Like most of you, I’ve spent my entire adult life attached to a car. I’m now trying to break that habit.
I have spent the last four years writing a book called Saving Ourselves from Big Car. It’s an exposé on how the combined might of the auto, gasoline, tire, insurance, and other car-related industries has pushed our species to the brink of extinction.
I’m now being attacked by Big Car for daring to challenge their grip on transportation. I’m used to this kind of reaction. I experienced it before when Sy Hersh and I exposed the My Lai massacre story (we won the Pulitzer), when I helped Ellsberg spread the Pentagon Papers (I got indicted), and, when I worked with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to make All the President’s Men part of the culture.
The unpleasant facts that Big Car doesn’t want me speaking about are that they have, over the last century, been responsible for more human beings dying than World War II. That the august figures of Alfred Slone and Charles Ketterling (yes, the same names on the renowned health center) and their Ethyl Corporation alone killed more humans than Communism and Nazism combined (over 50 million.) And that we’ve poured enough concrete onto our land to build a bridge to the moon and back.
We have made our cities convenient to cars, not people. We have continued to expand the size of our roads and highways, yet traffic congestion remains unchanged. We kill more wildlife on our roads than all hunters combined. We have transformed most of our big cities into giant parking lots.
And, most importantly, we are changing nature so that wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and other disasters are costing us billions of dollars and millions of lives.
What I’ve tried to show in my book is that there are alternatives to being addicted to using personal automobiles. These alternatives are being tried in a myriad of communities throughout the world. They are starting to work, and we must find ways to collaborate before it’s too late.
My great, great, great-grandfather’s form of mobility was a donkey. His father’s was a horse, my grandfather traveled on public transport, my father drove a big, shiny car, I also had a giant internal combustion engine to take me places, my son drives a luxury car, his daughter will also drive a big fancy car, as will his granddaughter, but, unless we all realize what’s happening soon, his great-granddaughter will be back to the donkey.
If Big Car were a cancer trying to destroy us, we’d fight back. The complex and coordinated corporations that now determine how we use our mobility only care about profits. In the name of profit, they are willing to sacrifice our very species to maintain their quarterly earnings.
We must now find each other and break free of Big Car’s stranglehold upon us. If not, it’s only a matter of time until Big Car destroys us all.
4•1•1 David Obst’s book “Saving Ourselves from Big Car” was released by publisher Columbia Business School today. An author talk and book-signing will take place at Chaucer’s Books (3321 State St.) on Thursday, September 18, at 6 p.m.
