Dear Terry,
Hope I did not seem too grumpy in my rant about driving 60 km for croissants. Times have changed, and I'm very conscious of these issues.
When I was a kid in California, no one imagined climate change as we understand it today. Gas was cheap. We still had what were called "gas wars," when the gas stations of different companies would compete with increasingly low prices -- sometimes getting down to 10 cents per gallon.
Travel symbolized the open West and a world where the Interstate Highway System had only just begun. The beats and the Zen masters were big -- at least for my crowd. John Cage and Virgil Thompson could drive across the US in three days, while the road meant freedom for Jack Kerouac and his buddies.
Today, I see it differently. I turn down more travel opportunities than I accept, not because of funding or time, but because I am terribly aware of what it means to go a great distance for a few minutes' talk. For that reason, in fact, I'm exploring the possibility of a studio that will allow members of our faculty to accept speaking invitations without leaving Melbourne when it is only a matter of speaking rather than workshops, teaching, or collaborative enterprise.
I hope I did not seem overly judgmental in saying that a 60-km-trip each way for croissants exemplifies the wrong kind of passion. Back when I was a kid, my friends and I would have thought it heroic. That was a world in which cars meant freedom, a world in which no one could have anticipated the catastrophic climate changes driven by greenhouse gases.
Of course, if James Lovelock is right, the situation is already so bad that nothing we can do will head off what's coming. It could have done if we have begun to correct course back in the 1960s, but we didn't. So my concern may just be silly ... if so, one more trip to the best bakery in Western Australia is little difference.
So far, at least, I've been hoping that we might make a modest difference. Thus my concern.
Ken
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