Green Bicycling Test
I wrote this yesterday afternoon but I was too tired to finish it (I had been up all night sorting out a year of accounting for DJWriter, Inc.). My brother woke me up at 9 PM, and we talked on the phone for eight hours. By then, I was tired again. Anyway, I'm finally awake enough to wrap this up, so here it is...

I'm not sure what I think about this. At first blush, I'd say hardcore environmentalists like the Sierra Club can suck the fun out of anything, even bicycling, with a depressing injection of eco-guilt. Go ahead, take the "How Green Is My Bike Ride?" test. Then come back and we'll talk about the results.

Much to my amazement, I did well:

Your score: 82 out of 100 points.
American Flyer (80-100 points):
You're truly using your bicycle to save the planet. Keep pedaling!

I've never felt like my cycling was saving the planet. In fact, I do some things that are blatantly eco-unfriendly, the cycling equivalent of dumping motor oil in a river. Incredibly, they didn't take off many points for those behaviors, but they docked me harshly for another rather innocuous answer.

My worst answer was clearly #2. I drive to most of my bike rides. Heck, the main reason I chose a hatchback was to cart my bike around (at least we own a compact car). I know that wastes gas, pollutes the atmosphere, etc., but I get little joy from city cycling. Being hyper-alert in the city wears me out. I can ride 20 miles on the North Branch Trail and feel less exhausted than I do riding the six miles from my doorstep to the start of that trail. I also prefer suburban streets -- fewer stop signs and parallel parkers -- so sometimes I drive to road rides, too (my wife is a Chicago police officer so moving out of the city isn't an option). Somehow, the Sierra Club gave me six of ten points for this environmentally irresponsible/unforgivable behavior. Question #6 about my favorite type of riding, which is on a deserted country road, is similar. From my home, it's more than an hour's drive to any country roads, even further to deserted ones. They gave me eight points, but I deserve less. For goodness' sake, I even wrote a book premised on driving someplace to ride (although I try to accommodate everyone).

Instead, my worst score was on #3. When it gets dark, I don't ride my bike. There are rare occasions (once or twice a year) when I use battery-powered lights, but I generally avoid it. For that, the Sierra Club gave me five points out of ten. But there's nothing inherently wrong environmentally with not riding at night. They presume that this restriction limits my cycling and automatically makes me drive more, but it really doesn't. Living the semi-employed freelance lifestyle, I ride as much as I care to during daylight hours. Besides, I'm an old married guy -- where am I going to go at night?

I must be doing something green to score 82/100, though. Each of these practices earned ten points: I patch my tubes, I ride steel frames (generally -- five of seven bikes are steel, and I ride them 95% of the time), I clean my chain with citrus solvent (albeit not much more often than I ride at night), I have racks and fenders on my primary bike (plus rear racks on three others), and I fill my water bottles from the tap (at least when I'm home -- when I travel, I often choose bottled water over awful-tasting motel water).

What have I gained from this test? Not much. I'm already doing some good things, but I am unlikely to change the bad ones. Considering that someone who doesn't own a car only beat me by four points, I think this test is a dubious measure of greenness.

Labels: bicycling, environment

- posted by David Johnsen @ 5:25 PM 1 comments

 
"Almost Heaven, West Virginia"?
Do you have any idea what is happening in West Virginia these days? Check out this sobering slide show featuring the "mountaintop removal" method of coal extraction -- along with several residents turned activists desperately fighting to save their land and their own lives. Be sure to click "captions" on the bottom right to read the devastating details.

To extract large quantities of coal, companies clear-cut forests (sometimes without even harvesting the wood), blast away up to 1,000 vertical feet of rock, fill valleys with mountain rubble, turn headwater streams into chemical spillways, and poison the groundwater. The totals are staggering -- 470 mountaintops blown apart, 800 square miles of forest denuded and leveled, 675 ponds filled with toxic coal sludge. And the government predicts the destruction will triple by 2012, only five years from now.

Are we willing to sacrifice Appalachia -- the land and its people --to sate our appetite for fossil fuels?

John Denver would surely weep.*


* For more about "Take Me Home, Country Roads" -- including the original verse about "naked ladies" -- click here.

Labels: energy, environment

- posted by David Johnsen @ 3:35 PM 3 comments

 
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
I finished reading The World Without Us a month ago. Incredibly, every day something triggers a memory about something in the book. It stays with you. To imagine a planet without people, Weisman draws on virtually every realm of science from biology to astrophysics, not to mention a healthy dose of engineering, archeology, and social sciences. What would be the immediate consequences of our absence? Which man-made structures would last the longest? How long would it take for decimated animal populations to recover? Would another race of humans someday evolve?

On this speculative journey, the reader visits the New York subways, Houston's petrochemical plants, the "horse latitudes" where ocean trash languishes, the English birthplace of modern fertilizers, an Arizona nuclear power plant, and the radiation-poisoned -- but not lifeless -- area surrounding Chernobyl. Along the way, tour guide Weisman imparts fascinating tidbits. For example, when he describes how weather would break down the average house in the absence of a diligent homeowner, he notes that ceramic bathroom tiles will last the longest because they are chemically similar to fossils. Elsewhere, he describes how newspapers fill up landfills -- we think they break down quickly, but they last much longer buried without air or sunlight. While discussing the relative permanence of polymers, Weisman says "biodegradable" plastic bags don't really degrade completely; they just separate into minuscule particles of plastic. These plastic pieces do not break down, and they turn up in plankton and other small organisms.

Some Amazon.com reviewers claim the book says the world would be better off without us. Weisman never says that, however, so perhaps those people have guilty consciences. Also, science deniers need not apply -- evolution and global warming come up repeatedly.

The World Without Us is written in easy-to-understand language, which is important for a book that veers from chemical engineering to anthropology to oceanography. If the book has a flaw, I suppose it is its non-linear organization. Instead of a narrative moving from the present into a humanless world, the author jumps from topic to topic, shifting back and forth between now and the future.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the environment and our role in it. It does all the things a great book should: it entertains, provides a lot of information, and makes the reader think.

Labels: books, environment, science

- posted by David Johnsen @ 2:40 AM 0 comments