If you live downtown in a congested city center
Where mass transit is nearby and frequent
And parking is a problem and expensive
It’s easier to give up your car.
It means you have to limit your shopping
To what you can carry in your arms or cart.
It means most likely doing your laundry
In the building basement or a laundromat.
The youth make these choices for their reasons
To be able to mix and meet and hang out at night.
The affluent don’t give up anything, enjoying
The urban context
that lets them display their wealth.
For the rest of us living anywhere else
A car is a necessity and a pleasure to have
To go wherever you want whenever you want
Something everyone in the world would like.
And for all of us who participate in the global economy
Trucks and planes and boats move the goods we buy
Made in smokestack factories or grown on industrial farms
Depending on megawatts of electric power generation.
You could say I am addicted to this way of life.
I do not deny global warming but I do not change, either.
Like all the problems that were passed onto my generation
Now I repeat what was done before me.
I have a cabin in the mountains that is off the grid
Burning wood as long as trees remain
With solar panels for electricity and batteries for storage
Built in factories and shipped long distances.
The cook stove uses bottled propane tanks.
I burn a tank of gasoline driving there and back.
It’s a lovely refuge sitting next to a small waterfall
But no way is it not part of climate change.
I put a metal roof on it that will last longer than I will
live
But it sits on a foundation beam on the ground
That will not last so long.
I do not know how to fix it
And I do nothing, leaving it for my successors to solve.
