Walk Instead
Action: Reduce distance traveled by automobile by half
If there is one #2yrCO2 #2yearCarbonDiet switch that is an elemental pleasure, it’s the switch away from driving to #walkinstead #bikeinstead #transitinstead. As Paul Salopek tells us in his rationale for his 6-year walk across the world –“Scientists who have strapped GPS devices to the world’s last hunter-gatherers—the Hadza of Tanzania, for example—report that the typical male forager walks about seven miles a day. The typical American walks a third of that distance. Hadza’s daily meander is a biological benchmark: It’s what our 200,000-year-old bodies, supremely evolved walking machines, are designed for.” If pleasure or health isn’t reason enough, there’s a very persuasive environmental case to be made.
For many in the US, driving accounts for the largest faction of our carbon footprints– somewhere around 5 t CO2 equivalent of the -average American footprint of 17-19 t. In some regions the carbon fraction attributable to driving is much greater– households in the suburbs of large cities like Chicago generate twice the CO2 of homes in the center of the city, largely due to driving and the costs associated with maintaining a large home.
For many of us, going #carfree or even #carlight isn’t an option. We built our homes and our lives around automobiles, and in most of the US, there is simply no other way to cover the vast distances between the places we need to go. If this is your situation, but you want to take on this challenge, you could consider purchasing offsets to help mitigate the carbon cost of your travel. More importantly, consider advocacy to make your community more flexible for non-automotive ways of getting around, including price controls on driving, investments in bike/walk infrastructure, and by encouraging the construction of higher-density affordable housing, particularly if your existing community is largely suburban.
In the meantime, where you can, #getoutandwalk.
Are you ready to take this challenge? Tag #WalkInstead and #2yrCO2 #2YearCarbonDiet on social media.
