The Most Efficient Renewable Energy Nobody Considers
With New Year’s resolve, human energy can heal us and defeat climate change
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike: Chronicles of a Self-Serving Environmentalist)
In the 1970s visionary iconoclast Ivan Illich accurately predicted, “Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on a society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving.”
Once we’re psychically enslaved to energy, we become sedentary. “Two decades of sedentary lifestyle is associated with two times the risk of premature death compared to being physically active,” according to research from the European Society of Cardiology.
This social ill is referred to as the “sitting disease” by Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Multiple studies draw similar conclusions regarding “diseases of civilization.”
Only human energy is renewable
The only renewable energy that doesn’t require unrenewable rare-earth minerals and exploitative mining is human energy. When civilization reduced the onerous effects of work with labor-saving machinery, it also zapped the benefits of human energy, leaving us sedentary. One of those machines, the automobile, correlates with diseases of civilization.
Research has shown adverse associations of car time with markers of cardio-metabolic risk.
Mathematics logic adds that it’s overkill to use two tons of gas-fueled steel to propel a 170-pound human being.
“Don’t blame me for driving,” said a walking friend. “This sprawling suburb leaves me no alternative.” Drive to survive. No matter that car commuting exacerbates the “sitting disease.” Be seated, get depleted. No matter that car exhaust fumes are linked to cancer. Breathe and seethe.
Dear FTC, listen to me. Manufactured cars should exit the factory with an FTC WARNING on the hood:
Driving is Dangerous to Health and May Cause Death from Man-Made Diseases.
In his book Energy and Equity, Illich documents how the pursuit of speed of the few deprives the many (pedestrians) of their health and quality of life, leading to social inequalities.
Dear City Planners, structures fomenting massive energy output can be torn down! Portland, Oregon removed a riverfront freeway and replaced it with a public park.
The freeway-elimination model, duplicated by Paris and four other cities, begins restoring rights to pedestrians. Illich noted that “People on their feet are more or less equal.”
Voluntary paraplegics driving two-ton wheelchairs
The car and oil lobbies have created a branch on the evolutionary tree, turning out voluntary paraplegics driving two-ton wheelchairs. And then they shame us for not exercising.
Fitness centers are offered as band aids. Drs. Orstein and Sobel explain that we have confused exercise and physical activity:
Exercise is usually a deliberative, sometimes odious endeavor that can take time away from life, whereas physical activity can be any daily undertaking, work or play, that involves movement.” (See Healthy Pleasures, 1988, 14th edition.)
Purposeful exercise
Human evolution thrived on purposeful exercise until Gross Domestic Product sold us ways to exclude physical activity from our lives. Expanding GDP correlates with expanding waistlines.
When we didn’t buy into the sedentarianism pushed by industry and governments, they surrounded us with sprawl. If you walk in an unwalkable community, you can get ticketed for jaywalking, sometimes you’ll get tased. I was once ticketed for crossing a street with no nearby crosswalk when no cars were coming in either direction.
Walking, the number one form of human energy, is now criminalized.
At least four modes of human energy can stop this evolutionary, involuntary, delusionary, neurofibrillary, inflammatory, sedentary way of life. These four modes also can curtail two major and related sources of greenhouse gas emissions: motorized transport and carbonized industrial agriculture:
- Walking
- Bicycling
- Active transit
- Urban agriculture
Active transit blends walking and public transportation. A round trip, walking 10 minutes to the subway station and another 10 minutes from station exit to workplace and then the same path in reverse, equals a 40-minute walk. Forty minutes on a treadmill at a fitness club is 40-minutes deleted from your life, while 40 active-transit minutes is utilitarian exercise.
Urban agriculture works in synergy with pollution-free transportation, reducing the food supply distance from an obscene 400-mile average to some five miles, with many city farmers bicycling produce to the local farmers’ market.
Visionary municipalities, like Austin, Texas, offer grants and landscaping items to help you create your earthwise garden.
Programs like Fleet Farming, a bike-powered, all-volunteer team of farmers in Orlando, Florida is turning wasteful lawns into mini-urban farms to boost local food production.
Human energy to the rescue
Consider food shopping. We gain a double advantage by walking to the market instead of driving. More frequent shopping forays for smaller amounts give us purposeful exercise and liberate us to choose heathier, less wasteful, unprocessed food options.
The ideal urban structure involves smaller supermarkets without parking lots (as in many European cities). Space occupied by parking lots expands walking distances. In denser walkable communities, we wheel our own shopping trolleys to the food market and bakery.
Reducing commute time to zero
Bicycle commuting is remarkably efficient, even when blended partway with public transit. A few key efficiencies gained by cycling are often overlooked:
- Effective speed, which considers not only the time spent driving one’s vehicle, but the work hours spent to pay for that vehicle. Result: “Effective speeds of the ‘faster’ modes can be very low” (from Tranter and Tolley, Slow Cities: Conquering Our Speed Addiction for Health and Sustainability). With so many more work hours expended paying for a car than for a bicycle, the bicycle gains against the car in “net speed.”
- Increased life expectancy, which amounts to an additional hour for each hour of bike commuting. Statistically, the net commute time for bicycle commuters becomes zero (per Fishman, Schepers and Kamphuis, American Journal of Public Health, 2015).
Objectively, the private automobile is an inefficient mode of commuting, in terms of health and personal finance. The automobile (with urban structures built to favor it) amputates valuable human energy. And even if we were to replace gas-powered vehicles with electric cars, our environments would still be turned into freeway blight and Big Box bloat.
Human energy can triumph if we move our bodies and persuade our municipalities to restructure surroundings to favor purposeful energy. Eliminating single-use zoning, for example, would place commerce within walking distance. Converting redundant lawns into produce gardens reduces food distribution distances and improves diet.
Just how deprived of human energy are many “communities”? Consider that the most common gym activity is walking and (according to “41 Gym Membership Statistics that Will Surprise You” by Kyle Hoffman) the treadmill is one of the two most popular gym machines. How bland and uninviting has our outdoor environment become when we prefer to exercise indoors on a treadmill?
For a few fierce modern-day Spartans exercise is a laudable solution. But at least 60% of all gym memberships go unused (something GDP stats would interpret as a “successful” business model). Hoffman’s article also points out that 82% of gym members visit the gym less than once a week.
Do NOT let anyone shame you for not going to the gym. The criminals who deprived us of purposeful exercise are the oil, car, tire and building industries that manufactured artificial environments that defile human and humane evolution.
About the Author
Mark Cramer commutes and vacations with human-energy alternatives and once practiced urban agriculture. His book Old Man on a Green Bike: Chronicles of a Self-Serving Environmentalist proves that legitimate self-interest and a clean environment go hand in hand.
