Ecology,

Freedom
and Automobility
By Justin Good
Cummings & Good Design
vood@cummings-good.com
If a man walk in the woods for love of them half
of each day, he is in danger of being regarded
as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a
speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth
bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious
and enterprising citizen.
1
-Henry David Thoreau

If like me, youve lived in an environment where you need an

automobile to get around efficiently, then youve
undoubtedly felt a genuine sense of freedom attendant upon
operating and owning an automobile. If you grew up in a
suburban environment in an industrialized nation, you might
very well remember the first time you drove an automobile as
an experience of freedom so deep that it had an effect on
your very identity, as if you became a new person by being
able to drive. As if you were becoming yourself, actualizing
your potential, by becoming auto-mobile, by becoming free.
Call this the experience of automobility as freedom, or
simply, the experience of automobility.2
What is so interesting about this experience is that
theres truth in it, but there is also falsity. Of course,
in one sense experiences cannot be said to be true or
false: you either experience a sense of freedom or you do
not. But when someone feels and believes that driving a car

This essay was presented at the International Society for Universal

Dialogue Sixth World Congress, Humanity at the Turning Point:
Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom, Helsinki, Finland July 2005.
It will be appearing in the journal Dialogue and Universalism, XV,
Winter
2005.
1
Thoreau 1993: 76.
2
I use the term automobility, as opposed to speaking of driving a car,
because I want to refer to the experience of cars as a system, involving
not merely the individual vehicles but the surrounding infrastructure of
roads, highways and autocentric social organization (i.e. suburban
living) which constitutes automobiles as a form of mass transit.

is an essentially liberating experience, her experience of

automobility is tied up with and shaped by her ideas of what
it means to be free. Now our concepts of freedom can be
wrong. That is, a concept (an understanding) of freedom can
be false if it is internally incoherent (contradictory) or
if the use of the concept presupposes certain ideas about
nature that turn out to be false. Given the central role
that automobiles play in our global energy economy and the
ecological crises which that system has engendered, one
might question the conception of freedom that finds itself
expressed in the experience of automobility. That is, one
might conclude that (a) that conception of freedom is
ecologically-irrational, if it serves to legitimate legally
and reinforce psychologically a political economic system
which cannot be sustained, and (b) that therefore
automobility is not real freedom at all.
Despite its multifarious meanings (actually, because of
them), the concept of freedom is too important a part of our
ethics at the social and political level to avoid. Freedom
is a concept rich in meanings that ramify through the
structure of our society and the contested terrain of our
history. Disagreements in its meaning crystallize
contrasting visions of justice and how American and global
society ought to be structured. New conceptions of freedom
focus and concentrate social energies for radical change or
consolidate resistance to perceived threats to personal
property. No social movement or cause in the United States
can achieve popular support if it does not offer a
compelling, convincing view of freedom that speaks to the
hearts of individuals as citizens, as human beings, and as
organisms inhabiting ecosystems. Given the profound impact
of automobiles on our ecological situation,3 experience of
freedom of automobility should be at the center of public
3

They are, for example, the single largest factor contributing to our
ecological footprints as individuals. Collectively, the global
automobile fleet of 600 million vehicles contributes the single largest
amount of carbon emissions.

debate on the true meaning of freedom. Here is where my

interest lies. What would that debate look like? What are
the countervailing intuitions and beliefs about freedom that
clash in the interpretation of automobility? What measures
of freedom does the experience of automobility illustrate?
How does ecology undercut the viability of those measures?
How might we understand freedom in light of ecology? Towards
a clarification of these questions, I shall consider five
senses of freedom (or more specifically, ambiguities of
agency) in automobility pertaining generally to the issues
of: 1. mobility, 2. technology, 3. privacy, 4. rights, 5.
nature. Consider these loci of contention in a rational
debate on the ecological ethics of automobility that we need
to have.
1. Mobility
The experience of driving is an experience of liberation
most obviously because of the connection between being free
and being mobile and self-directed. These connections are
rooted deeply in our biology and our concept of freedom as
autonomy, or self-rule. At the most primal level,
automobility answers to the same biological impulse that
drives a crawling infant across the floor. Any technology
which satisfies a biologically-predisposed interest of ours
is going to be felt as liberating. The interest is related
to the kinetic pleasure we feel in speeding down the
highway, and the feeling of power and control that operating
a car can give. More importantly, the mobility which cars
enhance illustrates our concept of freedom as autonomy due
to the ways in which cars give us new choices and options
for movement. In a defense of automobility as an intrinsic
ethical good, Loren Lomasky argues that automobility
essentially complements human autonomy:
In the latter part of the twentieth century, being a
self-mover entails, to a significant extent, being a
motorist. Because we have cars we can, more than any
other people in history, choose where we will live and
3

where we will work, and separate these choices from

each other. We can more easily avail ourselves of near
and distant pleasures, at a scheduled tailored to
individual preferences. In our choice of friends and
associates, we are less constrained by accidents of
geographical proximity. In our comings and
goings, we depend less on the concurrence of others.4
Lomaskys main point in calling attention to automobility as
a complement to autonomy is in fact to defend the ethical
virtues of automobility against criticisms based on an
assessment of the external or social costs of the system.
Actually, he goes a bit further, and his view expresses a
deep intuition shared by many. He says that when we focus on
the social costs of a global economic system like
automobility, we ignore whatever intrinsic goodness
automobility may have.
the balance sheet of instrumental values and disvalues
ignores the intrinsic goodness of automobility in
promoting autonomy and complements such as free
association and privacy. Even if purely instrumental
calculations did not unambiguously display a positive
balance in favor of automobility, its autonomyenhancing aspects are so pronounced both qualitatively
and quantitatively that any plausibly adequate
normative evaluation of the
status of automobility usage must give them primary
attention.5
Of course, if freedom is a desired end, then promoting its
conditions may require a legitimate sacrifice, a discipline,
a gaining control over something, for example, the body or
the mind. The more abstract we make freedom as an ideal, the
easier it can be to see the logic of this view. Identifying
freedom as the autonomy of choice is intuitively plausible
because it sounds correct to say that our freedom of choice
is more valuable than any particular choice we might make.
If our overriding ethical goal is more autonomy for more
persons, then we should be prepared to pay the costs for
that autonomy. But when does the cost undermine the agency
4

Lomasky 1997: 15.

Lomasky 1997: 25.

we hope to purchase with it. Engineering efficiency experts

Amory and L. Hunter Lovins offer a list of such costs for
the United States car fleet alone, amounting to almost a
trillion dollars a year, including $200 million per day to
maintain roads and $90 billion per year in road accidents,
while killing 40,000 human beings and millions of non-human
animals per year.6 If we add in the part played by the
carbon emissions of the worlds car fleet to global warming,
the hidden external costs of automobility are far from
clear, and this makes it difficult to evaluate the
desirability of the system as fostering autonomy. When
freedom is construed abstractly as choice, the reality of
freedom presupposes that we have genuine alternatives to
choose from and that we are aware of what we are choosing.
That is, free choice requires rational judgment, otherwise
our choosing to do something cannot be distinguished from
unconscious, docile acquiescence to external forces. In a
quasi-market society like ours, where we rely on prices to
tell us how much something costs - which is to say, to tell
us what other options we are foregoing by using limited
resources in the way required to create that thing we can
only act rationally, hence freely, if price reflects actual
cost. This is patently not the case with automobility, which
must be considerably more costly than the market indicates.
Even though people might very well be voting with their
tires, they can still be doing so because of a mistaken
sense of self-interest.
From an ecological perspective, the entire system of
automobility does not merely conceal extraordinary hidden
costs, it is essentially unsustainable as it currently
stands due to the energy required to manufacture and
maintain the vast empire of steel and petroleum cars and
concrete highways. Energy is the basic currency of
ecosystems, driving matter cycles and imposing limits on
their behavior. Despite what economists tell us, energy is
6

Hawken, Lovins, Lovins 1999.

never really produced or consumed, but only transformed, and

every transformation involves a loss of energy, in the sense
of a loss of quality. Unlike matter, energy does not recycle
but only flows, loosing quality or structure every time it
changes form and producing greater entropy or disorder in
the process. In a closed matter system like the earth, this
means that we are continuously and irreversibly degrading
the quality of energy available. It is the energy available
in an ecosystem that determines the level of order (material
abundance) available to its inhabitants and so to its
carrying capacity, or the maximum population load of any
given species that can be supported by its environment on an
ongoing basis. As a technological extension of our natural
abilities to move about, automobility obviously requires us
to consume more energy (bioproductivity), particularly in
the form of petroleum, than we would consume if we used a
less energy intensive form of transportation. Moreover,
given the need for the system of automobility to expand as
a basic structure of global capitalism, it requires us to
increase our drawdown of a nonrenewable fossil fuel just as
global supply is projected to peak. For an economy that
needs to grow in order to live, the imminent peak of world
oil production means the end of automobility as we have
known in for the past fifty years.7
Does this mean that autonomy itself is unsustainable?
Or does it mean that we have to deepen our understanding of
freedom to make it compatible with ecological reality? What
the emphasis on freedom as physical mobility conceals is the
freedom we might experience if we instead used our limited
energy resources in more efficient ways. More efficient
systems of mass transit would allow us to use the precious
energy we expend commuting in and maintaining a car for
activities which increased our spiritual and intellectual
mobility. If, instead of living in an architectural space
7

The worlds fleet of over half a billion cars is projected to triple

by 2050!

dominated by and shaped around the automobile, we lived in

an environs with human scale - as in the case of a distance
between home and work which is walkable we could recover
the sense of freedom that comes with experiencing the sense
of place or spiritual locatedness in the world which is
probably necessary for experiencing life as meaningful. We
could experience the freedom of living in an environment
which is worth walking around, as opposed to driving
through. The ecological inversion of freedom as mobility is
freedom as the sense of locatedness, of a sense of direction
that comes from living in a space shaped to, and by, the
proportions of the human body. On this ecological view of
mobility, liberation from the constraints of bodily mobility
afforded by automobiles is not freedom, it is the
domestication of the human by the automotive. The social
ecologist Murray Bookchin makes the point specifically
regarding community:
The freedom of all organisms is a function of direction
of meaningful niches in nature and meaningful
communities in society In its own way, our loss of
community has been a form of domestication a
condition that lacks meaning and direction as surely
as is the wild animals loss of its niche.8

2. Technology
The sense of power underlying the experience of automobility
is quite objective and can be practically quantified in
terms of the energy required for the car to do its work.
According to one energy equivalence analysis, when speeding
down the highway, a one hundred horsepower car does the work
of two thousand people. Like all technologies, an automobile
serves to extend and enhance some basic human capacity. If
clothing extends our skin, while radio extends the voice, an
automobile extends the whole body: wheels extend feet in
8

Bookchin 2003: 279.

motion, and the internal combustion engine, like your

furnace at home, extends the stomach by enhancing the
process whereby we as human beings gather energy necessary
for movement from the sun. (from burning petroleum rather
than eating vegetable or animal protein.) We can travel more
often, farther, to more destinations, and with a higher
degree arbitrariness, than any other mode of transportation.
Automobility feels freeing because it allows us to overcome
natural limits our bodies have in moving about and hauling
stuff from one place to another. Cars allow us generally to
exert our will to a greater degree upon the world. Put
differently, cars can help us to get more work done. So the
idea goes, automobility is liberating because it is
empowering technology, and because becoming more free is a
specifically technical problem.
But our faith in the redemptive potential of technology
is called into question by other things we know about
freedom. That is, there are undeniable limits to how
technology can make us freer, despite what we are invited to
fantasize about technology in our high-tech economy. In
spite of our confidence in technology to empower us, we know
that new technologies can often alter us, both mentally and
socially, in ways that are as unpredictable as they are
unconscious. From an ecological perspective, there is
nothing mysterious about this, since technological
innovations upset ratios have holistic effects on that
relation. As a consequence of the manifold readjustments
that elements of the system make to reestablish equilibrium,
the technological innovation can end up subverting freedom
by subverting the ends that the innovation was intended to
serve. Automobiles were originally intended as horseless
carriages, and from that perspective, they served as simply
a faster way from point a to point b, and this is the basic
idea behind automobility as a complement to autonomy. But
the significance of the automobile for how we live and for
our whole sense of space, and for our expression of freedom
8

is not explained or clarified by saying that. The advent of

the automobile has altered not simply the time it takes to
get to point b, but where point a and point b are in the
first place, our reasons for going there, what we see along
the way and, ultimately, the structure of the society within
which a and b become destinations.
Because all technologies are extensions of the human
body and mind, such forms serve to give us a degree of
control over our condition only by altering our nature in
the process. Focusing on the car as an extension of the
human body, one is led to think about the ways that your
extended body is now implicated in a larger system over
which you have no control, and whose interests you are now
beholden to. The very flexibility that automobility makes
possible can thus be seen as a constraint on ones movement.
For example, sociologist John Urry argues that automobility
forces us to live in spatially-stretched and timecompressed ways. Temporally, the very flexibility in
scheduling that automobility with its 24 hour availability
makes possible can easily necessitate that one make oneself
more available, compelling one to expect, and be expected,
to travel more
often and more quickly. And over wider distances:
The structure of autospace forces people to
orchestrate in complex and heterogeneous ways their
mobilities and socialities across very significant
distances. The urban environment has unbundled
territorialities of home, work, business, and leisure
that historically were closely integrated and
fragmented social practices in shared public spaces.
Automobility
divides workplaces from homes, producing lengthy
commutes into and
across the city.9
From the perspective of town and urban planning,
automobility is an economic system with its own internal
interests in perpetuating and enhancing its functionality.
9

Urry 2000: 5.

The architect and city planner Peter Calthorpe, for example,

talks about conflicts in the kinds of landscapes that cars
and pedestrians want.
The car wants lots of pavement and the low-density
development that preserves plenty of space for more and
more asphalt. The car also wants to travel more;
between 1969 and 1990 the national population grew by
21 percent while the total vehicle miles traveled in
cars increased 82 percent Pedestrians want close
destinations: shops, schools, services, or recreation.
They need direct links to these destinations free of
cul-de-sacs, parking lots, or massive intersections.
They want safe, interesting, and comfortable streets
to walk on and human scale in the buildings which line
it.10
Consequently, cars are not simply a means of transit, or a
horseless carriage, they are an organizing principle of
suburban society which establishes the basic form of social
life, the scale of streets and the relationships between
buildings. In China, the competition between the needs of
cars and of human beings is more basic and more urgent than
either the aesthetics or civic life of our neighborhoods.
As the new century begins, the competition between cars
and crops for land is intensifying. The addition of 12
million cars each year consumes, in new roads,
highways, and parking lots, rughly 1 million hectares
of land enough to feed 9 million people if it were
all cropland. Since the worlds people are concentrated
in the agriculturally productive regions, a
disproportionate share of the land paved for cars is
cropland.11
How do these holistic consequences of automobile technology
alter our sense of its liberating possibilities? The
liberating potential of technology is limited in an
important sense. To see technology as a means of liberation
is to see freedom as a technical problem about means, as
opposed to ends. But the problem of freedom is in large
measure about pursuing the right ends; to live towards goals
which are naturally-proper to an individual, in the sense of
allowing her to actualize her mental and physical and
10

Calthorpe 1993: 27

10

spiritual faculties. After decades of technological advances

in building more fuel efficient internal combustion engines
which followed the oil shocks of the 1970s, US automobiles
consume more petroleum now because they have more horsepower
and because people are driving more. When end of cheap oil
comes, the increasing dysfunctionality of the system of
automobility will lead to what media ecologist Marshall
McLuhan called the reversal of the overheated medium: a law
of technological media which states that media reverse the
enhancing function they originally had on the human
mind/body when they are pushed to their limit. When do we
know that the limit has been reached? For one, the traffic
jam and the oil embargo have begun to reverse the speed and
flexibility that the horseless carriage originally offered
against its horsed competitor. For another, while the carbon
emissions from automobiles at first offered a fabulous
alternative to the mountains of horse manure and rotting
horse carcasses that were the ecological impact of the horse
and buggy system, its contribution to global climate change
infinitely overshadows the trivial problems we once had with
horseshit.
3. Privacy
Traveling in an automobile, especially if it is your own,
does not merely extend mobility, it extends ones private
space, and this too must be an element in the experience of
automobility. Private space is the first and most important
objectification of human freedom. According to classical
liberal political philosophy, political freedom begins with
the ownership, or autonomy of our body and its work. When
through our work, we gain property to create a house, we
extend our autonomy, actualizing our original self-rule.
When we are on the bus, we are in a public space and our
behavior must conform to socially-prescribed rules. In
contrast, the interiors of cars can be intensely personal
11

Brown 2003: 49.

11

contexts, for example, they can be strewn and cluttered,

like a bedroom, with the most personal articles, arranged or
not, according to ones whims; they can smell and sound and
feel just like home. Lomasky sees this privacy as integral
to the autonomy that automobility makes possible.
More salient to privacy than the distancing of oneself
from others is a regaining of control over ones
immediate environment. I may be surrounded by other
people, but if I can determine to a significant degree
what they shall be allowed to perceive of me and know
about me and
impose on me, then to that extent I have retained a
private self.12
As an extension of our domestic sphere, a car enhances our
freedom by extending the range of our domestic autarchy,
including to an extent, our domestic schedule. Our ability
to come and go as we please allows us to privatize our
movements so that personal times are desynchronized.
The objective clock-time of the modernist railway
timetable is replaced by personalized, subjective
temporalities, as people live their lives in and
through their car(s), if they have one.13
In turn, the experience of this privacy can make public
transportation seem impersonal and inflexible. The
sophisticated climate and mood controls of modern cars
enhance this feeling of being protected from the outside
world, in particular, unsolicited interactions with other
humans, by steel and glass and speed.
The privacy that automobility makes possible spatial
and temporal isolation is closely related to the privacy
that autocentric suburbia makes possible more generally.
Never before in human history have so many individuals had
access to so much spatial and temporal distance from other
people and from the ecosystems they inhabit, and never
before have so many people lived in willfull, intentional
ignorance of the impacts that their way of life, especially
12
13

Lomasky 1997: 22
Urry 2000: 6

12

their use of energy has on their larger ecological context.

In fact, isolation from the dirtiness and overcrowding of
industrial cityscapes is just what suburbia originally
promised and what undoubtedly keeps people voting with
their tires by deciding to live there. The industrial
productive might was brought to bear on retrofitting Thomas
Jeffersons agrarian ideal of autarchy over ones own
private piece of the earth into the idea of an industriallyproduced artifact of the suburban homestead that one could
reasonably expect to purchase, of course on credit, and
given certain industrial freedoms such as a living wage
and a secure job.
However, the privacy that autonomy seems to presuppose
is not necessarily secured by industrially-produced privacy
structures like cars. McLuhan makes the point that in
America people live their private lives during the day while
they are working and go home to be with other people by
watching television. In this sense, we do not watch
television, it watches you, the way cars might be said to
drive you. Dont so many people watch television to avoid
the loneliness of their private lives? Privacy, and the
autarky it objectifies means more than physical
independence, it means having interests which are ones own.
The lonely crowd lacks autonomy because its privacy is
purchased at the expense of an autonomy of responsiveness to
the forces and interests which maintain the industrial
structures that underlie that very privacy.
The reversal of the privacy that automobility and
suburban, autocentric social planning originally promised is
the mechanized depersonalization of our everyday
interactions with other persons, and a dehumanized
architecture structured around the needs of cars rather than
pedestrians. Despite the palpable sense of agency that one
can feel at the wheel, the experience is oddly passive, in
many ways like watching television. Television is of course
an interactive medium, requiring the active synthesizing of
13

different modalities of information quickly and remaining

continuously engaged with the development of whatever
process is being televised, for example, a game show. In
this sense, driving a car exercises ones cognitive and
emotive faculties. But the passivity of television lies in
not needing to react to what you see by interacting with it.
This is not to give oneself autonomy by separating oneself
from external forces but to make oneself a docile and pliant
receiver of messages one has not chosen to heed.
As personal times are desynchronized from each other,
so spatial movements are synchronized to the rhythm of
the road. The loose interactions and mobilities of
pedestrians give way to the tightly controlled mobility
of machines To inhabit the roads of the west is to
enter a world of anonymised machines, ghostly presences
moving too fast to know directly or especially to see
through the eye.14
Privacy turns into alienation when the physical isolation it
purports to require ends up corroding another equally
important sense of autonomy crucial to human flourishing and
happiness: the republican autonomy of a person as a citizen
of a community. Without the direct participatory involvement
of individuals in the administration of their communities,
those administrative tasks are forfeited to a formal
representative council which saves the resident the labor of
exercising, and therefore developing, the ethical and
practical rationality needed to understand and manage the
affairs of a community. In turn, without the direct
involvement of citizens in its functions, the representative
council is freed to pursue its own interests without the
interference of the interests of the general populace.
Automobility contributes to this corroding of republican
autonomy by requiring the expansion of private over public
space. Minimally, the autonomy exercised and fostered by
participatory democracy requires public spaces in which to
meet and socialize and debate. Privacy becomes alienation
14

Urry 2004: 6

14

when it displaces the physical structures needed to

actualize our inherently social and political nature.
Today the public world is shrunken and fractured.
Parks, schools, libraries, post offices, town halls,
and civic centers are dispersed, underutilized, and
underfunded. Yet these civic elements determine the
quality of our shared world and express the value we
assign to community. The traditional Commons, which
once centered our communities with convivial gathering
and meeting places, is increasingly displaced by an
exaggerated private domain: shopping malls, private
clubs, and gated communities. Our basic public space,
the street, is given over to the car and its
accommodation, while our private world becomes more and
more isolated behind garage
doors and walled compounds.15
This kind of sociological critique of automobility runs
square up against the epistemological assumptions of
mainstream free-market advocates. According to Sam Kazman at
the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy
organization in Washington D.C., the very fact that people
consistently choose suburbia over urban or rural life
entails logically that those people are necessarily acting
freely and towards greater objective autonomy. Hence, to
attack the suburban ideal of privacy is to attack someones
personal lifestyle preferences which have nothing to do with
ethics.
The National Association of Home Builders polled people
on this question: If you were given the choice between
an urban townhouse, close to public transportation,
close to shopping and work versus a single-family,
detached home in an outlying suburb, which would you
choose? Eighty-three percent went for the single
family-home; seventeen percent for the urban townhouse.
Many people do not like the urban style of living, or
at least they do not want it for certain phases of
their life such as when they are going to raise
children. They like the suburbs. Statist intellectuals,
on the other hand,
despise few things more than the suburbs.16
But separation undercuts the flow of information, which
precludes rational choice, which consequently undermines
15
16

Calthorpe 1993: 23.

Kazman 2001: 3.

15

freedom. Unless they are speaking in a merely rhetorical

manner, even advocates of free-markets acknowledge that
prices only allocate scare resources in the most beneficial
and least coercive way, if they reflect the actual costs of
the production, extraction, disposal, etc. When we talk
about drawing down our solar energy bank account, or
undermining the biospheres capacity to provide the natural
nutrient recycling services necessary for all life, it is
obvious that prices are not reflecting costs. In the case of
fossil fuel energy, it means that prices are artificially
low, with the effect that the resource will not be
distributed in the way that is most beneficial to the larger
community. It will be wasted, just like in the former Soviet
Union where artificially low prices led to horrible waste
and inefficiency in industrial production. The irony of the
charge that ecological criticisms of automobility are
statist in an economic sense is that, when we consider its
external costs of energy production and waste disposal,
industrial capitalist automobility is guilty of the same
gross inefficiencies and wastefulness of the old soviet
economies.
The contemporary automobile, after a century of
engineering, is embarrassingly inefficient: Of the
energy in the fuel it consumes, at least 80 percent is
lost, mainly in the engines heat and exhaust, so that
at most only 20 percent is actually used to turn the
wheels. Of the resulting force, 95 percent moves the
car, while only 5 percent moves the driver, in
proportion to their respective weights. Five percent of
20 percent is one percent
not a gratifying result from American cars that burn
their own weight in
gasoline every year.17
When one considers the virtual monopoly that automobile
transportation has in suburban America where one generally
has no choice but to have a car, then the assumption that
car drivers are acting freely in choosing automobility as a
form of transit cannot be maintained. When one considers
17

Hawken, Lovins, Lovins 1999.

16

the Bush Administrations use of military maintain cheap oil

prices for American drivers, there is an ironic sense in
which environmentalists are the party of free markets, while
the Republican establishment has forsaken free markets in
favor of a military-command economy: that is, when it comes
to the market for the worlds most heavily traded economy,
petroleum.
In any case, the degrees of physical private space that
affluent citizens of industrialized have grown accustomed to
desire as a normal, justifiable expectation, is neither
sustainable nor just. It is not ecologically-rational to
expect as much private space because the energy and material
flows required to maintain it is greater that the
sustainable yield of the earths natural bioproductivity.18
Whether we like it or not, most of us in the industrialized
North are going to have to expect less personal space in the
future. This might just allow us to retrieve as sense of
privacy which can be easily overshadowed by our longings for
physical isolation; the privacy which one finds by finding
ones one unique niche in society, in a hidden space created
by a web of relations; where the privacy is a result of
ones unique function within a community. Individuals in
some aboriginal societies have secret names for their
private selves that only they know, in order to name that
part of them that no one can touch, even if they are living
together in a hut.19 Paradoxically, it just might be the
case that to truly feel a non-alienating sense of privacy
requires living within a community dense enough with social
roles to create a unique set of spiritual coordinates on
which to locate ones privacy.
4. Rights

18

By one estimate, every day the worldwide economy burns an amount of

energy the planet required 10,000 days (or about 27 years) to create.
19
Robert Wolff mentions this about the Sngoi aborigines of Malaysia.
(Wolff 2001).

17

It is ethically obvious to some that automobility is a

right, and there are plausible reasons for thinking so. But
everything turns on how you construe rights. If freedom has
often been identified with self-rule, the specific cultural
expectations and assumptions about what sort of private
sphere of agency (i.e. what sort of home) is minimally
required, and maximally permitted, in order to count as
having secured the freedom of the individual, has altered
radically. This is due in part to changes in how
individuality has been conceptually measured. At the
beginning of the American republic, Thomas Jefferson thought
that true freedom would be embodied in the yeoman farmer,
who would own his own land and farm, making him economically
self-sufficient, with lots of space to range over. By the
end of the 19th century, the inequities of the Gilded Age
had drastically reduced that measure to all except the upper
classes and millions of workers began to hope for the more
modest provisions of industrial freedom, forming the
ethical basis of the modern welfare state. At the beginning
th
of the 20 century, mass production and national markets for
commodities offered an enticing surrogate consumer
freedom. Making the automobile, and then the suburban life
based on the automobile available, the liberal capitalist
dream of unparalleled private dominion for the masses could
be kept alive. The consumerist version of the liberalpolitical ideal of a pursuit of property, as a pursuit of
greater consumer buying freedom, finds its deepest
expression in the purchase of a car. As the major object of
individual consumption after housing, cars satisfy not
merely our predispositions for greater mobility and privacy,
they satisfy our conventional expectations for material
affluence as an index of social status and perceived selfworth. Status is hierarchical according to its very logic,
since it expresses an underlying interest in rank-ordering
of individuals with deep social and biological roots.
People love cars in large part because of, not in spite of,
18

their very bulkiness and expensiveness. If you can afford to

have one, you must categorically have the social-economic
background or the craftiness or both, to control the
requisite resources to procure one, which makes cars
reliable indicators of social standing and individual
economic productiveness.
This whole line of thought rests upon a view of rights,
however, that rests upon an ecologically-irrational view of
the normative context within which rights make sense. It is
instructive to consider that the thinkers and actors who
established the political and economic foundations of the
American Republic could not have anticipated, let alone
imagined, the ecological crisis that we now face. Beginning
with the premise of the moral value of individual freedom,
they were concerned with the political problem of
coordinating the economic activity of individuals, in order
to protect them from each other, and to protect them in ways
that would lead to increasing productivity and so material
well-being for all. It was inconceivable to them that the
seemingly infinite natural resources of the North American
continent could one day become more scarce than human labor,
thus giving us the problem of unemployment with all of its
social costs, or that the world would one day be too small
to support the possibility of a better life for all human
beings. The American Declaration of Independence does not
refer to ecological limits or conditions to rights; my right
to life and the fruits of my labor (i.e. property) is only
limited by my duties to acknowledge your right to life and
property. And my right to appropriate Nature is only limited
by the extent of my labor. As John Locke put it,
God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave
it
them
for
their
benefit,
and
the
greatest
conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it,
it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain
common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the
industrious and rational (and

19

labor was to be his title to it)20

The ecologically irrationality of our own expectations
about personal material affluence, like the ecologically
irrationality of the millions of Chinese who dream of
automobility, reflects this flawed ethics which took no
notice of ecological conditions. Where classical liberal
political economy theorizes the origins of political rule in
a state of nature where individuals act freely to acquire
property and to improve their lot, ecology sees individuals
as organisms, among other organisms located within
ecosystems. Within this framework, the continuities are more
evident than the boundaries of individuality. This is
because ecosystems involve the continuous flow of energy and
materials (nutrients), through and among the living
organisms and the abiotic, or non-living materials that
together make up the biosphere: the continuous, selfmaintaining field of living activity that is as alive as any
cat or cell or a coral reef. Matter is not simply something
we work with our hands or machines in order to pursue
happiness, but something that is continually cycling through
us in the forms of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus,
oxygen and hydrogen. Consequently, from an ecological
perspective, human freedom needs to be understood as
conditioned by the requirement to perpetuate and enhance
these life-sustaining cycles. When the burning of petroleum
in millions of internal combustion engines overburdens the
carbon recycling services (provided free of charge) by the
earths natural carbon sinks, giving rise to our nightmarish
global warming scenario, our notions about how much
affluence to expect from our economies runs into ecological
facts which our underlying political philosophy never
considered. It is going to require a lot of ethical
imagination, on top of a lot of social and economic stress,
to rethink, and to renegotiate at a global-societal level, a
20

Locke 1980.

20

view of individual freedom which takes account of these

ecological facts.
At least since the limits to growth debates in the
early 1970s, green activists, new urbanist architects,
radical social ecologists, green political theorists and
disgruntled drivers among others, have imagined an
ecological conception of freedom. The very idea that
ethical significance applies solely to human beings in
virtue of their unique spiritual-rational individuality (for
example, often they alone are said to have souls) is an
ecological fiction because individuality itself is an
ecological fiction. Individuals always exist within
niches, and are shaped and supported by complex webs of
interdependency with countless other beings and nutrient and
energy cycles. This does not mean that therefore rights are
illusory or that there is no basis in reality for
ascribing rights to persons. It is reason enough to observe
that human beings are fragile, sentient beings whose
interests, including having access to what they minimally
need to exist, are easily subverted by hostile forces, and
that as Abraham Lincoln put it, it cannot be ethical for one
to be enslaved to the interests of another.
From an ecological perspective, this notion of rights
makes sense, but does not go far enough. If having interests
is what plausibly gives a being ethical significance (by
giving us a reason for taking into account that beings
welfare relative to our actions), then ethical significance
pertains to every thing in nature which can be said to have
interests. Logically, if our relations of interdependency
are as real as the outlines of our physical body, then
ethics must be extended to consider the interests of the
other beings we are interdependent on.21 Since healthy
ecosystems maximize the carrying capacity of a bioregion
21

To say that the interests of, say a spotted-oil, must be taken into
consideration when considering the ethics of an action or policy
affecting those interests, does not mean that every interest must be
uniformly weighed, only that it should not be ignored.

21

through maximizing the bioproductivity of the available

energy and nutrient flows (through synergistic and symbiotic
relationships among organisms), it is in the ethical
interest of all organisms, for us human beings who have such
knowledge about and influence over the environment, to
protect and enhance healthy ecosystems. Green political
theorist Robyn Eckersley has articulated this ecological
challenge to our traditional liberal understanding of rights
as an ambit claim for ecological democracy:
all those potentially affected by a risk should have
some meaningful opportunity to participate or otherwise
be represented in the making of
policies or decisions that generate the risk.22
The claim has radical implications despite its ethical
commonsense basis in the notion that persons should not be
subjected to avoidable risks without their consent. For one,
an ecological view of democracy would need to enlarge its
picture of what constitutes citizenship.
The ambit claim argues that in relation to the making
of any decision entailing potential risk, the relevant
community moral community must be understood as the
affected community or community at risk, tied together
not by common passports, nationality, bloodline,
ethnicity, or religion but by the potential to be
harmed by the particular proposal, and not necessarily
in
the same way or to the same degree.23
For another, a nation-state that was based on such an
acknowledgement would need to solve the problem of
ecosystems involving unrepresented interests. A post-liberal
green state would not simply need to represent the interests
of its vocal citizens, it would need to serve as ecological
trustee for the ecosystems which cannot say what they need
to thrive. Such a political culture would require a socialeconomic system whose operation did not depend upon the
systematic cultivation of our most selfish, materialacquisitive impulses, in order for us to broaden our ethical
imaginations enough to understand what those silent
22

Eckersley 2004: 111.

22

interests were. Such a change may not seem possible, but it

is very likely necessary.
5. Nature
Correlative to idea of freedom as technological mastery is
the idea of freedom as essentially opposed to nature, as
something to master and reconfigure in order to satisfy
human desires. Perhaps better than any other industrial
artifact, automobiles symbolize the gigantism of Iron Age
economic power and design. Constituting the largest industry
in the world, fueled by the most heavily traded commodity
(petroleum), and made of thousands of energy-intensive parts
shaped by a hundred years of intense design innovation,
automobiles embody the basic premise of economic modernity
that the advance of human civilization, as an advance of
human agency, means overcoming the necessities that nature
imposes on how we live. This is accomplished by learning
to use natures productivity, through science and
engineering, to further human purposes, essentially making
the physical conditions of human life more comfortable, less
risky and more affluent.
Perhaps the biggest conceptual roadblock to thinking
about freedom from an ecological perspective is the
intuitive idea that freedom is just fundamentally opposed to
nature. For all of their differences, both Marxists and
capitalists, both social democrats and conservative
republicans, have generally assumed that human freedom
requires the domination of nature, and that human freedom
will only be complete when nature is fully mastered.24 On
this point, there is virtual unanimity among such prophets
of modernity as Rene Descartes, John Locke, Karl Marx and
Sigmund Freud, that the advance of human agency requires the
23

Eckersley 2004: 113.

Bookchin argues that the only difference between the capitalist and
the Marxist-socialist view of nature is that Marxists avoid to dominate
nature while avoiding the domination of the worker class by the
capitalist class.

24

23

coercive domination of nature, both external and internal,

by the technically-empowered human will, and that the costs
of such domination are compensated for by the manifest
rewards of civilization. This view of freedom has deep
metaphysical roots in our idea of nature and our idea of
freedom of will as an uncaused cause. The so-called problem
of free will arises from the idea of nature as a system of
causal regularities determined by strict physical laws of
nature which necessitate that anything that happens behaves
lawfully, hence, unfreely. Since everything that happens is
therefore caused, nothing is free in the sense of being an
uncaused cause, or an unmoved mover. So is freedom even
possible? Thats of course the philosophical question. There
is an economic correlate to this metaphysical conundrum that
has more obvious ethical ramifications. If we are not
spontaneously supplied by our natural environs with
everything we need to live in flourish as human beings, then
the stinginess of nature must be overcome by the
expropriation of the earths bioproductivity, essentially
through technical and social advances in the productivity
and division of human labor.
Given these ecological assumptions about human beings
that they have infinite insatiable desires and about the
natural environment that mother nature is stingy and only
provides us with what we need if we force her to - a view of
freedom as antagonistic to nature follows logically. But
both premises are highly questionable. The idea of a being
a human being which has infinite desires unshaped by
natural limits is not a realistic picture of human nature.
It is the ecologically-nonsensical fiction of a free
rational agent which acts according to a disembodied,
denatured assessment of its needs. The fact that so many
individuals in the consumer classes of industrial society
find themselves desiring ever more levels of material
affluence is not evidence supporting the message of the
prophets, but simply the self-fulfilling prophecy of a
24

society based on the premise of infinite denatured wanting.

We have built an economy which must either grow or die, and
therefore have saddled ourselves with a societal ethics
which requires us to act as if our happiness required an
endlessly increasing consumption of material conveniences.
Freedom as the mastery of nature turns into domestication by
an industrial machine, the freedom of the rat running her
race, or in the poignant phrase of the political
philosopher, a joyless quest for joy. The reversal of the
technologically-driven quest for freedom from scarcity is
the enslavement of the self by new needs. Bookchins
social ecological perspective again:
Although a hunter-gatherer community may be free from
the needs that beleaguer us, it must still answer to
very strict material imperatives. Such freedom as it
has is the product not of choice but of limited means
of life. What makes it free are the limitations of
its tool-kit, not an expansive knowledge of the
material world Although choice presupposes a
sufficiency in the means of life, it does not imply the
existence of a mindless abundance of goods that
smothers the individuals capacity to select use-values
rationally, to define his or her needs in terms of
qualitative, ecological
25
humanistic, indeed philosophical criteria.
We dont have to run the race, though. For most of
their natural history, human beings have lived freely in
ecologically sustainable communities. The idea that our
preindustrial and preagricultural ancestors toiled endlessly
for the necessities of life is a myth necessitated by the
operating requirements of industrial culture. According to
the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller,
Our ancestors did not spend all thei rtime worrying
about survival problems. They were among the longestlived species on the planet, which implies that their
daily risk of death was miniscule. Like most great
apes, they probably spent their time worrying about
social and sexual problems. For most of evoltion, our
ancestors ranged across wide areas without being tied
to a single home base or territory. They owned no more
than they could carry, had no money, inherited no
25

Bookchin 2003: 69.

25

wealth, and could not store food today to insure

against starvation next month. If individuals
consistently appeared healthy, energetic, and well-fed,
it was not because they were born rich. It must have
been because they were good at foraging and good at
making friends who
took care of them during rough patches.26
As our anthropological understanding of aborigines continues
to deepen, shedding itself of the Victorian ethical biases
that distorted our perception, it is becoming less clear
that industrial society allows us to work less, or that it
provides us with a richer life, a life with greath wealth.
That we find it patently counterintuitive that stone age
humans might have enjoyed more leisure time than we do only
shows how much our thinking about freedom is based on
political myth, rather than anthropological fact. Of course,
ancient societies have also succumbed to ecological fate and
relative scarcity is a fact of biological evolution. But the
scarcity of food and water that confronts the human race now
is not the result of nature, it is the result of industrial
food production and the cheap and abundant energy that
temporarily increased the natural carrying capacity of the
earths biosphere, creating a bubble which had to burst. The
current global crisis in the food and water supply is the
result of technology, not a natural problem in need of a
technical fix.
If nature is not indeed stingy, and does not require us
to endlessly toil to pull from her clenched fists the scarce
resources required to self-maintain in the face of entropy
and natural selection, then freedom is not essentially
opposed to nature. If instead, nature is viewed
ecologically, not as inert resources to be expropriated
but as increasingly complicated patterns of integration and
wholeness within biodiversity, then freedom might plausibly
be seen as a moment within the development of nature itself.
From this perspective, to remove oneself from contact with
(or awareness of) ecological constraints on how one lives is

26

to remove oneself from the place which gives ones life

meaning. Correlatively, to be free is not to master nature,
it is to live in community with nature, where freedom is a
shared project; where nature offers us sustinence and
direction, and where we in turn offer nature our own
uniquely human insights into how natures ecological ends of
wholeness and biodiversity can be furthered. Despite the
many senses in which automobility does in fact enhance or
complement our agency, it is clear that, from an ecological
perspective, each of these senses contains a deep ambiguity.
This calls for a change in our concept of freedom. Our
destination may be too far to drive, but just close enough
to walk.

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Eckersley, R. (2004) The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and
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Miller 2000: 182.

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Thoreau, H. D. (1993) Civil Disobedience and Other Essays. New York:

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