BEYOND OIL Introduction -Staff Life After Oil -Jeremiah Creedon Bill Ford Has a Better Idea -Martin Wright The Rail Revival -Jay Walljasper Car-Sharing in Portland -Steve Gutmann Motorless in Montreal -Nick Peck Discuss Life After Oil in Café Utne. Click here: café.utne.com

The view from the Ford Motor Company chairman’s office is a big one.Wide open plains stretch out from the Detroit suburbs, knitted together by ribbons of gray highways.

From this perch, William Clay Ford Jr. has spent his first year as Ford chairman dropping a series of small bombshells on the American auto industry. He has warned that it risks becoming a pariah on the scale of Big Tobacco if it doesn’t clean up its act, and he has invited everyone from Greenpeace to Amnesty International to come in and help him do just that. He has pulled Ford out of the steadfastly anti-environment Global Climate Coalition and made the case for a 50-cent a gallon rise in gas taxes.

And his sense of mission seems to have infected his colleagues. In the foreword to the company’s first corporate citizenship report, CEO Jac Nasser insists that 'Ford can become a company whose decisions . . . restore

Hitchin’ A Ride Commuters in the rural Geronimo Valley of Marin County, California can now hitch a ride with little fear thanks to a new Ride Registry program, reports Hope magazine (Fall 2000). Both riders and drivers who pass background checks by the sheriff’s office are issued photo IDs which they show to one another before sharing a ride. About 10 percent of the valley’s residents participate. 'It helps turn strangers into neighbors,' says Debbie Hubsmith who initiated the program through a volunteer group.

the environment and contribute to the creation of social and economic equity in communities around the world.' This is a car company, remember. On the practical side, Bill Ford is overseeing an investment program that is pouring R&D dollars into electric cars, and alternative fuel vehicles.It’s a long-term vision that could transform the company’s core business from selling cars into selling mobility.

'We need a second revolution,' he says. 'Our industry has brought tre-mendous benefits—the freedom to live and work and vacation where you choose—but they’ve come at a cost. And that cost is primarily to the environment. . . . Our goal has to be nothing less than an emission-free vehicle that is built in clean plants, which actively contribute to the environment. And it can happen within my lifetime—hopefully within my working lifetime.'