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What you're about to hear is an excerpt from a conversation with Jonathan Moss of Bike Portland.
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If you want to hear the whole thing, you can become a Patreon supporter by going to patreon.com
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slash TheWarOnCarsPod.
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I heard you say something about, there was a chapter in the book that was really life-changing
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for you, the chapter about nature.
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Yeah, I think a lot of people might not make that connection.
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I've got to say, one of the funniest things about the book that I appreciate
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is how direct the chapter titles are.
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Literally, chapter names, cars ruin childhood, cars ruin nature, cars are killing us, cars
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ruin society, cars are unjust.
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You're very reasonable with these.
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But the nature one, right, that's what you said.
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So tell me more about how that was such an important chapter for you.
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I'm the kind of person that I really love being in nature, despite the fact that
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I'm a native New Yorker, really love the urban life.
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I still have spent a lot of my time pursuing the outdoors and as wild as possible.
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And so I really value wild space.
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And one of the reasons that I think this movement is so important is land use and
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preventing greenfield development and endless sprawl that takes up all the
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space that we have and kills everything.
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So I mean, I already was aware that that land use pattern of endless
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suburban expansion was really bad for natural areas.
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But it wasn't until I read Ben Goldfarb's book, Crossings, which I highly recommend
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to everybody that I started to sort of open my mind to all the different
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ways that cars are hurting nature.
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And then we also interviewed Paul Donald, who wrote a book called
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He's a UK researcher.
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And he too really breaks down all the ways that this is happening.
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And it's just really pretty much everything that cars do.
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I mean, the ways that cars strike animals, including insects.
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I don't know about you, but when I was much younger and you would drive
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through the countryside, there would be a lot of bugs on the windshield.
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That doesn't happen as much anymore.
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It's not because they invented something special about cars that makes
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the bugs fly off of them.
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It's because there aren't as many bugs.
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And that's actually really disturbing, right?
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But it's also just the roads themselves are an incredibly
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onerous burden for the landscape to bear.
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Not only do they have fumes coming off of them.
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Not only do they have noise coming off of them.
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Not only do they have runoff coming off of them.
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But they also divide habitats and create genetic islands that
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reduce genetic diversity, which of course is even more important
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in the New York climate change.
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And for species to be able to move around is also more important.
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And roads are just constantly being built all over the world.
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And I really started putting together the pieces,
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the damage that we're doing.
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And I think that there's a figure that there is something
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like 70% fewer animals in the world than there were in the 1970s.
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And roads have a big thing to do with that.
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And Paul Donald in his book and in his interview with us
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really argued that cars are perhaps the thing most
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responsible for that decline.
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And I think people just don't realize it.
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And the poignancy is how do most of us access nature
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because there's no good access to nature
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by public transportation.
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For the most part, we access it by driving.
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And even those of us who really try to leave no trace,
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we're getting to the trailhead on a road.
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And that road itself is damaging.
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So I guess it's a little bit overwhelming emotionally,
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like so many things that have to do with the destruction
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of our natural world and the climate crisis,
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especially to say, wow, everything about this
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is killing life on this planet.
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And that's a big thing to think about.
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But for me, it's now something that I can't stop thinking about.
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I think that's the thing that was most surprising to me
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in researching the book was just how totally terrifying
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Yeah, a lot of people have asked us,
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are you more or less radicalized now having written the book?
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And I will say that I am more radicalized
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because there were things in doing the research that
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And Sarah did much of the research for the nature
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chapter and just in reading what she wrote
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through the normal process of us finishing the book.
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I was just like, my jaw, my mouth was on the floor
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because we don't think about the very expansive ways in which
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cars really do ruin everything because those same people who
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might say, OK, there are 70% fewer animals on this planet
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than there were 50 years ago would make the connection
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to agriculture and the fact that we've
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destroyed the rainforest to raise cattle.
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But they would not, for a minute,
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say that the interstate highway that
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gets the agriculture workers to their jobs
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and gets the meat from the meatpacking plant
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to the grocery store is responsible as well.
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And so part of what we're trying to do with the book
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is to get people to make those connections
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and to see cars as this determinative force in our lives,
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whether you drive or not.
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How did you put it in the book, you said the goal is to
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make someone see the water?
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I didn't get it right.
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There's a Marshall McLuhan quote about, you know,
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the fish knows nothing of the water, right?
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It's an old joke that the fish are swimming along
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and another fish comes by and says,
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water sure is nice today and the other two fish
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are like, what's water?
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And that's sort of how we see cars, you know,
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they're just the background.
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We kind of joke in the book that you're born
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and you're put in a car seat and driven home
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and then a funeral procession takes you
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in a hearse to the cemetery
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and everything is driving in between.
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And so much so that we just don't question it.
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It's this huge force.
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It dictates where we live, how we live,
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who we socialize with, how we access food,
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how we access medical care, education, employment,
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all this kind of stuff.
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So we want people to see that this was built,
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it can be unbuilt and you got to start
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just getting people to see the problem
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is the first step towards solving it.
