Someone wrote a letter to

Someone wrote a letter to Via (the California State Automobile Association's quarterly rag) magazine complementing them on their environmental positions. The letter writer was from Fair Oaks, California, a suburb some 30 miles from downtown Sacramento that exists solely to perpetuate the suburban sprawl that will make California unliveable in 20 years. Downtown and midtown Sacramento are very pleasant places. If they did not fall in my exclusion zone (I will not live between Viareggio and the Berkeley Hills), I would consider living there. I grew up in Sacramento. Not a bad place, as far as it goes. I have seen Fair Oaks. Nothing is in walking distance to anything. It is a little colony of LA on the American River, a curious outpost of the affluent redneck (to see this culture in all of its glory, go to Folsom Lake on a summer day). In Fair Oaks a family is not complete without a motorboat, three cars, and a monstrous air-conditioned house. In short, it is the type of place that school shootings happen in, although I don't think they have had one yet. One pays exorbitant sums to live there, and, in order to pay these sums, one has to get work in, well, probably downtown Sacramento (that would be 60 miles driven a day).

So this letter writer probably consumes more resources in a month than my whole family does in a year and is an environmentalist? OK, perhaps she does not fit the bill of the typical Fair Oaks resident, but I would be surprised. It is only because there is this grain of doubt that I do not mention her by name. I am no Earth Firster. I drive a Ford Explorer, I support drilling the Arctic Wilderness, and I am a big supporter of some invasive exotic flora (Eucalyptus and fennel forever!). But I at least live in a high density area, have a short commute, east almost entirely organic and do not go out of my way to praise or punish the environmental stand of a non-environmentally oriented magazine.

Sorry, but suburbanites of this sort bug me much more than Bill Bennett's gambling.