Heading for Higher Ground

Several months after the tsunami of 2004 I read about a man who survived it.  He remembered that his elders told him that if he ever saw the tide go out much farther than he had ever seen, to head to high ground.  He yelled "Run!" and got everyone in his village to safety.

The man was a leader of some of the hunter-gatherer people on the Andoman islands off the coast of Thailand.  They live what most of us would consider a primitive lifestyle.  Yet, this man and his people survived the tsunami while people with cell phones and instant access to weather information perished under the waves.

Since I read the article about the man who survived the tsunami I have often been unimpressed with news about advances in technology.  I read another article before that about how farmers who could recite the most weather proverbs are the most successful farmers.  I am not saying that we should get rid of our cell phones, but sometimes our own memories may be more helpful to our survival than gadgets.

One machine that we would be better off without is the automobile.  We built a dangerous transportation system on the need for everyone to have their own car.  Our need for powerful and impressive-looking automobiles and our juvenile desire to drive them at high speeds has led us into an addiction to oil that has made us warlike.  Humans die so that people in the United States can pretend that interstate highways are NASCAR courses.  We constantly put toxic gases into the air.

TV ads for CSX Railroad claim that they haul a ton of freight almost 500 miles on one gallon of fuel.  Why do we waste so much fuel hauling passengers and freight in cars and trucks?  Because of our ridiculous car culture and snobbery.  We think of ourselves as failures if we do not own a car, and we do not want to have to associate with lowlifes found on buses and trains.  The cost of this car culture is immense.

Telecommuting may someday relieve our need for expensive gasoline, but we need to stop thinking of our automobiles as extensions of ourselves or a form of self expression.  Trains and bicycles make more sense than cars.  Our need for exercise and socialization may help us to survive better than cars.