I agree with columnist Shaden Abusaleh almost 100 per cent. My only criticism of this insightful article is the car culture reference to us being an eight-hour drive away from Standing Rock. Please think about distance without only thinking of car travel. Some of us don’t drive!
We have to get away from fossil fuel dependency if we truly want to end oil pipeline building and big oil production. We have to boycott petroleum as much as we can and to do so we have to change our minds and our language: move away from common references that assume driving is normal and acceptable.
We need to call for a movement against the dominance of car culture much like the movement which defeated the common acceptance of smoking. We need to start literally protesting with our feet instead of going to gas stations and filling up on the product we’re fighting. We have to call for an end to automobile advertising, push for labels on new cars warning about the dangers of auto-dependency including speed, crashes, injuries, pollution, and climate change. We need a movement which actively shames the commonality of single occupant vehicle use. We need higher taxes on gasoline to discourage idling and driving and to help subsidize more and cheaper mass transit.
Let’s think long and hard about how ineffective protesting big oil is without the muscle of our collective boycotting of the product of the pipeline!
Let’s have a movement against private automobiles.
