Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [40]
In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t approach any of my fellow parents last spring because I wasn’t ready to communicate clearly and peacefully. No doubt I’d have transferred my simmering cloud of anxiety about global warming into a blistering lightening-bolt accusation that would have put anyone on the defensive. Even if I tried to mask my scorn and self-righteousness with polite affect, knocking on the window of a Hummer to tell the driver to turn off her engine would certainly have backfired if I believed she was a perfect example of wanton overkill consumerism and deliberate, head-in-the-sand ignorance. What did I know of her life, her family culture, or the conflicted justifications for choices she might have made? The only person I can hope to understand is myself, and the discomfort I felt around the dilemma of how to take effective action was a sure sign that I needed to find a different way to frame this issue.
Since then, I’ve arrived at this analogy: if it is so easy for me to believe that others should turn off their engines, why can’t I turn off my internal “judgment-engine”? Who is to say which is ultimately worse for the environment, the Escalade’s exhaust or my toxic rant about the behavior of another human? What if these people I’m judging simply believe what they’ve been taught and they don’t yet understand the consequences of their actions? It is likely that they feel they are being responsible, caring parents to come and pick up their offspring, and keep the inside warm or cool for their comfort, and they don’t realize the extent to which they are poisoning the air these children breathe as they walk out to meet them. I didn’t know myself until recently that it isn’t necessary to warm up a car’s engine by running it for a long time in winter, and I didn’t realize how much gas is used when we idle our cars, until I did some research and found out, for example, that an idling vehicle emits twenty times more pollution than one traveling at thirty-two miles per hour. One hour of idling burns up to a gallon of fuel and produces approximately twenty pounds of carbon dioxide. Children breathe 50 percent more air per pound of body weight than adults, and are thus much more vulnerable to airborne toxins. More than ten seconds of idling uses up more fuel than restarting the engine. Since 1972 it has been against the law in Massachusetts to idle unnecessarily for more than five minutes. This past year, a new bill entitled “an act to improve school campus air quality” has been passed which prohibits buses and commercial and personal vehicles from idling on school property.
How would I approach other drivers if I assumed they really wanted a safe, clean world for themselves and their children but needed a gentle, compassionate wake-up call or simply some good information? Even more radical than that, how would I approach them if I didn’t need them to change at all? How peaceful would I be if I could accept them and myself exactly the way we are, and still take action? I realized I had energy around this issue and I felt compelled to share what I’d been learning, for my own sake. I simply couldn’t sit back and be passively frustrated and judgmental any longer. For me, the best course of action was to launch an idling-awareness campaign and to learn how to give out the information with an open heart.
Now I am helping to put up “Idle-Free Zone” signs around the town’s public schools to remind parents and bus drivers not to idle while waiting for kids. I’ve made up an idling fact sheet to send home to parents, and I’m hoping to involve the science teachers so that they can incorporate some emissions