This past week we celebrated Earth Day, the day in which we consider all the ways that we impact life on our planet.

It’s easy to be complacent about our environment. It’s convenient to say that because we recycle we’re doing all we can to help the cause.

Many people shy away from more far reaching ideas to conserve resources and counteract climate change. A good example is the high amount of skepticism that gets applied to electric cars.

Conventional wisdom says they’ll never work. Some people think they’re unpredictable, inconvenient, and just in general not very practical.

It’s considered better to stay the course with good old petroleum based engines, something that offers a well established network of services.

America is very much a car culture. There’s gotten to be far more of a dependence on cars during my lifetime. The dependence has grown to the point that it might be worthwhile to consider lifestyle changes.

Houses built in the 1950s usually came with just a single car garage. Now double is pretty much the absolute minimum. Triple is almost the standard with new homes.

Walking and carrying is a lost art. Everyone jumps in the car to go anywhere. We have massive urban subdivisions where there’s nothing within walking distance.

The electric car challenges that modern mindset. It involves making due with the need to constantly charge batteries, and to perhaps cut down on the amount of driving someone does every day.

It’s true that electric car technology is thus far not perfect. We haven’t advanced to the point that they can easily make a round trip from Marshall to Sioux Falls, South Dakota in subzero cold. The question is where to begin.

Electric cars will never see breakthroughs if there isn’t a desire among consumers to use them. Public buy-in will be needed. Electricity has worked fine for golf carts for more than 50 years, so it seems like there’s potential to have the same kind of success on the road.

We have something to gain by developing an electric car alternative, and also by working with transit system technology.

It would be a good thing to see networks of electric charging stations throughout Greater Minnesota. There would also be benefits to making light rail transit an option for all corners of the state, maybe by linking up every community that has a four year college.

Massive amounts of gasoline get wasted every day in urban traffic. It used to mean a simple process of commuting between the center of a city and suburbs. Now there’s often a suburb to suburb commute, a process by which traffic spreads out in many different directions.

Earth Day is an ideal time to question whether a high amount of consumption is really necessary. It’s good to consider sustainable approaches, to transportation as well as other things like food choices and home energy.

It’s often not popular to encourage people to consume less. It’s like telling them not to spend money at businesses, not to help with keeping the wheels of the economy in motion.

A more acceptable concept is to urge people to consume wisely. No one wants to see situations where people spend recklessly to the point of reaching a financial crisis. No one wants runaway consumption that causes resources to be depleted.

Instead it’s a matter of using resources in a way that allows for availability and affordability in the future.

We should question how much we really need. It’s very possible that by conserving resources we could have not only a more efficient way of life, but one that’s actually better and more enjoyable.

— Jim Muchlinski is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent.