Article 4 - "THINK GLOBALLY, TRAVEL LOCALLY" July 2008 edition of First Church of The Streets

     The price of gas has really put the brakes on car travel, it seems. In April, the Department of Transportation said that Americans traveled 1.4 billion miles less than they did the April of the previous year. Finally, something has put a damper in the love affair between the American driver and the road.

     Times like these, it is a good thing to be finding places close to home to travel to. The idea of a travel in a local space is to see something that may be considered commonplace from the vantage point of a tourist or traveler. Some people call this a "staycation", where one stays more local to find ways to spend his vacation time.

     Even on this regional level, a level I have explored extensively for at the last five years or so, gas prices cut into where one goes. Instead of choosing the park seventy miles from home, the one that is forty miles seems better even if the former one had a better attraction. Trips are calculated in miles and how much the gas costs to get from here to there, and from there to here. In these more expensive times, every mile counts.

     This, of course, has been nothing all that new for Europeans. If they were spending four dollars for the metric equivalent of a gallon, it would be a bargain. American prices, expensive as they may seem, are nothing compared to those across the pond. Domestic supply has something to do with that, which is the reasoning that presidential candidate John McCain thinks we should explore offshore drilling. This would increase the supply that we do have. Unfortunately, the argument that the oil belongs to the company and not the government kicks in. If Exxon Mobil wants to send the oil to China, it can. There is no guarantee domestic production will go to the domestic coffer. The environmental risks for a gamble like this are debatable.

     In the meantime, in the everyday world far removed from board meetings and oil refineries, a traveler such like myself weighs the different options of what to do to satisfy a passion. Looking ever more closely for nooks and crannies closer to home become a priority, but the desire for travel still goes on and begs to be fulfilled.

     There are city parks that can be walked in. Now that the summer has kicked in, there are lot more people there and the place is pretty lively. Not too many miles either, and while there shopping or other errands can be completed. Even the idea of whether or not to pay for a park comes into play; six bucks for a parking fee seems weighty when the price for the gas gets calculated. A lot of the city parks are free, and as mentioned before, centrally located.

     Walking or riding a bike near home can work well too, depending where one lives or works. Near my home are fields which we have gotten permission to walk on. These places are harvested for hay to feed dairy cows, but there are no cows out to pasture here. There are just acres of grass which sometimes grow several feet tall, occasionally mowed down or sprinkled with manure to fertilize it. Obviously, the day after a fresh fertilization round, we don't spend a lot of time on the trails. But soon, it dries out, and we are able to make our way around the edges to make a complete figure out of it. This trip is near home, and doesn't require any gas miles at all for us to travel on, though there is obviously some on the part of the farmer to upkeep it. Every mile seems to count in something like this.

     The reality is that all of this calculation is probably a good thing. Walking around in an oblivious state is probably not the wisest thing to do in a world affected by climate change, increasing demands for an increasing population, and a world where the everything is connected to everything else is more and more apparent. Human rights becomes more than standing with a placard insisting that we Save Darfur. Maybe saving Darfur entails cutting down on my driving, so that there is less demands for oil consortia to makes deals with governments, which in turn incite racial and tribal hate to get to the oil fields needed to seal the deal. Of course, there are probably those who don't agree with that depiction of the timeline, but it doesn't change the fact that every time I choose to drive, there is now more carbon dioxide in the air for overtaxed oceans and fauna to filter out. And there is one less gallon of gas for some guy to go to work to feed his kids, or someone in India to get a better job in the first place. It becomes important to remember that I share the air with everyone else on the planet.

     In this way, even with a local perspective on travel, even with keeping things as close to home as possible, everything seems to have a global impact. Maybe investors are the reason why prices are expensive, maybe it is demand. In the meantime, there are trails to be walked near my home, parks near my grocery store to be visited, and local businesses to visit to bring everything closer to home. Even in an international economy, the importance of the local commodity is to one's life, in this case mine, is always an issue. Think globally, travel locally. A place is a place no matter how far the distance traveled.