Auntie with bike in Taiping Malaysia market
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
-Iris Murdoch
The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.
- Ann Strong
Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the
journey!
- Barbara Hoffman
In this time of environmental crisis anyone who can get this passionate about garbage must be listen to. Annie Leonard, a Seattle native is featured lecturer at Town Hall Seattle via KUOW radio and her speech about her movie, The Story of Stuff is something you may well want to pass along to your friends who may not have seen it. Any country who is so successful in creating so much waste must take a moment to pause and contemplate what we are creating for future generations on our finite planet. This is an excellent presentation there is nothing boring about it because of her creative enthusiasm for her work and her sense of humor.
Some months ago I saw this New York Times article with the title “Broadband Yes. Toilet No” about a young educated couple, Erin McKittrick and her husband Hig, living in a yurt in Seldovia, Alaska. Hig has a PhD in Geology, while Erin has a masters in Molecular Biology. Then I heard them interviewed on our local public radio station about their new book detailing their thirteen month journey by foot and paddle some 4000 miles—my interest was clinched. 
The Long Trek Home, published by the Mountaineers, is the tale of this young couples walk from Seattle along the coastline way up into Alaska where they conclude their long walk and later settle on family property in Seldovia, Alaska. It is an amazing story of determination and a respect for the land, written by a curious young couple who have a bright future ahead of them with their new toddler son Katmai, in 452 square foot living space, in a town of 250. Quite a tale.
Katmai: taking a bath in the yurt
rolling hills of France
“Opting Out” is a simple thing you can do to save time and that can have a vast environmental impact. If you choose to Opt-Out, you will no longer be included in firm offer lists provided by these four consumer credit reporting companies that send out credit card offers and insurance solicitations, mostly thought of as another form of unwanted junk mail. Taking these simple steps can also reduce the chances of becoming a victim of identity theft that can take years to recover from and hours and hours of hassles should you become unknowingly “duplicated.”
New uses for your paper money?
What you don’t think of yourself as artist? Take time this winter to take on some creative and fun project to use another part of your brain.
Here’s a simple one to start with that will make everyone think you are a crafty clever person. Taking time to gift wrap a gift is part of the present and here’s a way to recycle and make your present stand out from the rest, make a bow using materials that at already close at hand.
Who needs a Dollar Store when you can do some origami projects using a dollar bill? Here are some crafty ways to make a cheap gift that you can say you made yourself, certainly this is one thing that is not plastic and is not made in China! If this inspires you and you are curious what else you can do on the cheap take a look at these sculptures from Stacey Lee Webber made from coins. You may never pass a penny on the sidewalk again. Here are some more intricate uses of our legal tender to get you thinking in new directions.
If you want to be very “old school” and stand out from the crowd nothing is more endangered than decent hand writing. Take an hour to improve your handwriting and you’ll never regret this rarely shown art if you want to get noticed for an unusual talent in today’s computer world.
Teaching an old dog new tricks is what keeps us young and our brains more elastic. Perhaps you thought that you learned how to tie your shoes so long ago there is nothing new about it but here is an alternative way to tie your shoelaces that will likely never come untied when you are walking.
New use for old Scrabble tiles DIY hack
Check out Richard R. Nagy’s Scrabble computer key board and think of the clever things you could do with the materials at hand in our home.
These are all clever little things you can do in less than an hour that will open up new worlds to you and allow you to think about the world around you in a different hue. Go for it!
Awesome illustration from the UK Guardian Newspaper
These colorful illustrations of information fascinate me. This chart from the Guardian is another great example of an artistic way to get a message across. Eating with the seasons is a commitment to the environment and it begins with awareness.
Slate has an article on-line call Sustainable Salads, by Brendan Borrell, that details which fruits and vegetable have the most modest environmental footprint.
It’s a wise choice to shop where you can determine the origin of the produce you purchase and to keep in mind how far it has come to get to your plate.
Maya Lin is most known for her early artistic accomplishment at age twenty-one winning the design competition for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. She is a brilliant artist to know and to watch and her accomplishments are many since her black granite work. If you are interesting in knowing more about her watch the 1995 documentary: Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision or to listen to her talking about her latest work with On Point Radio‘s Tom Ashbrook.
A decade ago she announced she was out of the memorial business entirely that she wanted to pursue other things. But then she has created “What is Missing” a multimedia memorial to all the species vanished or vanishing from the Earth, where you can hear some of the sounds of a number of species you may have taken for granted that are now endangered.
Photo by Fruggo, august 2004, garbage. Picture taken in Groningen, the Netherlands. Ruby Ann City Parliament House. dumpster
This National Resource Defense Council page is an interesting look at the paper products we use in the home and which brands we buy that are best for spaceship earth.
Tom Watson, is the local hero and on the solid waste website for the hyper-recycling King County provides these waste calculators to determine how much you add to the waste stream.
Here’s a list of one hundred ideas of things you can do that will help reduce your impact on our planet, you likely could come up with a hundred more.
As if this isn’t enough take a glance at the ever dynamic world clock.
a different view
I have always found this a mind-bender to think of the world as a village, this one is presented by Dr. Donella Meadows was a distinguished professor at Dartmouth (with the Environmental Studies Program). She was an author and highly respected economist for the Sustainability Institute (she died at the age of 59 in 2001)
If the world were a village of 1,000 people, it would include:
� 584 Asians
� 124 Africans
� 95 East and West Europeans
� 84 Latin Americans
� 55 Soviets (including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and other national groups)
� 52 North Americans
� 6 Australians and New Zealanders
The people of the village have considerable difficulty in communicating:
� 165 people speak Mandarin
� 86 English
� 83 Hindi/Urdu
� 64 Spanish
� 58 Russian
� 37 Arabic
That list accounts for the mother tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French and 200 other languages.
In this village of 1,000 there are:
� 329 Christians (among them 187 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 31 Orthodox)
� 178 Moslems
� 167 “non-religious”
� l32 Hindus
� 60 Buddhists
� 45 atheists
� 3 Jews
� 86 all other religions
* One-third (330) of the 1,000 people in the world village are children and only 60 are over the age of 65. Half the children are immunized against preventable infectious diseases such as measles and polio.
* Just under half of the married women in the village have access to and use modern contraceptives.
* This year 28 babies will be born. Ten people will die, 3 of them for lack of food, 1 from cancer, 2 of the deaths are of babies born within the year. One person of the 1,000 is infected with the HIV virus; that person most likely has not yet developed a full-blown case of AIDS.
* With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village next year will be 1,018.
* In this 1,000-person community, 200 people receive 75 percent of the income; another 200 receive only 2 percent of the income.
* Only 70 people of the 1,000 own an automobile (although some of the 70 own more than one automobile).
* About one-third have access to clean, safe drinking water.
* Of the 670 adults in the village, half are illiterate.
The village has six acres of land per person, 6,000 acres in all, of which
� 700 acres are cropland
� 1,400 acres pasture
� 1,900 acres woodland
� 2,000 acres desert, tundra, pavement and other wasteland
� The woodland is declining rapidly; the wasteland is increasing. The other land categories are roughly stable.
The village allocates 83 percent of its fertilizer to 40 percent of its cropland – that owned by the richest and best-fed 270 people. Excess fertilizer running off this land causes pollution in lakes and wells. The remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of the fertilizer, produces 28 percent of the food grains and feeds 73 percent of the people. The average grain yield on that land is one-third the harvest achieved by the richer villagers.
In the village of 1,000 people, there are:
� 5 soldiers
� 7 teachers
� 1 doctor
� 3 refugees driven from home by war or drought
The village has a total budget each year, public and private, of over $3 million – $3,000 per person if it is distributed evenly (which, we have already seen, it isn’t).
Of the total $3 million:
� $181,000 goes to weapons and warfare
� $159,000 for education
� $l32,000 for health care
The village has buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These weapons are under the control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 people are watching them with deep anxiety, wondering whether they can learn to get along together; and if they do, whether they might set off the weapons anyway through inattention or technical bungling; and, if they ever decide to dismantle the weapons, where in the world village they would dispose of the radioactive materials of which the weapons are made.
In and Out: a meal on the run
For those of you who made it to see Food Incorporated this post may not have added appeal. I call Food Inc. the perfect “diet” movie, if you are trying the change your eating habits to a little lighter it’s the perfect flick to view. If you are interested in eating more locally take a look at Local Harvest’s site that details where you can buy food closer to home including a tab that details Community Supported Agriculture.
This posting that shows the difference between fast food advertising and the actual product is quite something to see also. Keeping some healthy snacks in the car, such as dried fruit and nuts at hand, will allow you to think twice before making one of these high calorie stops, the actual calorie counts can be looked up here or this list of the highest calorie foods on the run.
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