Home Truth

It’s always good to find someone struggling with the same ethical dilemma as yourself. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed Martin Love’s article “The end of the road?” in the Ethical Observer magazine this weekend so much. Mind you, his Volvo sounds in a much worse state than our minibus. Give it time.

He reaches the conclusion that his old friend the Volvo will have to go (I wonder if anyone will ask him in a month if he has indeed got rid of it yet or not). In contrast, we have come to the decision to keep our minibus (think depreciation, economic viability etc) for two more years until our eldest son reaches seventeen and has agreed to help with transporting the other kids around in exchange for some driving lessons. Fair deal.

However, we will do what we can to “green our ride”.

“When you can, cycle, walk, take public transport..” Sound advice for Martin Love from Dr Lane, a leading environmental consultant. Completely ignored by the majority of car owners if the crawling queue of cars with one person in that I see on the hill outside our house every morning is anything to go by. We do OK: Gadget Man cycles to work (with “necessary” GPS gadgets to get him there!), I walk to the gym, oldest child is an expert bus user. No doubt we could all do better though with a bit more thought and planning.

Then there’s regular maintenance, correctly inflated wheels, no unnecessary weight, changing gear at the right time, avoiding excessive acceleration…these all make some difference to carbon emissions and some has to be better than none.

And so the minibus lives on. As does our ‘slightly weird’ identity. And don’t forget tomorrow is National Car Sharing day.

Filed under: sustainability, travel on June 13th, 2007