Meet Ryan Mickle. He's a management consultant who recently moved to San Francisco, where he realized he'd no longer be needing his gas-guzzling Range Rover (San Francisco is, after all, the most walkable city in America.). But Mickle concluded that selling his car wouldn't do any good—though his own carbon footprint would decrease, someone else would still be polluting. He wants to get his SUV off the road for good, and he wants your help.
Mickle started a website, One Fewer, soliciting ideas for the best way to eliminate his SUV. In a video, he lounges in a Ghostbusters T-shirt and tells us, to the tune of Radiohead, that he will fling his SUV into the Pacific Ocean "like a fat kid into a swimming pool," or he will do whatever the "crowdsourcing" masses recommend as the best solution.
It's easy to see that an SUV cannon-balling into the ocean would be more damaging than just selling the thing. So would lighting it on fire, or driving it off a cliff—they're all suggestions that would make a totally sweet YouTube video but not a positive environmental impact. Beyond turning the Range Rover into a hybrid—one popular solution offered in One Fewer's comments section—here are some other ideas from the site's readers:
- Why not just donate it to some poor village to drive people to market for supplies and food so they can survive? Sure it keeps polluting but the overall benefit outweighs the harm.
- Please just take it apart by hand and recycle each and every component. Then, any revenue from the recyclers can be donated to a "Green-friendly" charity, to do some real good. Anything else is pretentious and a waste in the faces of less fortunate people. Think about it.
- Fill it full of concrete, take it out in the bay and sink it, thusly creating a possible reef.
- i l0v3 trucks...i d0nt kn0 h0w y0u can d0 this t0 y0ur land r0v3r. scr3w da 3nvi0rm3nt
- I say give it to an artist and ask him to make it into something cool. Some people have had cars made into works of art and it would seem good for this.
- Swap it with someone who has an SUV that wastes more gas. Then part out and recycle the SUV you got in return.
- Give it to me, I would be able to pay all my student loans with your luxurious mistake!!
It is, of course, quite a publicity stunt, and the backlash is only beginning as Mickle's Internet fame grows. Many of the comments recommend that the SUV be driven over a cliff—with him in it. So, setting solutions for the car aside for the moment: Is Mickle crazy? Is he doing more harm than good?
Jack Canning of @ Jul 29, 2008 09:30:04 AM