Dave Cohen is an integrative psychotherapist (davecohencounseling.com) specializing in approaches in mind/body modalities and ecopsychology. He also works as a consultant for Go! Vermont, providing free bike consultations for all Vermonters. Cohen's transportation work has been featured in numerous podcasts and the internationally released cargo bike documentary Motherload. He is writing a book, The Biggest Blindspot: Super-Sizing Our Bodies in a More-than-Human World.
BRATTLEBORO-When I'm walking around Brattleboro, people often fling a question at me: "Hey, where's your bike?"
Many of you may know that I work for the state, helping people shift up to a bike or cargo bike instead of driving. And it's no secret that I use a bike - often an electric cargo bike - to go shopping, do landscaping runs, or give a friend a ride. Recently, I even hauled a chair that was closer in size to a small couch. In truth, I also walk quite a bit, though generally not schlepping large furniture on foot.
But this bike question is fascinating because I never ask people on the street about their cars.
There's something simply revealing here: One can be seen and recognized on a bike. Truly, if I had made all my trips in an automobile, hardly anyone would have noticed my presence. I'd be just one of an anonymous drone of vehicles swarming around town.
However, what's even more curious about the inquiry regarding the whereabouts of my bike is that I have heard it from a broad political spectrum: well-known liberals, middle-of-the-road moderates, off-road independents, super lefties, seemingly apolitical people, and even outspoken environmentalists. Indeed, I've also heard a variation of the question from a secretive MAGA enthusiast. I suspect there is no political corner where this question wouldn't show up.
In this era of political divisiveness and ideological fragmentation, one thing appears to hold us together practically more than anything else: "automobility."
The word "automobility" implies precisely what automobiles do for us - they are "self-mobile." They move us around with great speed, power, and comfort but with minimal physical effort while disengaging our emotional and sensory awareness of the human and more-than-human world outside the car. That's explicitly what creates the perceived comfort and convenience.
Automobility is an age-old human aspiration in ancient mythologies, children's stories, and even our dreams. Miraculously, in less than a century, we have made this dream come true for just about everyone. Automobility is a blessing. I enjoy it and am thankful when I need it.
However, when taken to absurd extremes and left unquestioned, the marvel and godsend of automobility has degenerated into something entirely different: the nightmare and curse of automobilism.
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Automobilism, like alcoholism (or any substance addiction), includes a devastating loss of executive functioning that short-circuits our ability to recognize the damage we unleash upon ourselves and those around us. But in the case of automobilism, the destructive powers are effectively unleashed globally upon the entirety of the human and other-than-human world.
And right now, with the confluence of the state of our planet and this insane political moment, I believe it's time to challenge our deeply held foundational fantasies. Questioning our avowedly secular relationship with the automobile should absolutely be a top priority in that regard.
Automobilism, like the MAGA movement and its "drill, baby drill" fixation, is firmly rooted in a circa-1950s worldview. MAGA clearly wants to shift all of us in reverse to an era when we either didn't know, didn't want to know, or just didn't care about a lot of things we know about today.
Automobilism is uniquely implicated in climate change and the hottest years on record. We've also seen massively destructive resource wars for oil (and soon for rare-earth elements), and the heartbreaking worldwide effects of wildlife habitat fragmentation, along with the daily slaughter of mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles we pass off as roadkill.
And then we have the profound social and health impacts of automobilism: sedentary lifestyles, vehicular exhaust, and sonic terrorism (those purposely loud and belching cars and trucks), defunding of transit, the surge in toxic microplastics from tire wear, particulate matter from brake dust, pervasive noise pollution that affects the bodies of the young, old, and everyone in between, and the land use absurdities of urban, suburban, and rural sprawl. (Maybe it's time to call it "sprural development.")
That's just the tip of the melting iceberg of automobilism.
Sadly, most of these issues will only worsen by indiscriminately embracing high-tech auto dependency - the "tailpipe-less dream" of electric cars. They are a fantasy motivated by addiction where virtually everything stays the same to "solve" a colossal problem. We have already lost so much of our beloved Vermont to parking lots, strip malls, oversized roads, impoverished soundscapes, and endless "sprural" land use. Electric cars will only accelerate automobilism and all this decline.
It's past time to stop fooling ourselves. We have a choice: Either we remain in cruise control along the same old dead-end highway inspired by an era of Wonder Bread and Mickey Mouse, or we change lanes toward the signpost pointing us toward ecological and social well-being.
But how do we make a meaningful shift?
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As with any addiction, the first step to addressing automobilism is admitting there's a problem. So, to start with, we have to firmly get into our bones that driving a car is absolutely not a neutral or unremarkable activity. Really, it's a choice with monumental consequences.
Simply put, you can't drive in neutral. There's no middle-of-the-road here. All it takes to know this is rudimentary common sense when we look, listen, and feel into the world we have created.
And yet, there is a deeper shadow side to this.
Automobilism's most profound silence is about proportion and scale - we unknowingly are transformed into super-sized beings in our cars. This "super-size me" form of mobility is not just about largeness but also speed, power, weight, noise, and - perhaps more than anything else - a form of sanctioned violence that has colonized much of our world.
In a car, we are remolded into technologically modified organisms, boundlessly faster, bigger, heavier, and magnitudes more deadly than any living being on the land or in the air.
And if I'm right about this super-size phenomenon, the massive paradox is that we have made ourselves exceedingly small by reconstructing the world to fit our technologically hulking, uber-powered bodies. We've diminished who we are, everything around us, and our ability to imagine far-more-healthful alternatives. Or, as ecopsychologist David Kidner states, "Our imagination shrinks to fit a shrunken world."
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So, why isn't all this so obvious?
One indisputable reason is that the master enablers of all super-sized bodies, corporations - specifically, those that compose the industrial-automotive complex - have dished out billions of dollars to see to it that we are wholly blinded and brainwashed.
We've all been pummeled by the countless car-related commercials and marketing campaigns to normalize an absurdly out-of-scale way of living. And, of course, nearly everything has been built to accommodate cars, and virtually everyone is driving. From a certain angle, this might appear too uncomfortably close to the themes in The Matrix or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And maybe we can't see this because as much as we think we get into an automobile, it gets into us.
Perhaps in this way, automobilism is a democracy killer. Even though we've been sold on the car as the ultimate expression of freedom, as hard as it is to believe, it is a form of stealthy coercion. In these bulging bodies we've been coerced into atomizing ourselves off from the lived world as we increasingly marginalize anyone or anything not in a car to an intensely unlivable world - a tragedy of the commons that's conceivably antithetical to democracy.
And in doing so, we've collaborated with behemoth corporate bodies to grant them monstrous political power. That's all now nakedly revealed in the endgame of Donald Trump's "energy emergency" by gutting the Environmental Protection Agency and so many regulatory guardrails for the purpose of "drill, baby drill." Author Cara New Daggett states that this "petro-masculinity" also goes hand in hand with authoritarian rule, climate denial, gender anxiety, white patriarchal rule, and misogyny.
Clearly, just being aware of automobilism is not enough. We need a critical mass of people to shift to appropriate and active forms of mobility that return us to our bodies and our sensory and emotional engagement with the world.
That's what I help Vermonters with by providing free bike consultations through a state contract. The focus is on assisting people with adopting the new range of e-bikes and e-cargo bikes. These bikes are a huge game changer for riding distances, climbing hills, taking the kids to school, riding in four seasons, and so much more. I like to call this work "car-reduction therapy."
If you have to drive for everything you do, from commuting to picking up a quart of milk, you really need to stick your neck out to support significant changes. You should be a strong voice for traffic calming, more bike and walking infrastructure, slower speed limits, car sharing, and just less driving. Lots less.
You should also firmly back better planning strategies to build smarter communities, help curb sprawl, and support funding for public transportation. Really, we all need to do this.
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In my primary work as a psychotherapist, I am less interested in technological interventions than in who we are in terms of our sensed and embodied attunement to what is out there. So, while this is not a call for the end of the car or any claim that you are a bad person if you drive, this is a call for radical change and a politics of possibility rather than impossibility. Why now?
In this MAGA clusterfuck juncture, we need to know more than ever who we are, what we are doing, and how we are impacting our world and the political implications of automobilism.
This has little to do with "saving" the Earth, your "carbon footprint," taking down fossil fuel giants, or even "fighting" climate change, which is not a problem but a symptom of a problem.
It's about our mindful and sacred relations with this gorgeous Vermont land and its peopled communities, animal neighbors, biosphere, and soundscapes.
It's about inspiring a human-scale quality in how we move and live, and in what we build. It's also about being in touch with our emotional intelligence and imagination to move beyond the tired, broken thing we already have and reach toward something genuinely worth having.
Mark Twain once quipped, "You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus." As Vermonters, I believe we have the imaginative vision to differentiate between what an addicted, automobilized world has imposed upon us and our power to reclaim who we actually are. How we move in this world really, really matters, and this political and ecological moment is motioning to us to shift and shift big.
Besides, what do you believe Donald Trump would think about all this? That's how you know when we're really onto something.
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