My wife and I just bought a new set of wheels. Our dandy little Prius gets nearly 50 miles to the gallon, and we are already saving considerable money on gas.
We Americans love our wheels. Cars were one of the 20th century’s first complex technologies available to ordinary folk, in large part because they mesh so nicely with our sense of personal freedom. We give them cute names like we do our pets, keep ‘em clean and get frustrated when an injury occurs, like a scratch or dent. In some ways, our wheels are like a member of the family.
Perhaps, though, we love our wheels too much. Cars account for the lion’s share of greenhouse gas emissions, and the roads we build for them use enormous amounts of real estate and cost bundles to maintain. Cars also account for 40,000 deaths each year, including 15,000 teenagers, and gobble up money for fuel and repairs like hungry lions. To the detriment of public transport and other modes of travel, America is devoted to the automobile, and our wheels have dragged us into massive foreign debt and dependence on others to prop up our economy.
The wheel, and in this case I mean the simple wheel attached to an axle, is human culture’s first machine, developed some 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). Used for the potter’s wheel, it was adapted for the chariot several hundred years later, and the rest, as they say, is history. Almost every form of technology begins with and requires the action of the wheel, and without it the modern world as we know it would not exist.
Some cultures did not develop complex technologies, and at first glance, this would seem to include the wheel. Native North and South Americans, for example, did not employ the wheel before it was introduced as a transportation technology by Europeans. In Asia, Tibetans also did not use the wheel for transport, though it must be noted that wheeled transport does not work as well without flat ground on which to use it. One might suppose that cultures that did not use the wheel were too primitive, but this is not correct.
Native Americans knew of the wheel, and used its form in making hoops, religious instruments, baskets and ornaments. Their understanding of natural cycles easily led them to an understanding of the circle, and its relationship to the wheel. And the Tibetans, though horsemen and denizens of the highest mountain plateau on earth, also knew about the wheel, which they used for creating religious objects like prayer wheels, both stationary and hand-held. In both these cases a decision was made about the wheel, and in what way it would be used, and in both cases it was the sacred symbolism of the wheel that guided the decision. For these cultures, to have used the wheel as an object to roll over Mother Earth would have been sacrilege and defilement, bringing disaster and misfortune to beings.
We must now make much more thoughtful choices about wheels. As an expression of culture and ego, wheeled vehicles provide a sense of freedom, but at a terrible price in lives and ecology. Perhaps Native Americans and Tibetans were not primitives after all; perhaps they understood the potential cost of wheels far better than the rest of us.
