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The human nature is a contradictory one. Since childhood we all observe and learn how dependant on our immediate environment we are. We try to recognize our personal role and place in it. Yet we fail in fully acknowledging the
responsibility of each individual in keeping it (I don’t want use the word “clean”), let’s say, less polluted. Sure, one working day of a big industrial plant affects our environment more
than one person in, maybe, his entire live, but there are so many of us. We all want live in warm houses, drive cars, buy new clothes, fly in a couple of hours to the other end of the country, have things wrapped in neat plastic packaging… Well, this is how our world, full of humans works and affects the environment. We, as individuals, can’t do
much in terms of changing it. But what we can do at least, is to take a closer look at our own actions.
Thanks to the efforts of the doctors and media everybody knows that smoking is a one foolish and dangerous habit. The statistics of a cancer rate and x-ray photos of black lungs and whole contaminated bodies are enough to scare or at least make aware almost everybody (if people still smoke, its because they think bad things can never happens to
them). Thanks again to the doctors and media we are aware of a “second hand smoking”. The smokers have the decency not to puff smoke into other people faces, not to smoke in rooms or go outside, or sit in distant corners in restaurants. If all this is very effective is debatable, but still, its shows to certain degree, our enlightenment in this
matter.
We also all know how poisonous the exhaust fumes are. Nobody likes to stay right behind a running car; everybody complains about polluted cities and in general acknowledges the quality of a fresh country air. But why people still let their engines run without any necessity that is a question and a problem I like to bring to attention.
How often I have seen mothers dropping their children in kindergarten or chatting with other mothers outside and leaving the motor on, covering the playground and entrance to nursery school in clouds of exhaust? Countless times. How often have I seen men and women, also very educated looking, going in coffee shops, buying fast lunch and drinks and
letting park places being filled with the scent of gasoline? I’ve been seeing it more when I like to. Does the school bus need more than half an hour to get warm or cool (this is how long the bus driver let the engines run on a schoolyard). I don’t think so. What do the truck drivers, including small inner city deliveries trucks, who never, but
never turn the motors off think? Well, I guess they don’t get paid for thinking…
Around thirty years ago the awareness of pollution in the air and the car as the source of it took hold in dense populated countries of Europe. The experiments showed that there is no harm to the motor in turning it on and off. That the cutting off of the engines in cases of thousands of people using car in towns, brings the level of carbon
monoxide down considerably. The laws were made and the substantial fines were set. Today, on certain summer days, when the measurements of the carbon monoxide is high, the cities make speed restrictions, ask over the radio not to use cars without any need and encourage use of public transportation as an alternative. Some cities have even car free
weekends and people enjoy walking or driving bicycles on the open streets.
Thank to the circumstances, Nova Scotia has no big issues with volume of traffic. Despite complaints about rush hour in Halifax, it’s all pretty much local problems. Backups and traffic jams are seldom experienced by most Nova Scotians, as is the car smoke over the main streets of their towns. But still…
Do people need to run their car engines in their own backyards? Is it so necessary to get into warmed up cars in the winter and let the exhaust cloud the driveway for quarter of an hour? Is it so unbearable to sit in a car just with open windows in the summer? Must we have air conditioners and poison the parking lots of supermarkets? Do we think
that the air conditioner takes the same polluted air from outside and carries it inside? What is the sense of a scent free school when the schoolyard is full of stench?
And just a practical question… How much gas and money could be saved just by simple turning motion of a key?
The answers to those questions are not too difficult to find. We don’t need to do many things we do and we can at least try not to do them.
Unfortunately, there is no immediate solution to the problem.
One way: ask people to turn the motor off. It works. Sometimes for a while, mostly up to the moment when you turn away.
But to make people cut off the motor of a car of their free will, we need to raise public awareness to the problem and its environmental and health hazards. Like in the case with smoking, we need a public campaign. Not one report, but the constant attention of the media is needed. Schools need to teach children to save our environment and health on
this very basic level. Young drivers need to learn about this problem in driver’s school and CAA needs to inform its members.
Waking up the awareness is a very long, laborious, but rewarding process.
In the last decades, our societies have undergone many transformations.
We were enlightened in the matters of smoking, child abuse, globalization, “green house” effect, sex, drug addictions, democracies and dictatorships, human rights and value of human life. Compared to all that, working on the problem of running car engines, air pollution and taking care of our own and our neighbors health should be just a simple
task.
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