It was a typical situation on a Sunday evening. My 14 year old daughter, having spent the day with her friends, called and asked for a ride home. Something in me resisted driving the car seven blocks to pick her up, but I didn't want her to walk home alone in the dark. Last time we were in this situation, I rode her bike over and jogged home with her. She rejected my offer to do that again, with that classic teenage tone of disbelief that a parent could be so unreasonable. Clearly, the easiest thing would have been to jump in the car and give her that sacred ride home.
Instead, I decided to walk over to get her, with my younger daughter and our dog, Leo, as company. To my surprise, the walk home was uncontested, even magical. A cloudy, cool evening, the still air rich with the smell of fallen leaves. My daughters walked together, hand in hand, talking of the day. None of this would have been ours, cloistered in a car.
Squeeze the change out of climate by squeezing fossil fuels out of daily life.
