Reasons to Car Share

Now, before you think I’m getting all ‘eco’ on you, read on. There’s lots more to car sharing than saving the planet (although I must admit, that’s where my motive truly lies!).

For those of you familiar with my usual style, human behaviour seems to be the default theme for my writing. Let me move beyond that a little, and talk about our relationship with our environment. This topic is known in anthropological circles as Human Ecology, and trust me, it’s a pretty cool concept. 

For the purpose of this blog, I’m going to look into the ‘office environment’, and how we react to our colleagues. Why are people so reluctant to move past the confines of the office to socialise with those they spend most of their waking hours with? (Or is it just me…?)

I plan on breaking that bubble through lift sharing, and today I brought in two colleagues. It seems like a pretty good balance to be able to save money, save the environment (maybe not immediately, but it’s a start!) and also build a relationship with some of the great people I work with. Maybe it will catch on – or maybe it won’t. But perhaps reading this might sway you to send out that anxious first email to see who lives close by. You’ve got to start somewhere?!

So let me trace back the steps that led me to write to you about lift sharing:

It’s something I’ve also been brought up with, living in a small village with a close community, it seemed completely normal to have a group of friends pick me up on the way to school. And as we continued our journey toward the school gates, we’d do the odd detour, or send a small group up one of the alleys to fetch more friends to join our ‘walking bus’, making sure we got to school on time and together. 

I see the same sort of thing now on my drive to work, the only difference being the addition of adults and high-visibility jackets! But groups of children, huddled together discussing playground politics is a sight that I’m sure we’re all familiar with. I took it a step further and ended up accidentally applying it to my University days. 

I quickly figured out who lived where on campus, and on the walk in we’d stop at various halls to pick up others on my course, thus arriving at lectures and seminars together. I can see how this may make me look like an eccentric villager – ‘you can take the girl out of the village, but you can’t take the village out of the girl’! But surely humans have been grouping together since day one – belonging to a group and arriving together is a perfectly natural thing.  

I refuse to be labelled peculiar for falling back on my roots!  Plus it makes the journey there much more interesting and probably stopped a lot of hushed chatting during lectures because we’d already had a good natter by the time we arrived. Win, win situation?

So, back to car sharing. Why can’t I create the walking bus of my childhood through lift sharing with my colleagues, and encourage others to break their morning routine and do the same?

Maybe this might sway it – here comes the eco rant! 

We have now left the Holocene and entered what has been called the Anthropocene. This epoch shift has been identified because human activities have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems, and so we are now actively changing our environment. This isn’t just about greenhouse gases, we’re changing plate tectonics and natural balances, and the results could be pretty horrifying if left to continue at the rate they are. Unsurprisingly the date given to signify the start of the Anthropocene is 1750, the start of the industrial revolution. 

So what’s next? Well, we need to react, and quickly, as we’re fast approaching a one-way street and they’ll be little we can do about it from there on in. What we need is a global shift in our behaviour, a collective movement that ties us to one goal. Or, as is more likely, we need a butterfly effect – a small change in local behaviour that can spread and result in a much larger response.

So, let’s do what we do best: group together and react. Car sharing might seem like a small effort to change global issues… but at least with this option we can be sociable and save a bit of money in the process.