Climate Challenge Day Ten: Just Walk

I have been thinking a great deal about the power of walking lately. Walking keeps me healthy; when I have a headache or a cold, a few miles in the open air, moving steadily but slowly, always makes me feel better.   Walking keeps me in touch with my community; I pat cats and talk with neighbors as I move through the neighborhood. But it is a political act as well. Consider the Montgomery bus boycott, where African Americans stayed off the buses for 381 days, walking to work, church, school, and social events every day. Some had cars and organized carpools, but they were so targeted by the local police that the carpools halted and they just walked.  They believed in the cause, so they walked.

We could—can—do the same thing. Corvallis is not a big place. I know—I’ve walked it for years. I can get anywhere in town, either walking or on bike, in about half an hour. For me, it is faster to walk to work than to drive, when I take scraping windows and hunting for parking (and car keys) into account.  I worked out at CV for five years and biked there, every day, for four and a half, peddling up the hill in the dark so that I was off the road before the kids were on it.

 The question is: do we believe that climate change is enough of a real and present danger, as the residents of Montgomery believed that discrimination was in 1955, that we will take direct, non-violent action to avoid it?

Options:

Walk, don’t drive, to the grocery store. How long did it take?

Set a goal: walk more miles than driving for the next week.  I walked 25 miles last week. Mark drove the van to Albany (twice because of poor communication) for a total of 54 miles.