Our Cars, Our Bodies, Our Earth

Get myself a car, I feel power as I fly, Whoa now, I’m really in control.
It all looks fine to the naked eye, but it don’t really happen that way at all.. ~ The Who

In Vermont, our cars appear to many of us as natural as our mountains, moose and fall colors. However, with climate change bearing down on our state, carbon emissions are now seen by concerned Vermonters as the prime issue with our auto-centric culture. But could we be missing something even bigger?

This workshop probes the fascinatingly elusive psychology of the automobile and its pervasive influence on our vision of the world and place in it. We’ll focus on how the collective super-sizing of our bodies in cars (power, weight, speed, size, noise etc.) has profoundly transformed the integrity of our sacred relations to both the human and more-than-human worlds. Furthermore, we will explore how this immense power is perhaps undermining our response to the most significant crisis we have ever faced – climate change.

Most importantly, we’ll embark on a world tour of remarkable efforts that are challenging automobilism – the unbridled and indiscriminate use of motor vehicles. We will consider how Vermont can greatly benefit from this burst of innovation (planning, micromobility, technology, psychology and more) that is inspiring human-scale living, a reconsideration of our place in the world and helping us to move beyond a 1950’s model of automobility and transportation consumerism.

Bio
Dave Cohen  is an integrative psychotherapist in Brattleboro specializing in ecopsychology. In 2016,  Dave founded VBike, a Vermont advocacy group dedicated to promoting new bike design and technologies for everyday mobility and providing free e-bike and e-cargo bike consultations to all Vermonters. His work is featured on numerous podcasts and highlighted in the internationally-screened cargo bike documentary Motherload. In 1994, Dave founded Pedal Express in Berkeley, CA, a US pioneering bicycle delivery service utilizing a cargo bikes fleet.