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Depaved with Good Intentions

Why auto-free utopian Jan Lundberg believes we're all on the road to hell.

By Hal Espen

The centenary of the first American traffic fatality is almost upon us.
(photo: Kristine Larsen)

In a world engineered and designed by tidy utopians who offer schematic drawings and blueprints, there is little tolerance or time for the impractical, messy, chaotic, and unsanctioned visions of kooks, wackos, fanatics, cranks, bores, zealots, and monomaniacs--acolytes of shouted and scrawled revelation who often frame their utopian counter-schemes against a background of world-destruction fantasies and delusions of vast conspiracy. These are the ineffectual, the self-undermined, the dismissed as out of hand, the saboteurs, the bane of public meetings and planning commissions and political movements. Their naysaying empires rustle on cheap paper and flicker on the Internet for a time before passing into oblivion.

Such a man, or so it might seem, is Jan Lundberg--sworn enemy of the automobile and all its byproducts, and basically (at least according to any conventional reckoning) a big hippie loser. Except that Jan Lundberg, publisher of the environmental zine Auto-Free Times, founder of the Fossil Fuel Policy Action Institute, and director of the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, is one paranoid utopian who's armed with the distinct advantage of knowing that we know that his foe is every bit as powerful and hegemonic and destructive as he says it is. In a culture increasingly fed up with and often horrified by sprawl and congestion and road rage, he may even be some kind of prophet. And just because he's paranoid doesn't mean cars aren't trying to kill him.

The centenary of the first American traffic fatality is almost upon us. On September 9, 1899, a New Yorker named Henry H. Bliss was killed by a speeding automobile as he stepped off a streetcar on Central Park West. Since then, an estimated 15 to 20 million people worldwide have met untimely deaths as a result of the madly proliferating horseless carriage. And with the total number of vehicles on Earth approaching half a billion and increasing at the rate of more than 50 million a year, there is no end in sight. At the close of a century that began with virtually no pavement in the United States, the nation is now enmeshed in a hypertrophied, 2.4 million-mile network of paved public roads, which is maintained and extended at the cost of $200 million per day. Having consumed 765 billion barrels of oil, the world still has up to two trillion barrels left, and so the toll continues: 42,000 deaths and 3.4 million injuries a year in the U.S. alone.

In a 1971 essay titled "The Car, the Future," J.G. Ballard, British author of the 1973 automotive horror novel Crash, writes: Think of the twentieth century. What key image most sums it up in your mind? If I were asked to condense the whole of the present century into one mental picture I would pick a familiar everyday sight: a man in a motor car, driving along a concrete highway to some unknown destination. Almost every aspect of modern life is there, both for good and for ill--our sense of speed, drama and aggression, the worlds of advertising and consumer goods, engineering and mass manufacture, and the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signaled landscape.

Against this overwhelming icon of modernity, 46-year-old Jan Lundberg is staking his own life. For the past decade, ever since he sold his Buick behemoth and renounced a 14-year career as an oil-industry analyst, Lundberg has toiled to bring our automotive age to a revolutionary end. He is failing miserably, but his is one of the most interesting failures I know of.

Lundberg lives in Arcata, a coastal town of 16,000 in the upper-left corner of California, with his 18-year-old daughter, Spring, in a modest house without a television or a refrigerator. When Lundberg bought the place, it included a driveway, but he has "depaved" it, and it's now a garden. He's made the same improvement to his mother's property down the road. Lundberg barters for necessities when he can, and his meager income comes from subscriptions to Auto-Free Times and occasional grants from environmental groups and foundations. He walks or rides his bike to and from his pleasantly shabby, one-room, wood-floor office in a building on Arcata's town square. When he must travel farther than the two miles to work--almost exclusively on the West Coast, either to see his 13-year-old daughter who lives with her mother up in Seattle or to enviro-schmooze in the Bay Area--he takes the bus or the train. When public transportation isn't an option, yes, Lundberg will get into a car. Friends who have shared these unforgettable rides with him say that Lundberg is an incorrigible backseat driver, at least to the extent that he is compelled to provide a running commentary on the horror and danger of it all.

The scourge of Detroit is tall and lanky, with long, graying red hair and a droopy mustache. The day I meet him, he is wearing a gray pinstriped suit over a T-shirt that reads "Not One More Road!" His manner is a similarly odd combination of styles--an air of patrician dishabille commingles with a strong hint of sardonic countercultural amazement at the world's commitment to ungroovy folly. After introducing me to T Proctor ("just T," in life and on the masthead), a young man who helps edit Auto-Free Times, Lundberg leads me across town to a vegetarian restaurant called the Wildflower Café. Our conversation along the way is punctuated by his contemptuous complaints about the (relatively anemic) traffic in Arcata and by a paroxysm of stage coughs when we walk past a noisy, smoking diesel truck idling at a stoplight. Upon arriving at the Wildflower, Lundberg is greeted as an honored village elder by a beaming earth-mother hostess; our lunch is brown rice, black beans, and soy-milk cappuccinos.

I know from reading Auto-Free Times that oil is Lundberg's bête noire ("I think of it as being burned and spilled, not consumed"), that cars are anathema and paved roads a deadly abomination, but I am a little disappointed by his disinclination to breathe fire and rage against the satanic vehicles parked outside. Instead, he alternates between a shrugging fatalism and what seems to be a residual policy-wonkish pride in his command of the facts pertaining to petroleum consumption and its sway over our lives and economies.

The pride may be inherited. In 1955 his father, Dan Lundberg, started the Lundberg Survey Inc., a company devoted to collecting gasoline price statistics and oil-industry trends. Jan Lundberg had been studying economics at UCLA when he left to work for his father, and together they launched the Lundberg Letter just before the oil shock of 1973. Business flourished, and Jan tooled around Los Angeles in a Mercedes and immersed himself in the minutiae of petroleum supplies and energy policy. The Seventies and early Eighties were heady years ("We predicted with accuracy the nature and the timing of the second shock in 1979," Lundberg boasts), but by 1983 the glut we are still enjoying today was well under way and the crisis was over. In 1986 Dan Lundberg died and Jan broke from his family and moved east to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he edited a short-lived rival newsletter called Lundberg Reports. By the end of the decade he had split from his second wife (the 13-year-old in Seattle is from this marriage; Spring from his first) and was running a struggling environmental outfit called the Fossil Fuel Policy Action Institute, which he founded in 1988.

I'd imagined that Lundberg must have undergone a dramatic conversion experience at some point, like Darth Vader's recruitment to the dark side, but he insists that his parents were early environmentalists. The Lundbergs brought up their five children on an organic ranch near L.A., and during Jan's adolescence--which coincided with the height of the Vietnam War--the family sailed to Europe and lived for several years in Italy and Greece. Back in California, Jan got involved in the antiwar and environmental movements at UCLA in the early Seventies, but he claims that he didn't view joining the family business as a sellout. After all, his father believed that the objective information he was providing was as useful to the green cause as it was to the industry.

His quiet turning point came, Lundberg tells me, a decade and a half later, after an encounter with a fellow activist at the Washington, D.C., office of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. "He was this very modest guy," Lundberg says, "and he mentioned that he didn't have a car. Suddenly I felt two inches tall." Several months passed, however, before Lundberg unloaded his own gas guzzler and embarked upon a fresh, new life as a militant pedestrian.

Lundberg remained just one more inside-and-around-the-Beltway enviro-lobbyist, however, until the war in the Gulf inflamed America's petroleum anxieties for the first time since the Seventies. As part of an omnibus proposal for various antiwar "eco-democracy" initiatives, Lundberg distributed a flyer denouncing America's "auto-cracy" and raised the notion of a national paving moratorium. It struck a chord, he discovered, and in January 1991 he published the first issue of Paving Moratorium Update, which was renamed Auto-Free Times five years later. Asphalt, "the toxic residue of oil refining," was just as bad as oil, he argued. Within a year, the nascent publisher-environmentalist had moved to the ecotopian redoubt of Arcata, where his ideas were sure to inspire greater sympathy than they ever could in suburban Virginia.

More than anything else, Lundberg is a tireless pamphleteer. In addition to churning out the Auto-Free Times (there have been 15 issues, with a current circulation of more than 15,000), he has written numerous broadsides and position papers ("Art, Making Yogurt at Home, and Massage Are Destroying the Planet," "Just How Much Do You Think You Are Justified to Pollute?"). At the United Nations Earth Summit in the spring of 1992, Lundberg distributed a manifesto titled "Don't Go Down the U.S. Road" and confronted Brazil's Minister of the Environment, who protested that a paving moratorium would cause "a paralysis of development." He composes passionate letters to Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and prints their replies, including this one from the President: "Thanks so much for writing. I welcome your thoughts and promise they will be carefully considered."

The beauty of Lundberg's stance lies in the breathtaking sweep of his absolutism. For starters, the internal combustion engine is evil--a nasty, spendthrift, gluttonous, polluting technology. Highways are arenas of slaughter, instruments of a road-kill holocaust. His solutions are not ameliorative: The system must be abolished, replaced by an agrarian mode of life sustained by local ecosystems, not transportation. Seat belts, air bags, New Urbanist schemes for traffic calming and pedestrian malls, and the anti-sprawl movement don't impress him much. The thing that sets his pulse racing is wiping out the global combine of automobile manufacturers, oil companies, highway builders, and car-dependent construction industries.

How about electric, or energy-efficient hybrids, or hydrogen-cell vehicles? Forget it. Lundberg believes that there isn't going to be any alternative fuel, and if there ever is, a car is still a car and a road is still a road: "The asphalt and tires and the plastics are all from the same place the gasoline is coming from," he says. "We don't just jump on the bandwagon saying 'Oh yeah, electric cars, they're the answer!'" Lundberg's opposition to electric cars, which he sees as ultimately dependent on radioactive-waste-engendering energy sources, has cost him plenty in lost advertising, contributions, and credibility. The entire quest for a post-gasoline car is what Lundberg reduces to "the techno-fix." He tells me, "I support the techno-fix as one of many reforms, as long as it's done in the spirit of a revolution for conservation. But as an end in itself, it doesn't do enough." He adds, airing his inner utopian, "Most of the people who support these reforms know they won't do enough, but they live in a world of what is politically doable. They want to know how we can declare victory, move on, and win the political game."

Auto-Free Times has given Lundberg a platform for disseminating his own voluminous writings, but the magazine has also been a lively clearinghouse for a wide variety of contributions from others. Taken together, these reports, epistles, screeds, blurbs, drawings, and cartoons create a Boschian vision of a hellish universe bent on despoliation and malevolent violence. With headlines like "Toll Road Nightmare for California Gnatcatcher," "Tire Dust Kills," "Blacktop Ribbons of Death," and "Motorized Lemmings, Ecological Suicide," Auto-Free Times presents a relentless indictment of the automotive infrastructure.

On the other hand, much of the content is also hopeful, earnest, or playful. "Some of it is reform oriented, some policy oriented, some fuck-shit-up oriented, and some humorous," explains Lundberg. Some is just deliriously loopy, as in the spring 1997 cover story on a dreadlock-coiffed vagabond named Brian Campbell, inventor of the Personal House Bike: a 200-pound contraption with 135 gears and an insulated sleeper box. "The spirit of the Earth came and spoke to me, saying I'm not going to be like all the rest," Campbell is quoted as saying. "Before I started those bikes, I didn't accomplish one thing."

Some contributions have a touch of the sublime. One letter to the editor offers:

I would go even farther than depav-ing. I would suggest that the Biozone (about 10 feet underground to 20 feet above ground) be considered inviolate anywhere that more than one-tenth of the surface of the earth is covered by artificial human structures--be they buildings, sidewalks, roads, or asphalt. In other words, in densely populated areas, all buildings should be off the ground on piling, pillars, or stilts; or underground. All transportation should be subterranean or airborne on monorails. The surface of the earth should be reserved for plants and animals. The only surface transportation should be walking trails and maybe bike paths, so the entire city would be a park.

Other writers push the magazine's Luddite orientation to Unabomber-esque extremes, as in this missive from a reader in Brooklyn: "Don't you know that virtual highways are MUCH MORE DANGEROUS than asphalt ones? You want to know the quickest way to bring new pavement to a halt? Destroy telecommunications. You want to know the quickest way to stop deforestation? Destroy telecommunications."

Auto-Free Times is also filled with absurd little news items ("Thousands of drivers spent the night stuck in a traffic jam that stretched 60 miles on the highway between Berlin and Nuremberg"), which, cumulatively, have an unsettling effect. Other elements are simply poignant: an account of small-town life in the 1920s and 1930s by an elderly reader who remembers a world of efficient streetcar lines, trains, and ferry boats; schools within easy walking distance; dairies and small grocery stores that made daily deliveries; and doctors who made house calls. Or a photograph of a white swan killed on I-95 in Connecticut.

Curiously, even the Auto-Free Times heeds one of our culture's few remaining taboos in visual representation: depictions of the carnage wrought by automobile accidents. Lundberg has never published pictures of human casualties. Despite the popularity of television's "reality" shows, featuring berserk footage of car chases and collisions, most of the public continues to view the dangers of the road with collective denial and equanimity; it is one of the deeper mysteries of the motor age. "My patients always tell me they never had any expectation of how violent the crash was," an emergency-room physician recently observed on National Public Radio. For a less polite revelation, it is salutary to turn once again to J.G. Ballard, who writes that "the rough equivalent of speeding on unchecked tires along a fast dual carriageway at the end of a tiring day at the office is lying in a hot bath with a blazing three-bar electric fire balanced on the edge below a half-open window rattling in a rising gale. If we really feared the crash, most of us would be unable to look at a car, let alone drive one."

A recurrent rhetorical gambit in the Auto-Free Times involves contrasting the shock and horror that greet plane crashes with the routine acceptance of the toll on our roads. Here is how a lamentation titled "Altar of the Highway Gods" begins: "Last year's dead pedestrians could fill the equivalent of over twenty jumbo jets." It's a disturbing variant on the soothing old saw of pilots and airline apologists, that air travel is safer than driving.

Overall, of course, the intent of Auto-Free Times is to be a tool for political change. There is a rich tradition of anti-automobile analysis in the literature of twentieth-century American city planning, land-use, public safety, and environmentalism. Lundberg's work parallels much of this, although it seems largely unaware of direct influence. Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, the great critics of urban development, wrote passionate and extensive denunciations of the impact of automobiles on the cityscape. The lineage of anti-car books includes the social critic John Keats' The Insolent Chariots (1958); Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), which opens with the sentence, "For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people"; and Kenneth R. Schneider's Autokind vs. Mankind (1971). The theme has been taken up in recent years by titles such as Stanley I. Hart and Alvin L. Spivak's The Elephant in the Bedroom: Automobile Dependence and Denial (1993) and Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (1997). Evan Eisenberg's The Ecology of Eden (1998) includes the following passage that could have come straight from the Auto-Free Times:

A biologist from a pedestrian planet, peering at some stretch of North America from a height of 500 feet, will conclude that its dominant species is a shiny lozenge-shaped reptilian creature that alternately basks in the sun and sprints at great speed. It is host, he will note, to small endosymbiotic organisms which at intervals emerge, move about slowly, then reenter the host ... They are devoted to the care and feeding of the host. They suck energy-rich organic compounds from the bowels of the planet and feed them to the host, something it is unable to do for itself ... They make over ecosystems to meet the host's needs, replacing vast forests and grasslands with flat surfaces on which the host can bask or sprint more easily, and building hives and dens in which the host can take shelter from the elements. What they get in return is as yet unclear.

In fact, there is a widespread consensus in these writings that the personal freedom and the apparent efficiencies provided by automobiles are bribes we pay ourselves to accept punishing taxes in the form of environmental degradation, danger, and the vast costs of road building and maintenance and real estate reserved for parking. By defining highways and roads as beneficial public works, we continue to mask this "cost-price distortion," what Lundberg refers to as "the petroleum free lunch." Even a conservative social critic like James Q. Wilson, who excoriates anti-automobile intellectuals in an article in Commentary ("Cars and Their Enemies," July 1997), acknowledges that sprawl and congestion are exacerbated by hidden subsidies. He waxes lyrical about the wonders of driving--the "excitement of command," "passion of engagement," and "breathtakingly fast" speed--but also advocates higher gas taxes and toll roads.

Yet after decades of eloquence and argument, what has been accomplished? Nothing illustrates the impotence of transportation policy makers and progressive urban planners with greater force than their abject failure to make even the slightest dent in the dictatorship of the car. One of the most disturbing parables of this sad truth is the case of historian Kenneth T. Jackson's 1985 book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. (It is dedicated to Kenneth Jackson II, the author's 16-year-old son, who was killed in a car accident a few miles from home just two weeks before the book was finished.) Jackson convincingly explains that "the automobile had a greater spatial and social impact on cities than any technological innovation since the development of the wheel," and offers a devastating assessment of the forces behind sprawl. But it was not until the 1998 elections that an inchoate revulsion against sprawl emerged as a burning issue in American politics--and it is still not clear whether sentiment can solidify into a movement with clear goals.

Or consider another example--the prescription offered near the end of James Howard Kunstler's scathing 1993 book on America's man-made landscape, The Geography of Nowhere. "We shall have to give up mass automobile use," he writes. "By this, I do not mean an end to all cars but rather, that every individual adult need not make a car trip for every function of living: to go to work, to buy clothes, to have a drink; that every adult need not be compelled to bear the absurd expense of car ownership and maintenance as a requisite of citizenship. The adjustment may be painful for a nation that views car ownership as the essence of individual liberty... But the future will require us to make [it]."

The future is stubbornly taking its time, however. General Motors and the Ford Motor Co. are still the largest two companies in the world, although the pending merger of Mobil Oil and Exxon will knock them down to the number-two and three spots. One out of every six Americans works in an automotive or petroleum-related industry. Per capita energy consumption in the U.S. has risen nearly back to the rate that prevailed before the first oil shock in 1973, and imported oil now accounts for 50 percent of consumption, up from 35 percent in 1973. After adjusting for inflation, gasoline now actually costs 10 cents a gallon less than it did in 1973. Nearly one in five households owns three or more cars. Then there is the macabre calculus of safety provided by the current craze for hulking sport-utility vehicles, as reported last spring in the New York Times: "When a driver switches from a mid-size car to a large car, he reduces his risk of death in a crash while increasing the risk for the other driver by roughly the same amount."

Meanwhile, the American way is making enormous inroads in the developing world. "I saw the terrible congestion in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Beijing, Guangzhou, Chongqing, and Xi'an," journalist Mark Hertsgaard writes in his recent book Earth Odyssey, a survey of global environmental problems. "Seoul, Jakarta, Shanghai, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Bombay, Delhi, and Karachi ... were hardly better off. Most of these cities also endured miserable air quality."

Back home, the most plausible sister city to these car-plagued metropolises is Atlanta, whose sprawl-friendly policies have allowed it to surpass Los Angeles as the apocalyptic capital of traffic jams and smog. Following the defeat of a proposed ordinance banning the construction of new drive-through businesses in Atlanta, Councilwoman Debi Starnes told a reporter, "Everyone says they're supportive of making our city and the world more pedestrian-friendly.And everyone says that they realize that in order to accomplish those two objectives that we're going to have to do a lot of little and medium things...And almost every time one of these little or medium things comes up, people say, 'Well, not this little or medium thing. This won't make much difference.'"

To which Jan Lundberg would doubtless reply, with every fiber of his being, "There is one big thing." Lundberg's program, however, is truly, perhaps idiotically, well beyond politics into utopia. "In search of real alternatives to more pavement and vehicles," he has written, "it becomes clear that non-transportation solutions are essential: car-free living, ecologically designed towns, and bioregional economic policies that resist unnecessary world trade." (Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow: "Isn't that every paranoid's wish? To perfect methods of immobility?")

I ask Lundberg: Isn't activism most effective when it addresses reality? If you're not going to work within the real world, aren't your efforts futile? "It depends on your definition of the real world," he replies with a smile. "If the real world is that we will always be using petroleum and always building more roads and that cars are physical appendages to our lives, then it is completely unrealistic to say that maybe we have enough roads and we can't afford to fix them all and there are healthier alternatives to relying on cars. But that's not what happens when you're open to pursuing a path of truth instead of trying to figure out something that will impress funders and allow you to sit at the table with the big-time polluters and decision makers."

All this may mean that Lundberg is more interested in being right than in building a real political movement--unlike his counterparts abroad, such as Emma Must, a former children's librarian who won the $100,000 Goldman Environmental Prize in 1995. Galvanized by her remarkable leadership, hundreds of thousands of people have mounted an astonishing series of anti-road demonstrations in England, resulting in the cancellation of dozens of major construction projects. When I ask Lundberg why nothing approaching the dynamism and engagement of the British movement has happened here, he replies desultorily, "Well, they have less space to pave over there. And I guess Americans are more accustomed to long commutes and greater domination by the car industry."

He also seems slightly listless when I ask him about future prospects for his cause. "I guess it's more of a publishing endeavor at the moment," he says, offering instead a melancholy soliloquy. "The Alliance for a Paving Moratorium is not as active as it should be. We've had some exposure in the mainstream, but it doesn't add up to a revolution, and it doesn't add up to massive change on the grassroots level. What it does is keep us on this treadmill where we're given some encouragement and gratification and support--just enough to fool us into spending another year of our lives when we'd rather be doing something else. We're not winning, we're not losing."

Ironically enough, Jan Lundberg is also a little cranky about being stranded behind a redwood curtain. "I'm 46," he says. "I wouldn't mind seeing the world." Travel by public transportation, however, "sucks." He complains about the college kids up the hill at Humboldt State University, "little shits" who drive their cars through town. Lately he has been haranguing the City Council (the only political body in the country with a non-automobile--owning Green Party majority) about the Y2K bug. "If Y2K is real, then this is it," he tells me. "This is when the depaving should be happening--this winter."

In any event, he'll continue to spread the word and take satisfaction in the almost archetypal role he's carved out for himself--the hermit-prophet living with no television, no refrigerator, and no car out on his depaved driveway. He's amused by the telling mistakes that journalists have made about him: An Associated Press story incorrectly stated that "he hasn't been in a car since 1989," and the National Enquirer followed up with a feature claiming that "Lundberg has sold all his worldly goods." He's gotten almost as much press as his sister, Trilby, who now publishes the Lundberg Survey and gets quoted in wire-service stories saying things like: "There's no end in sight to the historically low prices that motorists are paying." Three of his four siblings still live in Southern California (a younger brother recently moved up to Arcata), and all four, he says with a sad shrug, "are into cars."

Not long ago, Lundberg recorded an album, Ecosongs from a Depaved Drive-way, featuring Jan on guitar and Spring on vocals, with drums by local musicians Tofu and Lee Stevenson. They called themselves the Depavers. Their songs include "Have a Global Warming Day" and "It's the Beatles," a tune about how John Lennon would have been a road fighter had he lived.

A few months after they made the album, Depaver Lee Stevenson died, and Lundberg wrote a heartfelt obituary in the summer 1998 issue of the Auto-Free Times. Titled "Lee Was Free," the piece didn't say much about cars or roads or politics, but it seemed to say a lot about Jan Lundberg--and about the ineluctable entanglement of humanity, petroleum, and mortality:

"Lee Stevenson lived in Arcata without standard housing. In the prime of life he was more content than most stamped-out guys trying to survive. Lee lived up to his own expectations as a free man while helping others, and enjoying friends, music, and psychedelic medicinal plants. His home, a redwood stump turned into a teepee, housed sleeping bag, tarps, magazines, a few utensils, and clothes. That was where he died unexpectedly, a victim probably of a kerosene lamp's carbon monoxide. There was nothing but bones left thanks to the creatures of the forest... Lee saw coming the end of this civilization. We figured we would both see it in our lifetimes. The Earth will finally be spared the pollution and desecration. Overpopulation will correct itself and allow gentler species to come back."


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