I’ve been doing a lot of driving these past few months, after not driving at all for several months. Driving a pickup truck – without hauling goods – and using it like a passenger car is ridiculous and expensive. I’m not the only one weaned on cheap oil. For the past half century Americans fell in love with their pleasure vehicles as rural countryside was transformed from farmland into a landscape of suburban and urban sprawl crazy-quilted together with roadways and super highways. Along the way we’ve gotten lazy, fat, and now suddenly poorer. Goods and services once deemed essential (listen up landscapers) to our personal lifestyles and the economy are becoming unaffordable non-essentials. When W took office a barrel …
There appears to be a growing fervent desire, even within ‘mainstream circles,’ to rid oneself of conspicuous consumption, and attempt to live a more austere lifestyle. Perhaps you have a friend who decided to forgo Christmas-time gift-giving, or even displaying a Christmas tree…or know someone who rides the bus or a bicycle to and from work (toting their lunch to boot!), lives in a downtown urban core, or nor matter where the locale, is espousing the virtues of voluntary simplicity — a life free from clutter and ‘things.’ Perhaps not since the days of Henry David Thoreau, or the 1970’s back-to-the-land movement, have some people expressed such deeply felt environmental convictions.
Some of these convictions, cynics (conservative-government soothsayers) point out …