Cars, Colleges and Contentment

On your way across campus to eat breakfast in the cafeteria, you’ll probably see many faculty and staff coming to campus in their cars. Even though they’re thoughtful people, they’re probably not thinking very much about the ecological impacts of their cars. They’re not noticing that driving is a form of remote control. Drivers use the steering wheel, the accelerator and the brake to control the car. But they also use it to control air quality and the climate. They drive to work, but they also drive practices of extraction, processing, distribution, marketing, sales, repair and accessorizing, all of which drive their own environmental impacts. They drive on roads and park in lots, so they promote the paving of America, with all its impact on habitat and environment.

Each of us, of course, only drives as far as we “need.” But all of us together drive a lot. In the 2004 Campus Ecology class, students made a rough calculation of the number of miles that faculty and staff travel to and from school each day. Using the St. Olaf directory, we used mapquest to calculate the miles traveled by 763 faculty and staff. The number we came up with was 19,778 miles—and that doesn’t count the miles that students drive. That amount of daily driving reflects an ecological design that’s not sustainable, and one we’ll be thinking about in the coming years.