Some of my younger coworkers play the street parking game, moving their cars around every two hours, but getting ticketed often enough that they spend more on fines than they would on a monthly pass. Today's meter maids don't bother with chalking tires - they record tag numbers in a hand-held device and if they run across that tag in the zone again, they leave a $52 ticket. A monthly pass is only around $80, less than the cost of two parking tickets, but the lure of free parking is strong.

The Baltimore Sun reported on Steven Braun, whose car was towed from a space near a branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Braun had taken his infant daughter and disabled mother to the library and thought he was lucky to find an open parking space. The space was next to library employee parking and was one of two without signs marking them as reserved for Domino's customers. Domino's, you may recall, made pizza that was so bad they started an advertising campaign admitting that they were bad but promising to do better. Kind of like BP. And the Republican Party.

Just after Braun's car (with his mother's walker inside) was towed, Quick Response Towing sent an employee out to move a sign to that space - in case anyone might be confused. A woman bystander caught that move and posted it on youtube, but removed it after being threatened by Quick Response's attorneys. So Quick Response also shares tactics with BP. And Republicans.

Braun is fighting the $300 ticket but the hearing won't take place until February 2011.

However this gets resolved, the owner of the towing company that hauled away Braun's car, Gordon Kelly, said something to me that should be written as a warning on every dashboard of every car being driven into or around the city:

"There's basically no parking in Baltimore unless you pay for it."

And people wonder why I bike to work.

Last month, the Sun profiled UCLA economics professor Donald Shoup, who makes the unpopular argument that free parking is bad for society, and "at the root of many urban ills: congestion, sprawl, wasteful energy use and air pollution."

The high cost of the required parking increases the prices we pay for everything else, including housing. "We have expensive housing and free parking," he says. "We have our priorities the wrong way around."

When street parking is free or inexpensive — as in many cities — demand exceeds supply, and people spend time and fuel cruising for scarce spaces. Cheap street parking thus increases congestion by encouraging people to drive rather than walk, pedal or take public transit.

Libertarian Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, counters,

It is when {Shoup} starts thinking like an urban planner, trying to change people's behavior and in particular trying to reduce driving, that we have a problem. ... Mobility is valuable, and any limits placed upon it harm people and the economy.

But to how much mobility and parking are we entitled? And at what cost?

To how much of anything are we entitled? And what are the costs?

Destor has repeatedly raised the question of who decides how much stuff we're allowed to have. So has the environmental movement, though from a different perspective.

Last week, Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman interviewed ecological activist Derrick Jensen, whose latest book is Deep Green Resistance. DN broadcast the interview on Black Friday right after a very worthwhile interview of Chilean Economist and Right Livelihood Laureate Manfred Max-Neef on Barefoot Economics, Poverty and Why The U.S. is Becoming an "Underdeveloping Nation". DN subtitled the Jensen interview: "The Dominant Culture is Killing the Planet...It’s Very Important for Us to Start to Build a Culture of Resistance." Jensen asserts that environmentalists lose because they don't really know what they want. I suspect that most environmentalists want other people to pollute less, but that few are really willing to give up many of the advantages they personally enjoy from our advanced industrial society. Jensen, however, does not shy from advocating violent responses to a system that threatens the planet.

Jensen alludes to an argument I first read on Peak Oil discussion boards - the idea that our sustainability problems started well before the industrial age, when societies became dependent on systematic agriculture. That's an awfully hard concept to swallow. Anyone who even stayed awake during social studies period was taught that moving from hunting & gathering to farming brought major benefits to a society, enabling it to grow and to survive lean times. How could farming be a bad thing?

AMY GOODMAN: Derrick, what is the influence of Native Americans in your writing, in your work, in your activism?

DERRICK JENSEN: ... I have tried not to romanticize them, which is another form of objectification. And what I do know is I know that the Tolowa Indians, on whose land I now live up in way northern California, they lived there for at least 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. And if you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived there since the beginning of time, using a myth as stories that we tell ourselves that make the world fit together. So, in any case, the Tolowa lived there for at least 12,500 years. And when the dominant culture got there 180 years ago, the place was a paradise. I mean, salmon runs so thick that you could hear them for miles before you’d see them. ... And, you know, I’m lucky if I see a half-dozen salmon in a year at this point.

So my point is that they do offer a model for — one of the things that abusers constantly want us to do is to believe that there is only one way to be, which is theirs. And this is true — you know, there’s the great line — I think it was Václav Havel — the struggle against oppression is a struggle of memory against forgetting. And one of the things we need to remember is that there have been other ways of living that have been sustainable. You know, the Tolowa lived there for 12,500 years, which is sustainable by any realistic measurement. And they didn’t do it because they were too stupid to invent backhoes. You know, why? Why? How did they look at the world differently that allowed them to live? It wasn’t because they were primitives. It wasn’t because they were savages. What did they have? They had social strictures in place.

To the extreme ecologist, the benefits of agriculture have inherent pitfalls. Good farmland and stored grain will be stolen or fought over. A warrior caste will arise to protect land and property. Prosperous families will lead to a pyramidal society living in towns and then cities. As Jensen notes, cities require importation of resources - which is the end of sustainability.

But while hunting and gathering societies may have been more sustainable, they certainly weren't necessarily peaceful. And even if one is personally willing to contemplate living in a low carbon footprint society, Jensen does not believe that personal sacrifice and conservation are nearly enough to save the planet. He believes activists have to dismantle the industrial polluters.

AMY GOODMAN: Derrick Jensen, we let people know that I was going to be interviewing you, and a lot of people wrote in questions. And a few of them asked you to talk about what they call you advocating the use of violence. You have written, quote, "What I want is for all activists to act like they are serious about their resistance and that might include assassinations." What do you mean by that?

DERRICK JENSEN: The world is being killed. And if they were space aliens who had come down from outer space and they were systematically deforesting the planet and vacuuming the oceans and changing the climate, what would we do? There are two million dams in the United States. There’s about 70,000 dams over six-and-a-half-feet tall. And if we only took out one of those dams every day, it would take 200 years to take them all out.

And I want to be really clear that I don’t advocate violence any more than I advocate nonviolence. What I advocate is looking at the circumstances and deciding what would be the appropriate action, both personally and socially. ...

Jensen's thinly-veiled references to, "appropriate action," are certainly disturbing, and even frightening, but it is probably inevitable that the intransigence of corporate and industrial culture towards any real environmental responsibility must lead to a consideration of violence closer to home, as it already has in Nigeria. But if we continue to feel entitled to as much stuff as we can cram into our McMansions, we will have to pay for it in ways we haven't anticipated.