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Car-Free Day to celebrate the alternatives to being auto dependent By
Julie Sulunga Jake Gibson and Max Kaufman are students at Utah State University planning a walk to help commerate Car-Free Day Sept. 21. The idea of this walk is to get word out that there are alternatives to being car dependant. The walk will start at the Logan Transit District station to signify the city's cooperation in having a readily accessible bus system that is free and will take you almost anywhere you need to go in the valley. "With this walk we want to educate the public and get the word out to the politicians and policy makers of the community," said Kaufman, co-planner of the walk. The idea for the walk sprung from Gibson and Kaufman while hiking the Wellsville mountains and talking about the current situation this country is in. They started talking about the recent bombing of the World Trade Center and how that has affected the nation to the bitter core. "This nation needs to have a different lifestyle that is free and independent from having to depend on oil," said Gibson, also co-planner. "People are bound to oil from our basic necessities of food, heating our homes and the clothing we wear," Gibson said. The example of a cereal box is used to bring this forth. A box of cereal is made from wood pulp, a natural resource. The cereal is in a plastic bag which is made with petro-chemical materials. The grains in the cereal are harvested using oil-driven machinery. The fertilizer used for the harvesting is made from petro chemicals. The cereal is shipped to various parts of the world using oil to fuel the ship. And that is just one box of cereal. Oil is not a renewable natural resource, meaning it can't replenish itself after it has been drilled from the earth. "There will be a time when there is no more oil to drill in any part of the world," Gibson said. "Why should we wait until that time comes, why not look for another means now?" By finding an alternative to oil, land can be saved. Whenever the United States goes into a country to drill oil, they disrupt the way of life of the people that live there. So much of what happened with the terroist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was most likely over oil. By cutting the need for oil out in our daily lives people can become part of a more independent nation because there will be no ties binding citizens or the government to the whim of other countries. "Our generation cares about our lands and we don't want to see a nation in conflict," Gibson said. "We are doing this walk just to be heard instead of just riding our bicycles."
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