Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

I got a call the other day from a travel agent wanting to book my comings to and goings from a live event I have scheduled at a university in Pennsylvania in April. An event at which I will preach my nearly Petroleum-free lifestyle.

Nothing new about that: a little humor, a few photos of goat babies and solar panels, and another 500 college kids, in this case, will hopefully be inspired along the road to sustainability. The travel agent, balancing the equally rare traits of extreme efficiency and genuine pleasantness, told me, “The Amtrak train you want to take into Philadelphia on the return won’t allow you to make that earlier flight home you want. Because it doesn’t go to the airport. You have to transfer to the local SEPTA train with all your luggage from Thirtieth Street Station in order to make the airport. And that’s a 47-minute ride in itself. Then you get to Terminal E which only fate knows is the same terminal you’re flying from. Why don’t we just send a limo to pick you up after the event? It’ll be so much easier.”

Yeah. For everything except the planet.

This is a Robert Johnson-at-the-crossroads moment for me.

A walk-the-talk kind of issue for Mr. Almost Carbon-Neutral.

I feel bad enough about having to fly to events (c’mon, let’s get with the algae jet fuel, or at least the solar power planes). I try to drive the vegetable oil-powered R.O.A.T. when I can, especially to events West of the Mississippi, and I buy carbon offsets (or “moral offsets” as I call them) when I can’t. For a wonderful send-up of that guilt-allaying pile of hogwash, see the Web site CheatNeutral.

I told the travel agent I’d sleep on it (as someone who sees the world as a grid of either made or missed connections, she didn’t see what there was to sleep on). And my sleep that night was troubled, even with the last batch of this year’s Funky Butte Ranch Brussel sprouts in my belly. I considered all the variables as I tossed. Man, my baggage is going to be heavy for that Pennsylvania trip because I have to bring two cases of books for the signing following the event. Plus, it’s a three-day trip, so I’ll have a lot of clothes including my stylin’ event outfit, my running gear and shoes, and two pairs of my comfy plane yoga pants (one for each direction).

A limo would be much, much easier.

Why can’t the train go right to the airport? I met a family from Denmark recently, a country that is completely carbon-neutral, and they said that in addition to their grid being powered by wind, they have an efficient, high-speed, well-connected public transport system that takes them “everywhere that we want to go.” They also, by the way, recently saw the sluggish world economy cause their unemployment rate to spike from 2.1% to 3.4%.

Do I have to make a petroleum-free statement even when it might give me a hernia? Even when it might get me home to my sweetheart and goats a day late?

Can’t I just devote a good portion of my creative life to helping society (which includes me) acquire more carbon-neutral transport options, so I can avoid this dilemma in the future?

The limo isn’t a diesel engine, by the way — I checked. So it can’t pick me up on vegetable oil.

Regular readers of Farewell, My Subaru and of these Dispatches, and especially folks who’ve been to my live events, know I’m engaged in what I call a Hypocrisy Reduction Project – in my work, in my play, in my clothes, in my food, in my entire life. It started in Alaska, when after three years of catching my salmon with zero carbon miles I noticed the oil spilling from my two stroke outboard engine into the pristine fjord from which I extracted this ultimately healthy wild protein.

The oily contradiction was an epiphany for me (especially once I noticed that my friend Sonya caught her salmon in a rowboat). It was the moment I finally, viscerally, understood how connected everything is on a small planet. A cotton shirt soaked in pesticides and poison dyes and sewn by an 11-year-old in Bangladesh is not OK, even if it is nicely folded on a shelf at The Gap. Bangladesh is not Mars. It is just a bunch of folks like me living across the ocean. I wouldn’t want my kid soaked in pesticides for a living when he’s 11.

So I moved to New Mexico, got my now-tons-of-milk-giving goats (off Craigslist) and chickens for my protein, powered my ranch (and this Dispatch) by solar, and decided to drive on waste vegetable oil.

Early horror stories now fading thanks to the blessedly porous human memory, I can say it’s been pretty easy getting the first, say, 80% of petroleum out of my life.

Lest there be any doubt, let me say before I go any further that I am not completely a hypocrisy-free carbon-neutral angel yet – some sort of ecological Mother Teresa. I’m trying to reduce my hypocrisy, and I haven’t come close to eliminating it yet.

But I’m trying.

I’m working to be consistent. I don’t want glaring flaws in the lifestyle I live and preach, like Al Gore (who I like, and who wouldn’t make the same mistake today) driving an SUV in the otherwise excellent An Inconvenient Truth. I mean, one of the reasons I want Stephen King-level book sales is so I have the leverage with my publisher to insist that future books be printed on hemp and distributed in vegetable oil-powered vehicles. I have a dream.

And still, I don’t know what to do about the limo issue come April.

Sure, I drive on something other than petroleum in my normal life. But Pennsylvania, with very few exceptions, is not normal life.

And so the Hypocrisy Reduction Project meanders on.

Meanwhile, I’m making progress in other areas of my life. Take The Great Plastic Water Bucket Dilemma of 2007, for example. Goats are animals. Cuddly, infuriating animals, but animals nonetheless. And animals need water, every day. So when Natalie stomped her water bucket at 10 p.m. on a Thursday sometime late in the Bush nightmare, I had a quagmire of limo-riding proportions. The only store open after 5 p.m. within two hours of the Ranch is this large, sort-of everything store called Wal-Mart. Heard of it? I heard they might be branching out and opening some new stores in other communities. What was there to do? I drove the 28 miles, spent the 89 cents on a bucket made from petroleum, shipped from Indonesia after poisoning some village’s drinking water supply, and kept my goats (and my milk, yogurt, cheese and ice-cream-eating family) alive.

But I didn’t feel good about it. So I scoped the local Habitat for Humanity thrift store, found an old metal sink, and I’ll plug the drain and use it as a crush-proof goat-watering trough the next time one of the caprine devils gets stomp-happy.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back to the travel agent with my Philadelphia transportation decision. It’s a 90-minute limo ride, by the way, from the event back to the airport. Suggestions are welcome.

I won’t influence the jury by disclosing which way I’m leaning. But I will say that if you plan on suggesting the “train-to-train-then-hope-for-the-right-airport-terminal” option, I don’t want to hear it unless you can tell me you’ve done at least three similar public transportation jaunts with eighty pounds of luggage in, say, the past three years. And at least one of the trains needs to have left at 5:30 a.m., as this first potential Amtrak does.

The limo would pick me up at a comfy 10 a.m., following a work day and in advance of another sixteen hours of travel. Not that I’m trying to lead the jury. And when I at long last make it to the airport in New Mexico, I get to drive home on vegetable oil. Not that I’m trying to lead the jury. Really, I want to hear what you, my fellow denizens of this small planet, think. Before I book the…no, no. I don’t want to lead the jury.

If you think I should “just take the limo” just this once, simply type in “JTTL” in the comment portion of this Dispatch. If you who have done so yourself three times recently believe I should take one for the sustainability team and haul my portable workout gym around Pennsylvania at the crack of dawn, please type in (no cut-and-pasting), “Doug, I am of the opinion that in this circumstance you would, despite using not very much less fossil fuel, make a significant gesture by risking your lumbar health and choosing to employ multiple, inconvenient public transportation options for this one small portion of your trip, even though, should all trains be on time, such a choice will get you home hours and hours and hours later than your already-less-than-ideal first choice flight itinerary.”

I look forward to what the readers of these Dispatches think. I just want the vote to be fair. I hear you can stretch out and sleep in these limos, by the way.

 

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