virtual calendar note

BUY NOTHING DAY is coming up!

It’s Fri Nov 28 in the US (also known as Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving when traditionally people take advantage of the day off work to go do all their Christmas shopping in one terrifying, annihilative swoop of consumerism), Sat Nov 29 internationally.

I will definitely be working all that day, but there’s a really cool event going on here in London: TOPSHOP SWAPSHOP. The instructions read as follows: “Simply turn up at TOPSHOP on Oxford Street wearing an outfit you wish to upgrade, then on the stroke of two o’clock, marvel as hundreds of fashion moguls offer to trade your clothes with you. Fancy that girls jumper? Why not offer to swap your belt for it? Nice skirt, fancy trading my t-shirt for it? After a hectic re-working of your look you can then walk proudly back onto the streets of London town with a new wardrobe, not having spent a single penny.” Their catchphrase is my favorite part: ‘You can buy lots of clothes but you can’t buy style.’

-Tara

 

are cities sustainable?

Walking home this evening, I was attacking this question from just one angle, that of ‘transport.’ My thoughts went something like this:

What if, for a day, personal vehicles were outlawed in a major city? Buses, lorries/trucks, ambulances, vans, cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians, skateboarders, rollerbladers, unicyclists, and carpools would be allowed, but personal automobiles would have to stay home. People would flood public transport, leave for work an hour early just to get there, see each other’s faces as they passed…

Could be possible to narrow that list further? There are certain people, young children, elderly, disabled, etc. that wouldn’t be able to travel under their own power. You would still need buses, etc. with priority for those passengers so that they’d be able to get around. Getting rid of lorries is impossible: how else would we get necessary goods, food, medical supplies, etc? Cities, by condensing the distance needed to go to get resources, should mean less travel in general. But all those convenient resources still need to travel from their originating point to the city, which is perhaps more energy output in all. So staying local should be the solution, except that then if you can’t get everything you need locally, you still have to travel – or the goods do.

So certain vehicles are necessary evils of cities, in that case. But at least we could strip it down a certain amount, by encouraging cycling and people-powered methods of transport…

London is thinking about instituting a biker’s license, similar to a driver’s license, if the upward trend in cycle commuting continues. This is supposed to be a response to the concurrent upward trend in cyclist deaths and injuries. Yet there don’t seem to be any major plans to change the roads so that there are more separated bike lanes, signed bike paths, etc, to keep bikes away from the lorries, roundabouts, large intersections, and other hazards. This seems to be just another way to make the bikers responsible for their own victimization. I recently read an article which anecdotally found that car drivers percieved helmeted bikers as less fragile than unhelmeted bikers and therefore were less cautious driving around them, resulting in MORE accidents with HELMETED cyclists – which were still the cyclist’s fault, for wearing the helmet.

All in all, though, London seems to me the most green-conscious city I’ve been to (right now). There are recycling collection points in every neighborhood, many boroughs are expanding their initiatives to include compost of garden waste and kitchen scraps. There bins for paper and plastic bottle recycling next to trash bins on some corners and public-transport ads advocating cycling and walking. Half the flyers and free newspapers I read boast ‘printed on recycled paper,’ and local councils have freecycle-esque webpages for posting used stuff swaps. Re-use and recycling is high profile at the moment, but on a governmental and social scale, not just in the news. Heartening!

-Tara

 

plastic bag – animate!

SO awesome. Also reminds me of the inflatable homeless shelters project…

Using ‘waste resources’ from urban environments… there is something so appealing in solving urban problems by matching them with urban excesses, yet it’s always a stop-gap solution, not one that fixes any long-term, structural problem.

-Tara

 

TEOTWAWKI

So, the whole Large-Hadron-Collider doomsday scenario whereby Scientists in an Underground Laboratory are creating Miniscule Collisions that will create Miniscule Black Holes eating away at the Core of the Earth resulting in the Eventual Preemptive End of Civilization got me hyperlinking through Wikipedia (once again) discovering an anti-apocalypse group I didn’t know about. (Mol, I bet you knew about it. I bet you’ve read all Wikipedia has to say on the subject…)

They’re called the Global Scenario Group, and they did all their prophesizing in 1995. That’s right, 1995, pre-Inconvenient Truth, pre-reusable grocery bags initiatives, pre-widespread Nalgene vogue. They came up with three possibilities for the future: 1) Barbarization, i.e. collapse of civilization, 2) Conventional Worlds, i.e. we manage to cover our butts as we go, putting out forest fires with tsunamis, 3) The Great Transition, i.e. everybody becomes an environmentalist, locavore, and (most importantly) a humanist.

Unsurprisingly, it’s The Great Transition that they’re trying to push, and within that scenario there are two more, straight from Wikipedia:

“Eco-Communalism: Localism and civil society help bring about the environmental transition. The Great Transitions scholars do not view this path as being incredibly plausible.

New Sustainability Paradigm: Population stabilization, lower consumerism, and greener values create a more humane world. Civilization has a smaller ecological footprint and its members live healthier, more equitable lives.”

Their literature sounds academic at first, but ends up being much more like my first-year end of term papers: good topic, good ideas, some research, well written, but frustratingly inexact generalizations and conclusions that aren’t actually going to help anybody. (And only now do I realise that the LHC sounds familiar because two years ago I read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.)

It’s still a nice juxtaposition to other Wikipedia articles which calmly remind me that the Earth’s eventual end is inevitable in astronomical terms (the Sun is scheduled to become a Red Dwarf and swell in size, consuming our planet, in about 5.5 billion years).

Being in London, a city which collects compost along with plastics, paper, and metal to be recycled and has a congestion charge in effect to discourage traffic gives me some hope: I still feel like maybe governments can enact large-scale changes that people can join in with. The analogy, I suppose is war, where sacrifice is encouraged with nationalism as the motive. Why can’t humanism be the motive for equal ’sacrifices,’ for allocating resources, energy, time and thought toward finding and implementing solutions that may literally ensure the future?

Done ranting. For now. Sorry for the length.

Happy thought to leave you with: Guerilla Gardening.

-Tara

 

Treehouses Rock

Someday.

-Tara

 

WE

Watching the Olympics last week, I saw a pretty well-made commercial touting a *new* anti-climate-change organization. Through snowballing hyperlinking I stumbled upon their website and joined their mailing list (what’s more do-gooder spam email anyhow? move over, moveon.org!) I was wary at first, figuring their backing came from some evil dirty energy organization or shady government initiative, but they seem more like a coalition of eco-awareness orgs finally united under a well-designed ad campaign…

You should join them, too!

www.wecansolveit.org

The advert:

-Tara

 

the Norwottuck Rail Trail wins!

Sometimes, I silently scold cars that pass me when I’m biking, in a Dave Eggers style imagined conversation.

- You don’t see what I see.

- I am in a hurry.

- The hot air balloons drifting over the cornfields at sunrise…

- I am tired.

- The horses, sheep, cows, winking as you glide by.

- …

- Endless farmland and gracious meadows, rolling green hills. Twisty tall trees, vines hanging down to create a tunnel of green. The birch groves, where, when the early morning sun hits just right, you can very nearly catch sight of where the elves live. On the bridge crossing the Connecticut, squinting a little and tilting your eyebrows just so, the bridge disappears and you are flying into the sunset on your bike, ET style, through the viney green canopies of Never Never Land.

- I am sorry.

- Just think about biking next time.

Also: 20 miles a day X 5 days a week X 10-ish weeks = 1,000 miles! Yeah!

And: Today I got caught in the rain on my way home. It wasn’t so bad at first, the only thing that’s hard about biking in the rain is when my glasses get clouded. But then it started getting really vigorous, and maybe hailing, so I took shelter under a little tunnel because I knew it would pass soon.

After a few minutes, the sun came out, but the rain was still coming down hard core. A rainbow appeared in a perfect arch over the path, lined with trees stretching off into to the horizon, and it was just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

This is not my image, but I included it just so you could get a general idea. Sometime I’ll take my camera along and document the beauty myself.

- M