Blogs / Better Planet

When I was a teenager, my mom lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and my dad lived in New York City. I was a Northeast Corridor kid; I’d get on the Vermonter at the one-room 19th-century train station in downtown Amherst, or the impersonal post-apocalyptic one in nearby Springfield, and emerge into Penn Station with my most “urban” outfit on, hoping to pass.

The bummer of it was, it took at least five hours, and often more than six. By car, it was three and a half. The train showed up late, or it got stuck in New Haven for an hour switching power sources, or it had to slow down between Palmer and Windsor Locks because of track repairs. The sandwiches were sub-Quizno’s muck. There were a lot of empty seats.

Now Amtrak—the Northeast corridor in particular—is blowing up. Gas prices, blah blah blah. Congress is considering more than $30 million in new funding. As crappy as our national financial situation might be we should do it; this is our chance to become more of a rail society, in which trains run on time and the food isn’t bilge. This may be a pipe dream for now—Amtrak estimates it needs a billion dollars for track and bridge repairs alone—but if we could pull it off in a few years we’d be doing ourselves a favor foreign-oil-consumtion wise by getting cars off the road.

I’ve got the new slogan, by the way, congress. Amtrak: Not Just for Children of Divorce Anymore.

Image: flickr/jpmueller99 

The New York Times has a strangely touching story on this hippie guy whose job (until he got canned) was to speak for Atlanta’s trees.

Atlanta’s trees are so famous that when Sir Elton John cut an album that was kind of about Atlanta he called it Peachtree Road. Tom Wolfe described Atlanta’s trees as the city’s saving grace in that other famous carpetbagger’s tribute, A Man in Full. “People loved living under them,” he wrote.

No matter. Apparently the arborist in question, Tom Coffin, enforced local tree-preservation law too vigorously for the city’s taste; he complained about how none of the other arborists bothered imposing fines on developers who cut down trees and was out the next week.

It’s hard to imagine a worse PR move for a city whose most widely known non-peachtree features are Outkast and the headquarters of Coca-Cola. Especially because Coffin actually looks exactly like the Lorax. Fluffy beard and sad, paternal eyes and everything.

Image: flickr/cogdogblog 

It would be easy to feel deflated today.  Obama’s expressed a new willingness to accept some offshore oil drilling. McCain’s been gaining a little traction in polls, narrowing the gap to maybe 3 points, maybe zero, and part of it may be his aggressive advocacy of new drilling (offshore and in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge) to lower gas prices. On the face of it, not the most inspiring bits of news.

The happy flipside: the polls also show that energy is the top issue for voters, ahead of Iraq. That’s a stark contrast with 2004, when large swaths of the nation obsessed over gay marriage even as the war became a full-on disgrace. The upside of every American getting whaled in the head with $4/gallon gas every week is that as a result the electorate is actually thinking about the most important issue. When was the last time that was the case? 1944?

 Image: flickr/416style

Detroit’s condition is not the kind of thing you want to rub your hands in bloggy schadenfreude over. Blue-collar layoffs have started turning into white-collar layoffs. And when they sell cars that do horrible things to the planet they’re just trying to give the American public what it wants.

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