Doug Draper

Are we humans any more intelligent in the way we go about living our lives than pigeons or chickens?

It's a question that may seem absurd, or even blasphemous to those of us who believe we're blessed with the reason to behave more intelligently than either one of those two birds, especially when it comes to matters of survival.

But back in the 1970s, while I was still a young guy studying psychology at Brock University, there was this psychologist named B.F. Skinner at Harvard University who made a big name for himself putting pigeons and chickens in lab boxes and shaping their behaviour by rewarding them with food pellets or punishing them with electrical shocks.

We humans, Skinner went on to conclude, aren't much different than a "complex chicken." Reward us with something akin to food pellets for, let's say, manufacturing and driving around in supersized, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs, and we'll build and buy them by the hoards. Shock us with something like a sudden spike in the price of gasoline and we'll turn those big monsters in for something more compact in less time than it takes to fill up their tanks.

As much as I always wanted to believe we have the mental wherewithal to change our behaviour before we get caught in a box and shocked in to doing it, it's beginning to look like Skinner was right. Maybe we aren't much smarter than a pigeon or chicken.

Just take a harder look at the choices we make when it comes to transporting ourselves around and the impact those choices have had, and continue to have, on our health, our environment and our economic well being.

As far back as 40 years ago this spring, when millions of people around the world observed the first Earth Day, there were many scientists and economists out there already trying to warn us that the age of cheap oil was coming to an end and emissions spewing from the exhaust pipes of ever more cars and trucks was damaging our health and environment.

"If you wanted to design a transportation system to waste the Earth's energy reserves and pollute the air as much as possible, you couldn't do much better than our present system dominated by the automobile," stated Garrett de Bell, an ecologist who wrote the critically acclaimed "Environmental Handbook" for that first Earth Day in April of 1970.

"When we choose to travel by automobile, instead of by another means, our decision is influenced in part by the amount of money we must individually spend, and in part by the relative convenience and freedom afforded by operating our own private motor vehicle," added cancer researcher Kenneth P. Cantor in another essay published for the first Earth Day.

"We rarely consider our contribution to air pollution and its injurious effects on human health and agriculture, our wasteful use of land, our depletion of irreplaceable fossil fuels or our influence on the Earth's climate through the addition of carbon dioxide."

Yet the Big Three automakers -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler -- went on building ever-bigger gas hogs through the 1970s. Then came the "oil shocks" of the late 1970s with gas shortages and soaring prices at the pump and the first wave of smaller, more fuel-efficient Hondas and Toyotas began flooding the North American market.

Experts warned that those oil shocks were a harbinger of things to come. But what did the Big Three do? Instead of using the resources they had to produce the most fuel-efficient cars in the world, they went on one last binge as the economy ballooned during the 1990s with line after line of monster trucks and SUVs. They cost twice as much as a regular car, racked up huge profits and we bought them with a bravado that said: "Who cares how much gas they burn. Fill 'er up!"

The David Suzukis of this world warned against this gas-guzzling binge, but everyone from U.S. president George W. Bush to Canadian Autoworkers president Buzz Hargrove wrote them off as "environmental extremists."

Then oil hits $100 a barrel and suddenly smaller, more fuel-efficient cars are in and those monster mobiles are out.

It's tragic for the thousands of workers who've lost jobs working for corporations too shortsighted to see the end of cheap oil coming and it's tough for the rest of us when we pull up at the pumps.

But if gas at $1.20 a litre is what it takes to get us into more fuel-efficient cars -- and make us think more about public transit and other ways of getting around -- then so be it.

Our health, environment and economy may ultimately benefit as a result.

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Doug Draper can be reached at ddraper@niagarathisweek.com.