car environmentalist?

I was thinking today about what I personally am doing to help the environment. (I read an article yesterday in the NYT magazine about planting vegetable gardens to help stop global warming, which I'm going to try to do this week, but making it a little bigger than last year.)

Are we being environmentally conscious if we keep cars for as long as possible? In fact, I've never actually owned a car by myself. I guess I married into my first car in 1990. Peter bought a little blue Mazda 323 in 1989, and we would still have that car if it didn't get smashed like a pancake by a falling tree branch on a windless night in 2005! But..... we still have our 16 year old Toyota 4-Runner. However, maybe the small oil leak that we haven't fixed negates the fact that the car isn't in a land fill somewhere? But it's an SUV, so maybe it should be in a land fill!!

But our record has been destroyed anyway -- the Subaru (perfect and 3 years old!!) we bought to replace the pancaked car was totaled in an accident recently, and we bought a brand new car....

I better get out to plant that garden! :-0