Verlyn Klinkenborg, who often writes about “the rural life” on the New York Times editorial page, switches gears today with a meditation on our nation’s ill-fated love affair with the automobile:

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

77% of Americans drive alone to work, as I learned yesterday from a Daily Kos diary by friday durdikova. My fellow Kossack provides a pie chart from the U.S. Census Bureau showing how Americans get to work, and the numbers for those of us who walk, bike or take mass transit are, alas, only a tiny slice of the pie. Friday durdikova reaches the same conclusion as Klinkenborg:

The simple truth is we are past the tipping point, and at a certain point in our future, we will be forced to give up these single-serving cars, and we will have to share. We will have to change where we live, how we grow food, how we get electrical power– we will have to radically change the American way life. It is not sustainable. Period.

And the sooner we can come to that realization, the sooner we can come up with real solutions. Practical solutions. We can do it voluntarily or have the circumstances force us.

It is our choice.

To learn more about alternative forms of transportation, check out daclarke.org.