Ecology, Freedom and AutomobilityBy Justin GoodCummings & Good [email protected] a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and makingearth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.-Henry David Thoreau1If like me, you’ve lived in an environment where you need an automobile to get around efficiently, then you’ve undoubtedly felt a genuine sense of freedom attendant upon operating and owning an automobile. If you grew up in a suburban environment in an industrialized nation, you might very well remember the first time you drove an automobile as an experience of freedom so deep that it had an effect on your very identity, as if you became a new person by being able to drive. As if you were becoming yourself, actualizing your potential, by becoming auto-mobile, by becoming free. Call this the experience of automobility as freedom, or simply, the experience of automobility.2What is so interesting about this experience is that there’s truth in it, but there is also falsity. Of course, in one sense ‘experiences’ cannot be said to be true or false: you either experience a sense of  This essay was presented at the International Society for Universal Dialogue Sixth World Congress, “Humanity at the Turning Point: Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom,” Helsinki, Finland July 2005. It will be appearing in the journal Dialogue and Universalism, XV, Winter 2005.1 Thoreau 1993: 76.2 I use the term automobility, as opposed to speaking of driving a car, because I wantto refer to the experience of cars as a system, involving not merely the individual vehicles but the surrounding infrastructure of roads, highways and autocentric social organization (i.e. suburban living) which constitutes automobiles as a form of mass transit.1freedom or you do not. But when someone feels and believes that driving a car is an essentially liberating experience, her experience of automobility is tied up with and shaped by her ideas of what it means to be free. Now our concepts of freedom can be wrong. That is, a concept (an understanding) of freedom can be false if it is internally incoherent (contradictory) or if the use of the concept presupposes certain ideas about nature that turn out to be false. Given the central role that automobiles play in our global energy economy and the ecological crises which that system has engendered, one might question the conception of freedom that finds itself expressed in the experience of automobility. That is, one might conclude that (a) that conception of freedom is ecologically-irrational, if it serves to legitimate legally and reinforce psychologically a political economic system which cannot be sustained, and (b) that therefore automobility is not real freedom at all. Despite its multifarious meanings (actually, because of them), the concept of freedom is too important a part of our ethics at the social and political level to avoid. Freedom is a concept rich in meanings that ramify through the structure of our society and the contested terrain of our history. Disagreements in its meaning crystallize contrasting visions of justice and how American and global society ought to be structured. New conceptions of freedom focus and concentrate social energies for radical change or consolidate resistance to perceived threats to personal property. No social movement or cause in the United States can achieve popular support ifit does not offer a compelling, convincing view of freedom that speaks to the hearts of individuals as citizens, as human beings, and as organisms inhabiting ecosystems. Given the profound impact of automobiles on our ecological situation,3 experience of freedom of 3 They are, for example, the single largest factor contributing to our ecological footprints as individuals. Collectively, the global automobile fleet of 600 million vehicles contributes the single largest amount of carbon emissions.2automobility should be at the center of public debate on the true meaning of freedom. Here is where my interest lies. What would that debate look like? What are the countervailing intuitions and beliefs about freedom that clash in the interpretation of automobility? What measures of freedom does the experience of automobility illustrate? How does ecology undercut the viability of those measures? How mightwe understand freedom in light of ecology? Towards a clarification of these questions, I shall consider five senses of freedom (or more specifically, ambiguities of agency) in automobility pertaining generallyto the issues of: 1. mobility, 2. technology, 3. privacy, 4. rights, 5. nature. Consider these loci of contention in a rational debate on the ecological ethics of automobility that we need to have.1. MobilityThe experience of driving is an experience of liberation most obviously because of the connection between being free and being mobile and self-directed. These connections are rooted deeply in our biology and our concept of freedom as autonomy, or self-rule. At the most primal level, automobility answers to the same biological impulse that drives a crawling infant across the floor. Any technology which satisfies a biologically-predisposed interest of ours is going to be felt as liberating.The interest is related to the kinetic pleasure we feel in speeding down the highway, and the feeling of power and control that operating a car can give. More importantly, the mobility which cars enhance illustrates our concept of freedom as autonomy due to the ways in which cars give us new choices and options for movement. In a defense of automobility as an intrinsic ethical good, Loren Lomasky argues that automobility essentially complements human autonomy:In the latter part of the twentieth century, being a self-mover entails, to a significant extent, being a motorist. Because we have cars we can, more than any other people in history, choose where we will live and where we will work, and separate these 3choices from each other. We can more easily avail ourselves of near and distant pleasures, at a scheduled tailored to individual preferences. In our choice of friends and associates, we are less constrained by accidents of geographical proximity. In our comings and goings, we depend less on the concurrence of others.4Lomasky’s main point in calling attention to