An Appreciation For Scale

As many of you are aware, I recently returned from a 6,000 km trip to dog shows in Arizona. We left Saskatchewan on February 25, drove south through Cheyenne, Denver and Albuquerque, NM to Phoenix, then home via Las Vegas and Salt Lake City to Butte, Montana, turning east on I-94 to North Dakota before heading north to cross back into Canada late on Wednesday night.

It’s my third such extended road trip in the past 12 months. I drove to Charlotte, NC and back last March, while in October another show circuit took me through Montana, Michigan and Philadelphia. That doesn’t include several shorter weekend jaunts. I put 30,000 km on my minivan in the past 10 months and I drove the pickup to North Carolina.

Somewhere in northern New Mexico

Unless you’re a long haul truck driver, it’s unlikely that you’ve seen as much of North America by road as I have – or as frequently. On this latest jaunt, I was reminded of a piece I wrote during the coverage of Hurricane Katrina that I think applies equally to many who are utterly convinced of man’s impact on global warming. It’s titled An Appreciation For Scale, from September 2005.

As someone who has transversed the continent on several occasions by road, I have come to believe that many in politics, government and media fly too much.
Like the “destination oriented” urban business or leisure traveller who generally lives and works within a relatively confined geographical area, their excursions to far flung locales are experienced almost exclusively through airport terminals.
Flying distorts one’s sense of scale. There is an unreality about the little images on the ground and the vast distances they represent. Imagine the experience becoming so routine that the window seat ceases to be your first preference. Imagine not looking down from a cloudless sky to try to identify geographical features and places you once stopped for coffee in. Imagine napping over the vastness of South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa – and awaking a couple of hours later to ready your tray for landing.
Of course, many of you don’t have to imagine anything of the sort. It’s your normal flying experience.
Flying from Saskatoon into Los Angeles for the first time, there is a sense of astonishment at the endlessness of the great, smoggy city and her suburbs. Landing at night, the sense is even greater, as the lights of the city flood out into the Pacific, carried by boats.
Yet, make the same journey by road (ideally, with windows open and air-conditioning off) and the City of Angels appears as a mere oasis at the edge of a dry, rolling ocean of emptiness.
The second perception is accurate and appropriate, while the first is a distortion created by a sudden burst of speed.
So many people have so little appreciation for how large their country is, no realization that their great metropolitan areas are just miniscule dots on the map when placed within the great expanse of the continent. They have little understanding that there are hundreds of thousands of miles of infrastructure that connect us to each other in fragile threads of asphalt and cable and that their very urban lives depend on them.
As capsulized as the world becomes to the habitual air traveller, even more so is that of those who seldom travel at all. I know of Canadians who have never been south of Minot who can tell you with utter authority all about that great country – based on the flickering images that come over their television sets.
Returning to Katrina – some of the unthinking and uninformed criticism by media punditry of relief efforts may be due, in part, to this phenomenon. The size of the area devastated by Katrina and the subsequent flooding, relative to the size of those assets that are struggling to respond, is difficult for them to scale.
And virtually impossible for those whose view is contained within a 36″ screen.