Sustainable Travel

Personal coaches and employment counselors encourage their clients to write personal mission statements. They claim that this helps clarify values and develop personal goals. But have you ever had anyone encourage you to develop a personal energy policy?

The price of gasoline may be the catalyst that will push many Americans to do so. I expect not many of us have one. Or do we? Here's how Paola and I developed ours...

Tim Wirth, the Toyota Prius, and Ethanol

I started thinking about our energy policy last April after hearing former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth present the distinguished Leadership Lecture in Natural Resources and the Environment at Colorado State University. Wirth is President of the United Nations Foundation, created in 1998 after Ted Turner's billion dollar donation to the UN.
Wirth spoke about the failure of politics in general to bring energy issues to the fore, noting the almost complete lack of debate about energy during the 2004 election. He spoke of the increasing cost of fuel, our continued dependence on foreign oil, and the current increase in the price of fuel. He claims that we are headed toward $100 a barrel for crude oil.

His solution? "I own a Toyota Prius," he said. "If we simply combined existing technology for hybrid electric vehicles with our ability to produce ethanol from agricultural waste," he claimed, "we could cut our dependency on foreign oil very quickly."

After hearing Wirth, I began writing this essay on my personal energy policy. I was going to endorse Wirth's proposal and encourage the use of fuel efficient vehicles combined with ethanol mixes. But I got bogged down in the controversy over the use of corn for ethanol production. It didn't make sense, I felt, to encourage a huge monoculture of corn, which requires heavy fertilizing, hence, a large energy expenditure, to produce fuel.

As I began finalizing this essay our editor, friend, and English professor, Ellen Brinks, penciled in the margin: "what about biodiesel? A much better alternative than hybrid vehicles..." So I called Jeff Probst, CEO of Blue Sun Biodiesel. I put the same question to Jeff as I had about the long-term sustainability of agricultural based ethanol - "where are you going to get it and how does the energy balance work out if you have to grow a monoculture of canola oil that requires fertilizing and spraying for pests?" Jeff's answer was that while more studies are needed, certainly we can achieve the 20% mix using biodiesel fuel and that this will be a lot better than using 100% petroleum based products.

Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair and Yvon Chouinard, President of Patagonia

Last fall, Fort Collins hosted the 6th annual Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair. Yvon Chouinard, the founder and president of Patagonia outdoor wear, was a keynote speaker. Paola and I went to hear him speak, and we were quite impressed. He lamented our lack of sustainability in business and in personal behavior. "You can own a Prius," he said (and he does), "and you can ride a bicycle," he suggested (he does that too), but in the end we've got to make broader, more all encompassing choices about lifestyle.

Americans Made 496 Car Shopping Trips per Household in 2001

My desire to write up a personal energy policy was further encouraged by a recent article by Danny Hakim and Jeremy W. Peters entitled "Go Ahead and Drive Less, if You Can" (New York Times, September 25, 2005). The article sheds interesting light on personal energy policies and finally prompted me to finish ours.

Most interesting are the statistics cited by Hakim and Peters from a Department of Transportation study. In 1990, every household averaged 341 shopping trips using a car. Those trips averaged 5.1 miles in length. In 2001, we averaged 496 shopping trips, averaging 7.01 miles. No doubt the 2001 figure represents the fully fledged baby boomer household with both "echo boomers" (the children of baby boomers) and baby boomer parents driving.

I'm astounded by the 496 trips per year, though. That's 1.36 trips per day. Even more interesting to me, though, was a quote from Emeritus Professor Richard Porter, an economist at the University of Michigan: "People can't change where they live," Porter said. "They can't change where they work, and there aren't any clear substitutes to gas." Therefore, he argued, we're all pretty limited about how we can change our personal energy policy.

With Wirth, Chouinard, and Professor Porter in mind, I began to review our own personal energy policies. And it occurred to me that, as a society or, better yet, as the "baby boom generation" and as individuals, we may be on the verge of a need to make major changes in our personal energy policies.

Evolution of a Personal Energy Policy

Paola and I got rid of our two gas guzzling vehicles in late 2002 when we found that our nest was empty and that we needed only one car. We bought a 2003 Prius. It wasn't a perfect car for us as there was no room inside for a bicycle, but the fuel efficiency of 50 miles plus per gallon attracted us. A year later Toyota made a huge improvement in design and efficiency with the 2004 Prius. They also made it slightly bigger and included rear seats that folded down so you can put a bicycle in the back. We upgraded to the 2004 model immediately and have been very pleased with the result. Our other transport comes in the form of two bicycles which we use to get back and forth to work and to the University 90% of the time.

As I thought about Professor Porter's assertion that "people can't change where they live," I began to wonder. First of all, I remember the process we went through when we built our house in 1991. We had begun looking for either a house or a lot in 1987, and I had put a map of Fort Collins on the wall with a circle centered on Paola's university office. The radius of the circle was one mile, the distance Paola said she would walk or pedal to work (she had already made it clear she wouldn't drive). One other constraint we put on our house search was that the house had to face north so the backyard faced south, allowing for warm winter picnics on the deck, passive solar heating, and protection from the northwest wind. We found just such a building lot about three quarters of a mile from campus. Even better, the lot was within 300 yards of one of the primary bike paths in Fort Collins, the Spring Creek Trail, giving us access to a vast network of trails.

When it came time for us to move ExperiencePlus! out of the house, we were lucky to find a building site near "old town" Fort Collins, not more than 2.5 miles from the house. It also happened to be right off the other major bike trail in town, the Poudre River Trail. The location of both house and office eventually allowed me the opportunity to pedal 10 miles one way to work along bike trails with very little traffic, or 2.5 miles across town on bikeways, also with very little traffic. Better yet, the short route to work allows me to walk back and forth in about forty-five minutes.

Professor Porter's assertion that people can't change where they live or where they work proved untrue in our case. Certainly the change isn't easy, and both took time, but given the life style changes faced by many baby boomers today, such choices may not be all that difficult. I wonder, in fact, if we are seeing the tip of a small iceberg in Fort Collins as loft apartments and similar small apartments are beginning to pop up in our city center. As far as I can tell, these are the avant-garde of a new migration that fits the boomer demographic: empty nesters on the leading edge or just slightly older folks from the pre-World War II generation.

American Demographics (December 1, 2003) has reported on this trend. "Many of the newer town centers hark back to the great downtowns of the 1920s. These now offer a mix of great restaurants and entertainment options. More mixed-use zoning means you'll find condos or apartments on the second floor of buildings above ground-floor retail spaces. More densely settled communities that recreate main streets and central meeting places in areas like City Place, FL and Santana Row, CA, appeal to young singles and empty-nesters. These are places where one could shop on foot. Town centers like Bethesda Row, in Bethesda, MD seamlessly blend existing, renovated structures with new development, producing a destination that rivals downtown DC as a dining and gathering place." Fort Collins and Boulder, Colorado could certainly be added to this list as could many other college towns throughout America.

Our home is not in downtown Fort Collins and we can't easily walk to our city center restaurants. But both Paola and I can walk to work. Furthermore, we can pedal to almost any shopping venue in town and often do. In short, our own personal energy policy has taken shape over the past ten years without us ever really focusing on developing it.

We're not alone. In our energy decisions, we're part of a local and regional dynamic. Robert Grow, a Utah lawyer and founder of Envision Utah, a unique approach to regional planning and "visioning" recently spoke about the process of planning for growth and transportation on the Wasatch Front north and south of Salt Lake City. Through a complex series of town meetings involving thousands of community members, Envision Utah resulted in revolutionary regional land use plans that included the purchase of 175 miles of unused or little used Union Pacific railroad lines for commuter rail lines. Add to this bus lines, and you have a system which encourages public transportation and the redesign of cities and neighborhoods to maximize livability, walking, and mixed use commercial and residential areas (by Grows own admission, bicycling lagged behind in this process).

Call it new urbanism, call it the Europeanization of America, or blame it on higher gas prices, but the result is that we are entering a new period of personal choices in this country that have to do with personal, local, and regional energy policies. So get in shape, start walking and start pedaling!

Postscript

To paraphrase the Union of Concerned Scientists, "Paper or plastic? It doesn't really matter. What matters is how you got to the grocery store."

Have you got a personal energy policy? We'd like to hear about it. Just write it up and email it to us. We're especially interested in those of you using biodiesel, ethanol, hybrid vehicles, public transit, or combinations of these.

About the Author

Rick Price, Ph.D in Cultural Geography, and his wife, Paola Malpezzi-Price, Ph.D in Romance Languages, are the owners and founders of ExperiencePlus! Specialty Tours, Inc. Since 1969 they have walked and bicycled throughout Europe, exploring local cultures and collecting stories. If you would like to contact Rick or Paola, please email them or visit the ExperiencePlus! website.

This article was reprinted with permission from ExperiencePlus!