Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Monday, March 9, 2009

Back when SUVs were all the rage with the trendy set, a friend in Mount Airy offered to sell me his. His Expedition might have been two years old. It was time, he told me, for a new model. I remember two things about that moment. One is having not the slightest interest in joining the SUV set. I wouldn’t have driven it if he’d given it to me. And, secondly, I remember my response. I told him that I’d consider it… when I adopted five more kids.

Back in the 1990s, the sports utility vehicle seemed like overkill on wheels. And it does today. Just last year, on a shoot day in Chatham County, North Carolina, I was in my Prius with my field producer, trying to navigate out of a driveway onto a street in Pittsboro. I couldn’t see the on-coming traffic. I was blocked by one of those bloody behemoths.

“I can’t get past that FUV,” I blurted out.

It was early in the morning. I hadn’t had my coffee. My linguistic censors hadn’t slipped into place. But Meredith and I shared a moment of delight, hearing my Freudian slip resonate inside the car as the “Freudian neologism” it was. The FUV. How apt. That describes the way many of us have felt about the SUV for a long time now.

But I’m not here to fight battles against the SUV. By my lights, it’s already over. The SUV is dead. Gone along with the companies in Detroit that put those unsustainable vehicles out for so many years, with nary a concern for their environmental impact, with nary a glance at their long-term viability. Sure, a lot of SUVs remain on the road and will for many years to come. But the high moment of the SUV has come and gone. They are now on the downhill slope. They command less and less on the used car market; once gas prices spike back up, they will be comatose. The action is now in the smaller vehicles. The Prius, the Mini Cooper, the micro-compact, two-seaters, new vehicles yet to come. Less is more, more or less.

The acronym I spend more time joisting with these days is the SUI. Haven’t heard that one yet? Well, the SUI is an enemy that has insinuated itself into the very fabric of our consumer society. It is everywhere you look and in places you don’t look. Its parents are the twin cultures of convenience and disposibility. It is the product of the no-fuss, no-muss culture.

The SUI is the single use item. It’s the foam coffee cup we throw away after a single use. The Baggie that goes bye-bye after carrying one sandwich. It’s the doggie box we take home from the restaurant with leftovers, destined for the trash can quicker than you can say grace. It’s the packing material that cushions whatever precious item we’ve had shipped in from across the country, packing material that is tossed out with nary a thought. It’s the aluminum can that no one can bother to pick up, and that big daddy of the SUIs — the plastic single use plastic grocery bag that winds up in a tall maple tree, too high to retrieve, waving in the wind.

This is my soapbox for today. Let’s work long and hard to decide which SUIs are really necessary, and make a concerted effort to deep-six the rest… before they become FUIs….