Things Natural, Wild & Car-Free
The motivation behind this blog is to provide examples of connecting with nature without need of a car — and, more generally, seeking wildness wherever one happens to be — and to liberate the car-free lifestyle from its modern stereotype as something for urbanites only.
A bird noticer (sometimes) with a camera
In large part, this blog is devoted to sharing photographs of birds and other treasures of nature. Over the past six years or so, I have developed a passion for wild nature and a particular fondness for birds, who feel to me like my nearest kin (which only makes sense, I suppose, given that I’m a dinosaur). Around 2021 I developed a photography hobby, but it has always been derivative from those passions. I never set out to excel at photography as an art form. Photography, to me, is a tool to help achieve two main goals: (1) sharing my passion for birds and nature with others; (2) forcing myself to refocus my attention on something pleasant when I am distracted by other thoughts or stimuli (trying to keep a small flighty bird in frame is a great mindfulness exercise).
Friends sometimes encourage me to share my bird photos with a wider audience, but I drag my feet. After all, if people want to look at photos of birds, there are plenty of much more highly skilled and tech-savvy bird photographers out there; I’m just a casual hobbyist who delights in birds and finds peace in the quest to capture them on the camera. Moreover, I travel too much to cover any local bird beat (and not to mention that my travels are to Europe, not exactly the part of the world that comes to anyone’s mind as an avi-tourism destination). Still worse, I’ve been known to stay abroad for months without my “real” photography gear (if you lived out of only carry-on luggage for months, you might want to omit the telephoto lens too). For that matter, even at home, sometimes I like to leave the camera behind when I go for a saunter. Sure, I use my beloved 1st gen iPhone SE to snap photographs of landscapes and slower-moving wild things (e.g. mosses, sessile animals, shiny rocks) — but I no longer even attempt to use it for birds, not even big motionless ones (i.e. herons).
In addition to not being that much of a photographer, I’m also not that much of a birder. I know a lifer when I see one, but I don’t keep a life list or tallies of species counts. I don’t set off on long bus or bike journeys when I hear a report of a rare vagrant somewhere in the state. Indeed, I seldom venture out on reasonable-length bus or bike journeys to birding hotspots when there’s an acceptable saunter that I can take right from my front door. As I see it, enjoying birds should always be a pleasure, not a hassle. I choose my saunters based on my whims for the day, I tarry or keep moving as I fancy in the moment, and I simply appreciate what birds (and other wild things) may come. I adopted the label “bird noticer” for myself after being informed of these enamel pins created by Australian printmaker Bridget Farmer.
Car-Free Living is Carefree Living
As I continue to think about the suggestion to publicize my photographs, however, I realized that there is something personally important that unites them (even the non-bird iPhone SE ones): they were taken by a non-driver who self-consciously arranges life around a dual love for active transportation (especially sauntering) and wild nature.
I haven’t hired a car since early 2021, I haven’t owned a car since 2017, and I drove minimally for many years prior to that. This lifestyle is not a moral decision but a personal one. For me, car use was never anything but a gratuitous source of stress, anxiety, and mental clutter. When I began to rely almost exclusively on active transportation in daily life, it was liberating, and it also brought a new level of engagement with my external surroundings. In part because of that engagement and exposure to the world around me, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the urban world of noise, light, exhaust fumes, concrete, and right angles, and I craved life in smaller and quieter communities with more time spent immersed in wild nature.
Why do I travel to Europe? Well, it’s not because of the menagerie of brightly-colored birds. I go to Europe because it’s possible to find places to live car-free in a small village instead of a big city (and also without sacrificing modern amenities like the Internet, which is really pretty great). Europe might lack North America’s wildernesses, but North America’s wildernesses provide no recreational value to the non-driver who will never access them. I have seen the Milky Way numerous times in Europe while traveling without a car — imagine achieving that feat in the US of A.
For more about my decision to live and travel car-free, see the autobiographical piece commissioned by the Alliance of World Scientists in Nov 2023, Car-free Living Is Carefree Living, plus my Jun 2022 post to an old blog, Around the World for a Ten Miles’ Radius.
Car-free living is as important to me as the quest for wild things, but it is not a lifestyle choice widely shared. Specifically, I presume that most bird/nature photographers own personal automobiles and use them to transport themselves and their equipment to their photoshoot locations. I hold no animosity towards anyone who does so, and given my transatlantic flight record, I’d be a glaring hypocrite to chastise anyone for environmental reasons. But driving is not for me, and I believe that no one should need a car to enjoy the company of feathered friends and the connection with things wild, natural, and free. To be sure, though, the lack of a car does impose rather strict limits on where I can go and thus what I can photograph. These are limits that I embrace; to accept some limits is to relieve oneself of the paralysis that one can feel when faced with an overwhelming menu of options.
While photos might not rival the best, I hope that they’re good enough to inspire others to look for natural beauty within walking distance of their own front door.
The Need for a New Example
In recent years, I have spent some time rather deeply (if briefly) involved in the dark-sky movement, bird conservation, and wilderness advocacy. It is impossible not to notice how many of my colleagues depend on automobiles to pursue their passions — to reach designated wilderness areas, or Bortle Class 1 night skies, or the most species-rich birding hotspots. As I said about car-reliant photographers, I don’t begrudge them, especially considering that many of them work in conservation or field research and need a personal automobile to conduct their jobs. But personally I could never imagine returning to the motorist’s life, not even to access the wonders of nature.
Unfortunately, however, in much of the (over-)developed world, non-drivers are all-but structurally prohibited from spending time in wild nature. Furthermore, even when we can access bits of it (e.g. urban or suburban parks on a bus line or cycle route), it is almost invariably still against the backdrop of urban light, noise, and air pollution — public health and ecological crises that themselves have been greatly exacerbated by the organization of society around the norm of the personal automobile. Even though my own reasons for rejecting car use were preferential rather than moral or environmental, there are good moral and environmental reasons to acknowledge that there needs to be an alternative model for enjoyment of wild nature, one that does not presuppose access to a car. Correlatively, for the sake of human well-being, there ought to be models for car-free living that do not presuppose entrapment in large and dense urban areas. Offering such models was the main inspiration behind this blog.
More broadly, I hope to inspire more people to consider the car-free lifestyle as a desirable possibility, whether for their own lives at present, their visions of a utopian ideal, or both. And more broadly still, I hope to inspire all people — including the most devoted car owners — to pay more attention to the nature that exists within walking distance of their own homes and work places, not only the nature that exists along hiking trails that lead from a car park of a state park or nature reserve. And, on a more cynical note, I do also hope to inspire more people — car owners included — to notice just how annoyingly obtrusive car culture is, and perhaps allow themselves to be indignant now and again at (say) the traffic noise that impinges on their garden or blazing LED headlights that rudely interrupt an attempt to gaze at the moon.
Last updated: May 2024.
