1997: 15. 5 Lomasky 1997: 25.

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we hope to purchase with it. Engineering efficiency experts

Amory and L. Hunter Lovins offer a list of such costs for

the United States car fleet alone, amounting to almost a

trillion dollars a year, including $200 million per day to

maintain roads and $90 billion per year in road accidents,

while killing 40,000 human beings and millions of non-human

animals per year.6 If we add in the part played by the

carbon emissions of the world’s car fleet to global warming,

the hidden external costs of automobility are far from

clear, and this makes it difficult to evaluate the

desirability of the system as fostering autonomy. When

freedom is construed abstractly as choice, the reality of

freedom presupposes that we have genuine alternatives to

choose from and that we are aware of what we are choosing.

That is, free choice requires rational judgment, otherwise

our ‘choosing’ to do something cannot be distinguished from

unconscious, docile acquiescence to external forces. In a

quasi-market society like ours, where we rely on prices to

tell us how much something costs - which is to say, to tell

us what other options we are foregoing by using limited

resources in the way required to create that thing – we can

only act rationally, hence freely, if price reflects actual

cost. This is patently not the case with automobility, which

must be considerably more costly than the market indicates.

Even though people might very well be ‘voting with their

tires’, they can still be doing so because of a mistaken

sense of self-interest.

From an ecological perspective, the entire system of

automobility does not merely conceal extraordinary hidden

costs, it is essentially unsustainable as it currently

stands due to the energy required to manufacture and

maintain the vast empire of steel and petroleum cars and

concrete highways. Energy is the basic currency of

ecosystems, driving matter cycles and imposing limits on

their behavior. Despite what economists tell us, energy is

6 Hawken, Lovins, Lovins 1999.

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never really produced or consumed, but only transformed, and

every transformation involves a loss of energy, in the sense

of a loss of quality. Unlike matter, energy does not recycle

but only flows, loosing quality or structure every time it

changes form and producing greater entropy or disorder in

the process. In a closed matter system like the earth, this

means that we are continuously and irreversibly degrading

the quality of energy available. It is the energy available

in an ecosystem that determines the level of order (material

abundance) available to its inhabitants and so to its

carrying capacity, or the maximum population load of any

given species that can be supported by its environment on an

ongoing basis. As a technological extension of our natural

abilities to move about, automobility obviously requires us

to consume more energy (bioproductivity), particularly in

the form of petroleum, than we would consume if we used a

less energy intensive form of transportation. Moreover,

given the need for the system of automobility to expand – as

a basic structure of global capitalism, it requires us to

increase our drawdown of a nonrenewable fossil fuel just as

global supply is projected to peak. For an economy that

needs to grow in order to live, the imminent peak of world

oil production means the end of automobility as we have

known in for the past fifty years.7

Does this mean that autonomy itself is unsustainable?

Or does it mean that we have to deepen our understanding of

freedom to make it compatible with ecological reality? What

the emphasis on freedom as physical mobility conceals is the

freedom we might experience if we instead used our limited

energy resources in more efficient ways. More efficient

systems of mass transit would allow us to use the precious

energy we expend commuting in and maintaining a car for

activities which increased our spiritual and intellectual

mobility. If, instead of living in an architectural space

7 The world’s fleet of over half a billion cars is projected to triple by 2050!

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dominated by and shaped around the automobile, we lived in

an environs with human scale - as in the case of a distance

between home and work which is walkable – we could recover

the sense of freedom that comes with experiencing the sense

of place or spiritual locatedness in the world which is

probably necessary for experiencing life as meaningful. We

could experience the freedom of living in an environment

which is worth walking around, as opposed to driving

through. The ecological inversion of freedom as mobility is

freedom as the sense of locatedness, of a sense of direction

that comes from living in a space shaped to, and by, the

proportions of the human body. On this ecological view of

mobility, liberation from the constraints of bodily mobility

afforded by automobiles is not freedom, it is the

domestication of the human by the automotive. The social

ecologist Murray Bookchin makes the point specifically

regarding community:

The freedom of all organisms is a function of direction – of meaningful ‘niches’ in nature and meaningful communities in society… In its own way, our loss of community has been a form of domestication – a condition that lacks meaning and direction – as surely as is the wild animal’s loss of its niche.8

2. Technology

The sense of power underlying the experience of automobility

is quite objective and can be practically quantified in

terms of the energy required for the car to do its work.

According to one energy equivalence analysis, when speeding

down the highway, a one hundred horsepower car does the work

of two thousand people. Like all technologies, an automobile

serves to extend and enhance some basic human capacity. If

clothing extends our skin, while radio extends the voice, an

automobile extends the whole body: wheels extend feet in

8 Bookchin 2003: 279.

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motion, and the internal combustion engine, like your

furnace at home, extends the stomach by enhancing the

process whereby we as human beings gather energy necessary

for movement from the sun. (from burning petroleum rather

than eating vegetable or animal protein.) We can travel more

often, farther, to more destinations, and with a higher

degree arbitrariness, than any other mode of transportation.

Automobility feels freeing because it allows us to overcome

natural limits our bodies have in moving about and hauling

stuff from one place to another. Cars allow us generally to

exert our will to a greater degree upon the world. Put

differently, cars can help us to get more work done. So the

idea goes, automobility is liberating because it is

empowering technology, and because becoming more free is a

specifically technical problem.

But our faith in the redemptive potential of technology

is called into question by other things we know about

freedom. That is, there are undeniable limits to how

technology can make us freer, despite what we are invited to

fantasize about technology in our high-tech economy. In

spite of our confidence in technology to empower us, we know

that new technologies can often alter us, both mentally and

socially, in ways that are as unpredictable as they are

unconscious. From an ecological perspective, there is

nothing mysterious about this, since technological

innovations upset ratios have holistic effects on that

relation. As a consequence of the manifold readjustments

that elements of the system make to reestablish equilibrium,

the technological innovation can end up subverting freedom

by subverting the ends that the innovation was intended to

serve. Automobiles were originally intended as horseless

carriages, and from that perspective, they served as simply

a faster way from point a to point b, and this is the basic

idea behind automobility as a complement to autonomy. But

the significance of the automobile for how we live and for

our whole sense of space, and for our expression of freedom

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is not explained or clarified by saying that. The advent of

the automobile has altered not simply the time it takes to

get to point b, but where point a and point b are in the

first place, our reasons for going there, what we see along

the way and, ultimately, the structure of the society within

which a and b become destinations.

Because all technologies are extensions of the human

body and mind, such forms serve to give us a degree of

control over our condition only by altering our nature in

the process. Focusing on the car as an extension of the

human body, one is led to think about the ways that your

extended ‘body’ is now implicated in a larger system over

which you have no control, and whose interests you are now

beholden to. The very flexibility that automobility makes

possible can thus be seen as a constraint on one’s movement.

For example, sociologist John Urry argues that automobility

forces us to live in ‘spatially-stretched and time-

compressed ways.’ Temporally, the very flexibility in

scheduling that automobility with its 24 hour availability

makes possible can easily necessitate that one make oneself

more available, compelling one to expect, and be expected,

to travel more

often and more quickly. And over wider distances:

The ‘structure of autospace’ forces people to orchestrate in complex and heterogeneous ways their mobilities and socialities across very significant distances. The urban environment has unbundled territorialities of home, work, business, and leisure that historically were closely integrated and fragmented social practices in shared public spaces. Automobility divides workplaces from homes, producing lengthy commutes into and across the city.’9

From the perspective of town and urban planning,

automobility is an economic system with its own internal

‘interests’ in perpetuating and enhancing its functionality.

9 Urry 2000: 5.

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The architect and city planner Peter Calthorpe, for example,

talks about conflicts in the kinds of landscapes that cars

and pedestrians ‘want.’

The car wants lots of pavement and the low-density development that preserves plenty of space for more and more asphalt. The car also wants to travel more; between 1969 and 1990 the national population grew by 21 percent while the total vehicle miles traveled in cars increased 82 percent… Pedestrians want close destinations: shops, schools, services, or recreation. They need direct links to these destinations free of cul-de-sacs, parking lots, or massive intersections. They want safe, interesting, and comfortable streets to walk on and human scale in the buildings which line

it.10

Consequently, cars are not simply a means of transit, or a

‘horseless carriage,’ they are an organizing principle of

suburban society which establishes the basic form of social

life, the scale of streets and the relationships between

buildings. In China, the competition between the needs of

cars and of human beings is more basic and more urgent than

either the aesthetics or civic life of our neighborhoods.

As the new century begins, the competition between cars and crops for land is intensifying. The addition of 12 million cars each year consumes, in new roads, highways, and parking lots, rughly 1 million hectares of land – enough to feed 9 million people if it were all cropland. Since the world’s people are concentrated in the agriculturally productive regions, a disproportionate share of the land paved for cars is

cropland.11

How do these holistic consequences of automobile technology

alter our sense of its liberating possibilities? The

liberating potential of technology is limited in an

important sense. To see technology as a means of liberation

is to see freedom as a technical problem about means, as

opposed to ends. But the problem of freedom is in large

measure about pursuing the right ends; to live towards goals

which are naturally-proper to an individual, in the sense of

allowing her to actualize her mental and physical and

10 Calthorpe 1993: 27

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spiritual faculties. After decades of technological advances

in building more fuel efficient internal combustion engines

which followed the oil shocks of the 1970s, US automobiles

consume more petroleum now because they have more horsepower

and because people are driving more. When end of cheap oil

comes, the increasing dysfunctionality of the system of

automobility will lead to what media ecologist Marshall

McLuhan called the reversal of the overheated medium: a law

of technological media which states that media reverse the

enhancing function they originally had on the human

mind/body when they are pushed to their limit. When do we

know that the limit has been reached? For one, the traffic

jam and the oil embargo have begun to reverse the speed and

flexibility that the horseless carriage originally offered

against its horsed competitor. For another, while the carbon

emissions from automobiles at first offered a fabulous

alternative to the mountains of horse manure and rotting

horse carcasses that were the ecological impact of the horse

and buggy system, its contribution to global climate change

infinitely overshadows the trivial problems we once had with

horseshit.

3. Privacy

Traveling in an automobile, especially if it is your own,

does not merely extend mobility, it extends one’s private

space, and this too must be an element in the experience of

automobility. Private space is the first and most important

objectification of human freedom. According to classical

liberal political philosophy, political freedom begins with

the ownership, or autonomy of our body and its work. When

through our work, we gain property to create a house, we

extend our autonomy, actualizing our original self-rule.

When we are on the bus, we are in a public space and our

behavior must conform to socially-prescribed rules. In

contrast, the interiors of cars can be intensely personal

11 Brown 2003: 49.

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contexts, for example, they can be strewn and cluttered,

like a bedroom, with the most personal articles, arranged or

not, according to one’s whims; they can smell and sound and

feel just like home. Lomasky sees this privacy as integral

to the autonomy that automobility makes possible.

More salient to privacy than the distancing of oneself from others is a regaining of control over one’s immediate environment. I may be surrounded by other people, but if I can determine to a significant degree what they shall be allowed to perceive of me and know about me and impose on me, then to that extent I have retained a

private self.12

As an extension of our domestic sphere, a car enhances our

freedom by extending the range of our domestic autarchy,

including to an extent, our domestic schedule. Our ability

to come and go as we please allows us to privatize our

movements so that personal times are desynchronized.

The objective clock-time of the modernist railway timetable is replaced by personalized, subjective temporalities, as people live their lives in and through their car(s), if they have one.13

In turn, the experience of this privacy can make public

transportation seem ‘impersonal’ and inflexible. The

sophisticated climate and mood controls of modern cars

enhance this feeling of being protected from the ‘outside’

world, in particular, unsolicited interactions with other

humans, by steel and glass and speed.

The privacy that automobility makes possible – spatial

and temporal isolation – is closely related to the privacy

that autocentric suburbia makes possible more generally.

Never before in human history have so many individuals had

access to so much spatial and temporal distance from other

people and from the ecosystems they inhabit, and never

before have so many people lived in willfull, intentional

ignorance of the impacts that their way of life, especially

12 Lomasky 1997: 22 13 Urry 2000: 6

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their use of energy has on their larger ecological context.

In fact, isolation from the dirtiness and overcrowding of

industrial cityscapes is just what suburbia originally

promised and what undoubtedly keeps people ‘voting with

their tires’ by deciding to live there. The industrial

productive might was brought to bear on retrofitting Thomas

Jefferson’s agrarian ideal of autarchy over one’s own

private piece of the earth into the idea of an industrially-

produced artifact of the suburban homestead that one could

reasonably expect to purchase, of course on credit, and

given certain ‘industrial freedoms’ such as a living wage

and a secure job.

However, the privacy that autonomy seems to presuppose

is not necessarily secured by industrially-produced privacy

structures like cars. McLuhan makes the point that in

America people live their private lives during the day while

they are working and go home to ‘be with’ other people by

watching television. In this sense, we do not watch

television, it watches you, the way cars might be said to

drive you. Don’t so many people watch television to avoid

the loneliness of their ‘private’ lives? Privacy, and the

autarky it objectifies means more than physical

independence, it means having interests which are one’s own.

The ‘lonely crowd’ lacks autonomy because its privacy is

purchased at the expense of an autonomy of responsiveness to

the forces and interests which maintain the industrial

structures that underlie that very privacy.

The reversal of the privacy that automobility and

suburban, autocentric social planning originally promised is

the mechanized depersonalization of our everyday

interactions with other persons, and a dehumanized

architecture structured around the needs of cars rather than

pedestrians. Despite the palpable sense of agency that one

can feel at the wheel, the experience is oddly passive, in

many ways like watching television. Television is of course

an interactive medium, requiring the active synthesizing of

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different modalities of information quickly and remaining

continuously engaged with the development of whatever

process is being televised, for example, a game show. In

this sense, driving a car exercises one’s cognitive and

emotive faculties. But the passivity of television lies in

not needing to react to what you see by interacting with it.

This is not to give oneself autonomy by separating oneself

from external forces but to make oneself a docile and pliant

receiver of messages one has not chosen to heed.

As personal times are desynchronized from each other, so spatial movements are synchronized to the rhythm of the road. The loose interactions and mobilities of pedestrians give way to the tightly controlled mobility of machines… To inhabit the roads of the west is to enter a world of anonymised machines, ghostly presences moving too fast to know directly or especially to see through the eye.14

Privacy turns into alienation when the physical isolation it

purports to require ends up corroding another equally

important sense of autonomy crucial to human flourishing and

happiness: the republican autonomy of a person as a citizen

of a community. Without the direct participatory involvement

of individuals in the administration of their communities,

those administrative tasks are forfeited to a formal

representative council which saves the resident the labor of

exercising, and therefore developing, the ethical and

practical rationality needed to understand and manage the

affairs of a community. In turn, without the direct

involvement of citizens in its functions, the representative

council is freed to pursue its own interests without the

interference of the interests of the general populace.

Automobility contributes to this corroding of republican

autonomy by requiring the expansion of private over public

space. Minimally, the autonomy exercised and fostered by

participatory democracy requires public spaces in which to

meet and socialize and debate. Privacy becomes alienation

14 Urry 2004: 6

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when it displaces the physical structures needed to

actualize our inherently social and political nature.

Today the public world is shrunken and fractured. Parks, schools, libraries, post offices, town halls, and civic centers are dispersed, underutilized, and underfunded. Yet these civic elements determine the quality of our shared world and express the value we assign to community. The traditional Commons, which once centered our communities with convivial gathering and meeting places, is increasingly displaced by an exaggerated private domain: shopping malls, private clubs, and gated communities. Our basic public space, the street, is given over to the car and its accommodation, while our private world becomes more and more isolated behind garage doors and walled compounds.15

This kind of sociological critique of automobility runs

square up against the epistemological assumptions of

mainstream free-market advocates. According to Sam Kazman at

the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy

organization in Washington D.C., the very fact that people

consistently choose suburbia over urban or rural life

entails logically that those people are necessarily acting

freely and towards greater objective autonomy. Hence, to

attack the suburban ideal of privacy is to attack someone’s

personal lifestyle preferences which have nothing to do with

ethics.

The National Association of Home Builders polled people on this question: If you were given the choice between an urban townhouse, close to public transportation, close to shopping and work versus a single-family, detached home in an outlying suburb, which would you choose? Eighty-three percent went for the single family-home; seventeen percent for the urban townhouse. Many people do not like the urban style of living, or at least they do not want it for certain phases of their life such as when they are going to raise children. They like the suburbs. Statist intellectuals, on the other hand, despise few things more than the suburbs.16

But separation undercuts the flow of information, which

precludes rational choice, which consequently undermines

15 Calthorpe 1993: 23. 16 Kazman 2001: 3.

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freedom. Unless they are speaking in a merely rhetorical

manner, even advocates of free-markets acknowledge that

prices only allocate scare resources in the most beneficial

and least coercive way, if they reflect the actual costs of

the production, extraction, disposal, etc. When we talk

about drawing down our solar energy bank account, or

undermining the biosphere’s capacity to provide the natural

nutrient recycling services necessary for all life, it is

obvious that prices are not reflecting costs. In the case of

fossil fuel energy, it means that prices are artificially

low, with the effect that the resource will not be

distributed in the way that is most beneficial to the larger

community. It will be wasted, just like in the former Soviet

Union where artificially low prices led to horrible waste

and inefficiency in industrial production. The irony of the

charge that ecological criticisms of automobility are

statist in an economic sense is that, when we consider its

external costs of energy production and waste disposal,

industrial capitalist automobility is guilty of the same

gross inefficiencies and wastefulness of the old soviet

economies.

The contemporary automobile, after a century of engineering, is embarrassingly inefficient: Of the energy in the fuel it consumes, at least 80 percent is lost, mainly in the engine’s heat and exhaust, so that at most only 20 percent is actually used to turn the wheels. Of the resulting force, 95 percent moves the car, while only 5 percent moves the driver, in proportion to their respective weights. Five percent of 20 percent is one percent – not a gratifying result from American cars that burn their own weight in gasoline every year.17

When one considers the virtual monopoly that automobile

transportation has in suburban America where one generally

has no choice but to have a car, then the assumption that

car drivers are acting freely in choosing automobility as a

form of transit cannot be maintained. When one considers

17 Hawken, Lovins, Lovins 1999.

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the Bush Administration’s use of military maintain cheap oil

prices for American drivers, there is an ironic sense in

which environmentalists are the party of free markets, while

the Republican establishment has forsaken free markets in

favor of a military-command economy: that is, when it comes

to the market for the world’s most heavily traded economy,

petroleum.

In any case, the degrees of physical private space that

affluent citizens of industrialized have grown accustomed to

desire as a normal, justifiable expectation, is neither

sustainable nor just. It is not ecologically-rational to

expect as much private space because the energy and material

flows required to maintain it is greater that the

sustainable yield of the earth’s natural bioproductivity.18

Whether we like it or not, most of us in the industrialized

North are going to have to expect less personal space in the

future. This might just allow us to retrieve as sense of

privacy which can be easily overshadowed by our longings for

physical isolation; the privacy which one finds by finding

one’s one unique niche in society, in a hidden space created

by a web of relations; where the privacy is a result of

one’s unique function within a community. Individuals in

some aboriginal societies have secret names for their

private selves that only they know, in order to name that

part of them that no one can touch, even if they are living

together in a hut.19 Paradoxically, it just might be the

case that to truly feel a non-alienating sense of privacy

requires living within a community dense enough with social

roles to create a unique set of spiritual coordinates on

which to locate one’s privacy.

4. Rights

18 By one estimate, every day the worldwide economy burns an amount of energy the planet required 10,000 days (or about 27 years) to create. 19 Robert Wolff mentions this about the Sng’oi aborigines of Malaysia. (Wolff 2001).

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It is ethically obvious to some that automobility is a

right, and there are plausible reasons for thinking so. But

everything turns on how you construe rights. If freedom has

often been identified with self-rule, the specific cultural

expectations and assumptions about what sort of private

sphere of agency (i.e. what sort of home) is minimally

required, and maximally permitted, in order to count as

having secured the freedom of the individual, has altered

radically. This is due in part to changes in how

individuality has been conceptually measured. At the

beginning of the American republic, Thomas Jefferson thought

that true freedom would be embodied in the yeoman farmer,

who would own his own land and farm, making him economically

self-sufficient, with lots of space to range over. By the

end of the 19th century, the inequities of the Gilded Age

had drastically reduced that measure to all except the upper

classes and millions of workers began to hope for the more

modest provisions of ‘industrial freedom,’ forming the

ethical basis of the modern welfare state. At the beginning

of the 20th century, mass production and national markets for

commodities offered an enticing surrogate – consumer

freedom. Making the automobile, and then the suburban life

based on the automobile available, the liberal capitalist

dream of unparalleled private dominion for the masses could

be kept alive. The consumerist version of the liberal-

political ideal of a pursuit of property, as a pursuit of

greater consumer buying freedom, finds its deepest

expression in the purchase of a car. As the major object of

individual consumption after housing, cars satisfy not

merely our predispositions for greater mobility and privacy,

they satisfy our conventional expectations for material

affluence as an index of social status and perceived self-

worth. Status is hierarchical according to its very logic,

since it expresses an underlying interest in rank-ordering

of individuals with deep social and biological roots.

People love cars in large part because of, not in spite of,

19

their very bulkiness and expensiveness. If you can afford to

have one, you must categorically have the social-economic

background or the craftiness or both, to control the

requisite resources to procure one, which makes cars

reliable indicators of social standing and individual

economic productiveness.

This whole line of thought rests upon a view of rights,

however, that rests upon an ecologically-irrational view of

the normative context within which rights make sense. It is

instructive to consider that the thinkers and actors who

established the political and economic foundations of the

American Republic could not have anticipated, let alone

imagined, the ecological crisis that we now face. Beginning

with the premise of the moral value of individual freedom,

they were concerned with the political problem of

coordinating the economic activity of individuals, in order

to protect them from each other, and to protect them in ways

that would lead to increasing productivity and so material

well-being for all. It was inconceivable to them that the

seemingly infinite natural resources of the North American

continent could one day become more scarce than human labor,

thus giving us the problem of unemployment with all of its

social costs, or that the world would one day be too small

to support the possibility of a ‘better’ life for all human

beings. The American Declaration of Independence does not

refer to ecological limits or conditions to rights; my right

to life and the fruits of my labor (i.e. property) is only

limited by my duties to acknowledge your right to life and

property. And my right to appropriate Nature is only limited

by the extent of my labor. As John Locke put it,

God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and

20

labor was to be his title to it…)20

The ecologically irrationality of our own expectations

about personal material affluence, like the ecologically

irrationality of the millions of Chinese who dream of

automobility, reflects this flawed ethics which took no

notice of ecological conditions. Where classical liberal

political economy theorizes the origins of political rule in

a state of nature where individuals act freely to acquire

property and to improve their lot, ecology sees individuals

as organisms, among other organisms located within

ecosystems. Within this framework, the continuities are more

evident than the boundaries of individuality. This is

because ecosystems involve the continuous flow of energy and

materials (nutrients), through and among the living

organisms and the abiotic, or non-living materials that

together make up the biosphere: the continuous, self-

maintaining field of living activity that is as alive as any

cat or cell or a coral reef. Matter is not simply something

we work with our hands or machines in order to pursue

happiness, but something that is continually cycling through

us in the forms of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus,

oxygen and hydrogen. Consequently, from an ecological

perspective, human freedom needs to be understood as

conditioned by the requirement to perpetuate and enhance

these life-sustaining cycles. When the burning of petroleum

in millions of internal combustion engines overburdens the

carbon recycling services (provided free of charge) by the

earth’s natural carbon sinks, giving rise to our nightmarish

global warming scenario, our notions about how much

affluence to expect from our economies runs into ecological

facts which our underlying political philosophy never

considered. It is going to require a lot of ethical

imagination, on top of a lot of social and economic stress,

to rethink, and to renegotiate at a global-societal level, a

20 Locke 1980.

21

view of individual freedom which takes account of these

ecological facts.

At least since the ‘limits to growth’ debates in the

early 1970s, green activists, new urbanist architects,

radical social ecologists, green political theorists and

disgruntled drivers among others, have imagined an

ecological conception of freedom. The very idea that

ethical significance applies solely to human beings in

virtue of their unique spiritual-rational individuality (for

example, often they alone are said to have souls) is an

ecological fiction because individuality itself is an

ecological fiction. ‘Individuals’ always exist within

niches, and are shaped and supported by complex webs of

interdependency with countless other beings and nutrient and

energy cycles. This does not mean that therefore rights are

illusory or that there is no basis in ‘reality’ for

ascribing rights to persons. It is reason enough to observe

that human beings are fragile, sentient beings whose

interests, including having access to what they minimally

need to exist, are easily subverted by hostile forces, and

that as Abraham Lincoln put it, it cannot be ethical for one

to be enslaved to the interests of another.

From an ecological perspective, this notion of rights

makes sense, but does not go far enough. If having interests

is what plausibly gives a being ethical significance (by

giving us a reason for taking into account that being’s

welfare relative to our actions), then ethical significance

pertains to every thing in nature which can be said to have

interests. Logically, if our relations of interdependency

are as real as the outlines of our physical body, then

ethics must be extended to consider the interests of the

other beings we are interdependent on.21 Since healthy

ecosystems maximize the carrying capacity of a bioregion

21 To say that the interests of, say a spotted-oil, must be taken into consideration when considering the ethics of an action or policy affecting those interests, does not mean that every interest must be uniformly weighed, only that it should not be ignored.

22

through maximizing the bioproductivity of the available

energy and nutrient flows (through synergistic and symbiotic

relationships among organisms), it is in the ethical

interest of all organisms, for us human beings who have such

knowledge about and influence over the environment, to

protect and enhance healthy ecosystems. Green political

theorist Robyn Eckersley has articulated this ecological

challenge to our traditional liberal understanding of rights

as an ambit claim for ecological democracy:

all those potentially affected by a risk should have some meaningful opportunity to participate or otherwise be represented in the making of policies or decisions that generate the risk.22

The claim has radical implications despite its ethical

commonsense basis in the notion that persons should not be

subjected to avoidable risks without their consent. For one,

an ecological view of democracy would need to enlarge its

picture of what constitutes citizenship.

The ambit claim argues that in relation to the making of any decision entailing potential risk, the relevant community moral community must be understood as the affected community or community at risk, tied together not by common passports, nationality, bloodline, ethnicity, or religion but by the potential to be harmed by the particular proposal, and not necessarily in the same way or to the same degree.23

For another, a nation-state that was based on such an

acknowledgement would need to solve the problem of

ecosystems involving unrepresented interests. A post-liberal

green state would not simply need to represent the interests

of its vocal citizens, it would need to serve as ecological

trustee for the ecosystems which cannot say what they need

to thrive. Such a political culture would require a social-

economic system whose operation did not depend upon the

systematic cultivation of our most selfish, material-

acquisitive impulses, in order for us to broaden our ethical

imaginations enough to understand what those silent

22 Eckersley 2004: 111.

23

interests were. Such a change may not seem possible, but it

is very likely necessary.

5. Nature

Correlative to idea of freedom as technological mastery is

the idea of freedom as essentially opposed to nature, as

something to master and reconfigure in order to satisfy

human desires. Perhaps better than any other industrial

artifact, automobiles symbolize the gigantism of Iron Age

economic power and design. Constituting the largest industry

in the world, fueled by the most heavily traded commodity

(petroleum), and made of thousands of energy-intensive parts

shaped by a hundred years of intense design innovation,

automobiles embody the basic premise of economic modernity

that the advance of human civilization, as an advance of

human agency, means overcoming the necessities that nature

‘imposes’ on how we live. This is accomplished by learning

to use nature’s productivity, through science and

engineering, to further human purposes, essentially making

the physical conditions of human life more comfortable, less

risky and more affluent.

Perhaps the biggest conceptual roadblock to thinking

about freedom from an ecological perspective is the

intuitive idea that freedom is just fundamentally opposed to

nature. For all of their differences, both Marxists and

capitalists, both social democrats and conservative

republicans, have generally assumed that human freedom

requires the domination of nature, and that human freedom

will only be complete when nature is fully mastered.24 On

this point, there is virtual unanimity among such prophets

of modernity as Rene Descartes, John Locke, Karl Marx and

Sigmund Freud, that the advance of human agency requires the

23 Eckersley 2004: 113. 24 Bookchin argues that the only difference between the capitalist and the Marxist-socialist view of nature is that Marxists avoid to dominate nature while avoiding the domination of the worker class by the capitalist class.

24

coercive domination of nature, both external and internal,

by the technically-empowered human will, and that the costs

of such domination are compensated for by the manifest

rewards of civilization. This view of freedom has deep

metaphysical roots in our idea of nature and our idea of

freedom of will as an uncaused cause. The so-called problem

of free will arises from the idea of nature as a system of

causal regularities determined by strict physical laws of

nature which necessitate that anything that happens behaves

lawfully, hence, unfreely. Since everything that happens is

therefore caused, nothing is ‘free’ in the sense of being an

uncaused cause, or an unmoved mover. So is freedom even

possible? That’s of course the philosophical question. There

is an economic correlate to this metaphysical conundrum that

has more obvious ethical ramifications. If we are not

spontaneously supplied by our natural environs with

everything we need to live in flourish as human beings, then

the ‘stinginess’ of nature must be overcome by the

expropriation of the earth’s bioproductivity, essentially

through technical and social advances in the productivity

and division of human labor.

Given these ecological assumptions about human beings –

that they have infinite insatiable desires – and about the

natural environment – that mother nature is stingy and only

provides us with what we need if we force her to - a view of

freedom as antagonistic to nature follows logically. But

both premises are highly questionable. The idea of a being –

a human being – which has infinite desires unshaped by

natural limits – is not a realistic picture of human nature.

It is the ecologically-nonsensical fiction of a ‘free

rational agent’ which acts according to a disembodied,

denatured assessment of its needs. The fact that so many

individuals in the consumer classes of industrial society

find themselves desiring ever more levels of material

affluence is not evidence supporting the message of the

prophets, but simply the self-fulfilling prophecy of a

25

society based on the premise of infinite denatured wanting.

We have built an economy which must either grow or die, and

therefore have saddled ourselves with a societal ethics

which requires us to act as if our happiness required an

endlessly increasing consumption of material ‘conveniences.’

Freedom as the mastery of nature turns into domestication by

an industrial machine, the freedom of the rat running her

race, or in the poignant phrase of the political

philosopher, a ‘joyless quest for joy.’ The reversal of the

technologically-driven quest for freedom from scarcity is

the enslavement of the self by new ‘needs.’ Bookchin’s

social ecological perspective again:

Although a hunter-gatherer community may be free from the needs that beleaguer us, it must still answer to very strict material imperatives. Such freedom as it has is the product not of choice but of limited means of life. What makes it ‘free’ are the limitations of its tool-kit, not an expansive knowledge of the material world… Although choice presupposes a sufficiency in the means of life, it does not imply the existence of a mindless abundance of goods that smothers the individual’s capacity to select use-values rationally, to define his or her needs in terms of qualitative, ecological humanistic, indeed philosophical criteria.25

We don’t have to run the race, though. For most of

their natural history, human beings have lived freely in

ecologically sustainable communities. The idea that our

preindustrial and preagricultural ancestors toiled endlessly

for the necessities of life is a myth necessitated by the

operating requirements of industrial culture. According to

the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller,

Our ancestors did not spend all thei rtime worrying about survival problems. They were among the longest-lived species on the planet, which implies that their daily risk of death was miniscule. Like most great apes, they probably spent their time worrying about social and sexual problems. For most of evoltion, our ancestors ranged across wide areas without being tied to a single home base or territory. They owned no more than they could carry, had no money, inherited no

25 Bookchin 2003: 69.

26

wealth, and could not store food today to insure against starvation next month. If individuals consistently appeared healthy, energetic, and well-fed, it was not because they were born rich. It must have been because they were good at foraging and good at making friends who took care of them during rough patches.26

As our anthropological understanding of aborigines continues

to deepen, shedding itself of the Victorian ethical biases

that distorted our perception, it is becoming less clear

that industrial society allows us to work less, or that it

provides us with a richer life, a life with greath wealth.

That we find it patently counterintuitive that stone age

humans might have enjoyed more leisure time than we do only

shows how much our thinking about freedom is based on

political myth, rather than anthropological fact. Of course,

ancient societies have also succumbed to ecological fate and

relative scarcity is a fact of biological evolution. But the

scarcity of food and water that confronts the human race now

is not the result of nature, it is the result of industrial

food production and the cheap and abundant energy that

temporarily increased the natural carrying capacity of the

earth’s biosphere, creating a bubble which had to burst. The

current global crisis in the food and water supply is the

result of technology, not a natural problem in need of a

technical fix.

If nature is not indeed stingy, and does not require us

to endlessly toil to pull from her clenched fists the scarce

resources required to self-maintain in the face of entropy

and natural selection, then freedom is not essentially

opposed to nature. If instead, nature is viewed

ecologically, not as inert ‘resources’ to be expropriated

but as increasingly complicated patterns of integration and

wholeness within biodiversity, then freedom might plausibly

be seen as a moment within the development of nature itself.

From this perspective, to remove oneself from contact with

(or awareness of) ecological constraints on how one lives is

27

to remove oneself from the place which gives one’s life

meaning. Correlatively, to be free is not to master nature,

it is to live in community with nature, where freedom is a

shared project; where nature offers us sustinence and

direction, and where we in turn offer nature our own

uniquely human insights into how nature’s ecological ends of

wholeness and biodiversity can be furthered. Despite the

many senses in which automobility does in fact enhance or

complement our agency, it is clear that, from an ecological

perspective, each of these senses contains a deep ambiguity.

This calls for a change in our concept of freedom. Our

destination may be too far to drive, but just close enough

to walk.

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Warner, NH: Silver Brook Press. Brown, L. (2003) Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. New York:

Norton and Co. Calthorpe, P. (1993) The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American

Dream. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Eckersley, R. (2004) The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press. Kazman, S. (2001) ‘Automobility and Freedom: Kazman Remarks At The Objectivist

Center’, Navigator 4. Hawken, P., Lovins, A., Lovins, L.H. (1999) Natural Capitalism. London: Earthscan. Locke, J. (1980) Second Treatise of Government. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Co. Lomasky, L. (1997) ‘Automobility and Autonomy’, The Independent Review 2: 5-28. Miller, G. (2000) The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human

Nature. New York: Anchor Books.

26 Miller 2000: 182.

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Thoreau, H. D. (1993) Civil Disobedience and Other Essays. New York: Dover Thrift. Urry, J. (2004) ‘The ‘System’ of Automobility’, Theory Culture Society 21: 25 - 39. Wolff, R. (2001) Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing. Rochester, VT:

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