This weekend news of L.A.’s Spring Street and the infamous Green Bike Lane that Shall Not Be Filmed spread across the country with a speed normally reserved for stupidly large sunglasses and bad music. Really, it’s one thing when America has to tolerate bicycles getting all stuck in the fender wells of their pickups, but the idea that the most famous street in the world for filming movies and car commercials has quite literally gone green, well, that might be too much. This is, apparently, an “Anytown U.S.A.” icon where freakin’ car commercials are filmed for crissake. While I suspect Republican Senator Darrell Issa has already subpoenaed “everyone in Hollywood” and “cars from car companies” to testify to the utter job destruction this has caused and requested a special “grief” round of tax breaks for oil companies, it occurred to me that this green lane might not be all bad.

Not because of the bike thing. Everybody knows that riding a bike to work without barely escaping several life-threatening personal assaults does nothing to promote the more marketable “extreme” side of cycling so vital to the fashion industry. No, I think this strange and accidental new shade of green that renders streets impervious to film crews is a good thing for the most obvious of reasons.

Fewer movies.

At the rate we’re currently creating what passes for movies, by some calculations we will have utterly depleted everything that passes for “culture” in America for 2019.

Think about it. At some point, we’re going to run out of Dr. Seuss and comic book characters and both Starsky and Hutch and the Dukes of Hazard have already been turned into movies. Sure, we can release a Kojak movie, and–I was going to say CHiPs, but, no shit, I think there’s already a CHiPs movie planned for release in 2013–but after that, the resources are nearly gone. Like any resource, prices will go up as the availability of creativity decreases, meaning only the very fortune among us will be able to afford $250 tickets to see sparkly vampires and Resident Evil 19: Underworld, Werewolves and Vampires vs. Zombies, but even that can only last for so long. Eventually, like savages, we’ll be forced to film the cryogenically preserved head of Nicolas Cage starring in Bratz 3: It’s a Mall, Mall World.

No, there’s only so much creativity to go around, and that’s why we need to slow the pace of consumption now, while there’s still time to do something.

We need green bike lanes everywhere. In wrapping nearly every major city around the world in unfilmable green paint, we can at least cause fewer horrible movies to be made while slowing the inevitable end of all creativity as we know it. It’s clear we’ve found something–possibly the only thing–that can stop movies from being made. It falls on us now to take bold steps and act on this technology before movies leave us with nothing. Green bike lanes can save us if we take bold action now.

Or after the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie. Those are awesome.