Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Sustainability

May is National Bike Month!

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I’m taking a blogging vacation and a mini digital detox this week to hang out with family visiting from out of town. But in honor of National Bike Month, I’ll be celebrating bikes all week by rerunning some of my previous posts about bicycles and car-free living. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll see you next week!

Credit: Tammy Strobel

Bicycle Love (originally published May 5, 2009)

May is National Bike Month! Oh bikes, how I love thee. Let me count the reasons…..

10.  Bikes are quiet.

You’ll never get woken up at midnight, because your teenage neighbor’s revving his bike engine. And imagine if they replaced that freeway next to your house with a seven-lane bike path.

9.  You can cart groceries home on a bike.

Baskets are classy. Panniers are sophisticated. Cargo bikes are cool. And you can make your own hauling machine with a simple grocery cart.

8.  Bikes run on renewable resources – food, water, and human calories.

With the obesity rate hovering around 35%, quite a few of us have some calories to spare.

7.  Cycling tones your muscles, heart, and lungs.

The American Heart Association says all healthy adults ages 18 to 65 should get at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise five days a week. With a bike, you can probably get that on your commute to work.

6.  Bikes enable you to smile and wave at your neighbors.

Social isolation is growing in the U.S. Let’s get out of our cars and take a spin around our neighborhoods.

5.  Bikes are thrifty.

Check out Bike at Work’s calculator to see how much cash you can save by dumping your car.

4.  Bikes emit zero pollution.

Automobiles belch out 333 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, not to mention nitrogen oxide, sulpher oxide, toluene, benzene, formaldehyde, and more. All bikes emit is a little human sweat.

3.  Once you’ve learned how to ride a bike, you never forget.

What can I say … it’s like riding a bike.

2. Bikes are economical.

What’s the world’s most efficient mode of transportation? You guessed it – the bike. For energy burned per miles travelled, cycling is three to five times more efficient than walking. And it trounces running, driving a moped, taking a train, car-pooling, horseback riding, and swimming. (Sadly the least efficient mode of transport seems to be America’s favorite – driving a car with no passengers.)

And finally, the ultimate reason I love the bicycle…..

1. Bikes took down the bustle and the corset.

That’s right, ladies. The bicycle craze in the 1890s changed womens’ fashion forever. Women abandoned their confining corsets and adopted what was known as common-sense dressing.

In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said, “I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

bicycling not buttons

Let’s celebrate our two-wheeled friends all month by taking them everywhere. Note that Bike-to-Work Week is May 17-21, and Bike–to-Work Day is Friday, May 21. Employers can find out how to participate here.

What are your top reasons for loving bikes?


No Impact Man

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Over the weekend I watched the documentary, No Impact Man. Have you heard of it? Writer Colin Beaven talked his wife Michelle Conlin and their two-year-old daughter into dedicating a year to trying to make zero impact on the planet. That meant turning off their electricity in their New York City apartment, eating only local foods, giving up toilet paper, washing laundry in the bathtub, and riding bikes everywhere. Beaven says the point of the experiment was to see what would be easy to give up and what would be not quite as easy.

I loved that:

  • Michelle was a self-described reality-show addict and retail junkie and was less than thrilled about the project at first, but by the end, she loved riding bikes (even through Manhattan traffic), spending TV-free time with her family, and shopping at the farmer’s market.
  • Both Colin and Michelle said that the year made them better parents.
  • Michelle found that turning off the TV and all the gadgets made time slow down.
  • Colin discovered that working in the garden helped him connect to the rhythms of nature.
  • As the project went on, Colin reflected more about not just making personal changes, but getting involved in making change on a community level.

Things I wondered:

  • Why was it not against the rules to use hot tap water and the city sewer system?
  • Did they wash the diapers in the bathtub?

It’s a fun movie. I definitely recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet. I love that the message is not that we all must deprive ourselves to save the planet, but that less can be more. Simple living can be a deeply satisfying, rich, entertaining, connected, and fun way to live.

It left me wanting to power-down more often and do more bicycling, but more importantly, it renewed for me the importance of building community. At one point Colin Beaven said almost precisely what Rosie Kirincic told me recently when I visited Aprovecho, a non-profit collective dedicated to researching and teaching sustainable living practices and green skills: ““There’s accountability in knowing your community. It’s really a powerful thing.”

Have you seen No Impact Man? What did you think?

Bamboo Bicycles

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A couple of years ago, my husband and I were going to plant running bamboo along our back fence. Then we casually mentioned the idea to our next-door neighbor. She looked, well, terrified.

Bamboo is an amazing plant. It’s used to make musical instruments, toys, tools, weapons, flooring, paper, food, cooking oil, vinegar, and alcohol. But it’s also a bit noxious, at least in these parts.

When we were thinking of growing it, we visited a peaceful bamboo garden on the outskirts of town. The gardener showed us around and explained the difference between the many varieties of bamboo that rustled overhead in the slight breeze.

Then the conversation turned to warfare.

“You’ll need to dig a two-foot-deep trench all the way around your bamboo and bury this in it.” He held up a roll of thick, black plastic. “This needs to stick up at least three inches above the soil. The bamboo’s rhizomes will try to jump it. So leave a foot or so of bare ground all the way around the trench. That way you can see them coming over. When they do, mow them down immediately.”

It sounded more like prison-tower watch duty than gardening.

But there’s an upside to bamboo’s invasive nature. It is not only a useful plant; it’s an incredibly renewable resource.

And now you can get a bike made out of it.

Although riding a bike is considerably more environmentally-sound than driving a car, most bike frames are constructed out of materials that are decidedly not renewable. Think: steel, carbon fiber, aluminum, molybdenum, and titanium. Extracting these elements is labor-intensive, environmentally destructive, and can threaten public health.

For instance, I grew up 60 miles down-river of Leadville, Colorado, where the mining industry allowed heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and zinc to leach into the soil and water. The Environmental Protection Agency declared Leadville and the 20 square-miles around the town a Superfund site.

So imagine if we could make strong, light-weight, functional bicycles without mining, not to mention out of plants that grow like weeds. Well, we’re getting closer to that reality, although most bamboo bicycles contain some metal components.

You can purchase your own custom-made bamboo bicycle from Calfree Design. They claim that their bikes are tough, and they offer a ten-year warranty on them. They’re expensive though. All of the frames that are “on special” on Calfree’s website cost well over $1,000. But “if there were an award for ‘Bicycle with lowest carbon footprint’ (least amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the production of the frame), this frame would win, hands down,” Calfree’s site boasts.

You can also learn how to build a bamboo bicycle yourself.

Bamboo Bike Studio in Brooklyn offers workshops where you can learn to build one in a weekend. They’re also not cheap. The full bike workshop costs $932 and the frame-only workshop costs $632.

But some of the proceeds go to a great cause. The Bamboo Bike Studio is working with partners, including the Bamboo Bike Project, to establish bamboo bicycle factories in “Millennium Cities, starting with Kumasi, Ghana, Kisumu, Kenya, and Quito, Ecuador.” They hope the factories will, “provide a lower-cost, more durable, locally manufactured form of transport specifically designed for local terrain.” Unfortunately you’ll have to wait awhile to attend one of their workshops. They’re full through September.

But if you’re seriously into do-it-yourself, you could check out this how-to on Instructables. (However, as the disclaimer says, “Death or serious injury can result from a bicycle frame failure. … Be smart.)

Hopefully as more companies start to manufacture bamboo bicycles, the prices will come down, making bamboo bicycles a more accessible option for more people.

Would you ride a bamboo bicycle?

Appropriate Technology

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I recently visited Aprovecho, a 40-acre non-profit center about 15 miles south of where I live. They research green skills and sustainable living practices. They also tend a 1.5 acre garden; sustainably manage 23 acres of forest; and teach workshops in subjects like green building, permaculture, rainwater harvesting, and eating a 100-mile diet.

In addition, they develop something called Appropriate Technology (AT). On their website they define AT as devices that are “energy-efficient, nonpolluting, and renewable” that are made from “available materials, many of them recycled”.

Aprovecho was founded in 1979 by a group of back-to-the-land hippies interested in a specific type of AT: stove design. They wanted to develop affordable, fuel-efficient cooking stoves for use in the third world. And they developed something called the rocket stove, which is designed to use a small amount of wood, fully combust it, and keep smoke out of the house.

In the last thirty years, the Aprovecho staff has done over 100 stove projects in 60 different countries. Last year Prince Charles awarded them with the prestigious Ashden Award for one of their designs.

The group of people specializing in stove work recently moved off the Aprovecho campus and spun off into a separate non-profit. But they left behind an outdoor kitchen equipped with all different types of efficient cooking stoves. One of them is called a haybox. It’s a box that is so tightly insulated that you can bring rice and beans to a boil, stick the pot inside the box, and in several hours, the rice and beans will cook, with no extra energy expended.

After visiting Aprovecho and learning about their efficient cooking stoves, as well as their solar showers and composting toilets, I’ve been thinking that it would be fairly easy for more people to switch to at least somewhat more appropriate technologies, like:

  • regular toothbrushes instead of electric toothbrushes.
  • mixing spoons instead of electric mixers
  • clotheslines instead of dryers
  • bicycles instead of cars (at least for shorter trips)

I think I’ll stick with my flush toilet and electric range for now. But I’m a lot more mindful that the most high-tech tool is not always the best one for the job.

What types of Appropriate Technology do you use? In what ways do you try to conserve energy?

Gross Domestic Well-Being

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A country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the figure used to measure how big the economy is and whether it’s growing. It is the total value of all the final goods and services produced by private industry, the government, and trade, and it’s calculated as follows:

GDP = C + G + I + NX

  • C = consumer consumption
  • G = government consumption
  • I =business consumption
  • NX = total net exports (total exports minus total imports).

A strong and growing GDP has traditionally been seen as an indicator of good economic health and a high standard of living.

However, French president Nicolas Sarkozy is challenging the notion that GDP indicates a nation’s well-being, because GDP favors consumption over the welfare of citizens. For instance, building more prisons increases the GDP. Following the recommendations of Nobel prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, Sarkozy is pushing nations to adopt a new calculation that includes the welfare of citizens, environmental protection, work/life balance, and health care outcomes, as well as economic output.  Sarkozy believes that while GDP may be a measurement of a country’s market activity, the new number will be a better gauge of societal well-being.

You can read more about Sarkozy’s efforts here.

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The Slow Food Revolution

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(The fourth in a series highlighting U.S. Movements to celebrate, support, and spread the word about.)

dinner

Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist and political activist, founded Slow Food International in 1989, in response to a McDonalds opening in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna. Instead of focusing on his beefs with fast food – its highly-processed ingredients, the homogenizing effect it has on people’s diets, the social isolation it encourages, etc. – Petrini gathered 62 like-minded activists and created an organization to champion what fast food is not – the simple pleasure of cooking and eating fresh, high-quality food with others.

Today Slow Food International has 1,000 local chapters worldwide. They have an International Council, a President’s Committee, an Executive Committee, and an International Congress. They also founded:

  • Slow Food Editore, a publishing house that boasts a 70 title-catalog of books and magazines about food and wine production, artisan food specialties, crop varieties, animal breeds and food culture.
  • The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, which defends agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions, especially in the third world. Their Ark of Taste is a list of foods or food traditions in danger of going extinct because of “industrial standardization, hygiene laws, the regulations of large-scale distribution and environmental damage.”
  • Tierra Madre, a network of “food producers, distributors, cooks, academics and all those who work for responsible and sustainable food production.”
  • The University of Gastronomic Science in Italy, which offers a “multidisciplinary academic program in the science and culture of food.”

At first glance, one might be inclined to discount the 100,000 members of Slow Food International as an elitist cadre of epicures. Their manifesto doesn’t demand an end to agribusiness, factory farms, feed lots, or genetically modified crops, but defends “quiet material pleasure” and calls for a rediscovery of “the flavors and savors of regional cooking.” Petrini talks about a “fundamental right to pleasure.” And Slow Food enthusiasts devote resources to “taste education” of all things, holding sensory workshops for children and taste workshops for adults.

Unemployment is nearing double digits, our prisons are overflowing, our health care system is bloated and broken, and our public schools are scrambling for resources to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, let alone hold sensory workshops. Surely we have more cogent issues to tackle than how our food tastes?

Well, maybe not.

dinner 2Petrini might just be onto something. Getting Americans to change our over-consuming, gas-guzzling ways by decrying our ills simply isn’t working all that well. But convincing Americans to seek out pleasure in cooking, eating, and sharing food is undoubtedly a more salient message. And that message alone could transform the world.

I’m not thinking about what could happen if mass numbers jumped on board to save the Amish Pie squash, the bay scallop, Blenheim apricots, or other endangered plant and animal species from extinction or fought to preserve traditional ways of making gumbo or New England clam chowder. I’m not even thinking about how the Slow Food Movement’s insistence on “good, clean, and fair” could transform our food systems if it went mainstream.

I’m thinking about what could happen if more Americans simply rediscovered their kitchens, cooked real food, and took pleasure in sharing more family meals. How might those simple acts change the world?

Well, consider the following:

  • According to The Dogwood Alliance, fast food packaging waste makes up 20% of all litter and food packaging takes up 15% of our landfills.
  • Officials at Central Alternative High School in Appleton, Wisconsin switched from serving the standard fare highly-processed school lunches to fresh, locally grown, low-fat, low-sugar meals, and the results were dramatic. Discipline problems plummeted, attendance increased, and students reported an increased ability to concentrate, less moodiness, and fewer health complaints.
  • A National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse study found that kids who ate most often with their parents were 40% more likely to report getting mostly A’s and B’s in school than kids who had two or fewer family dinners a week.
  • Integrated-medicine champion Dr. Andrew Weil was interviewed on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show recently about how Americans can achieve health care reform, and more importantly how we can attain actual health. His advice? Stop eating processed and fast food. “It’s that simple,” he said. “In the 1940s and 50s, my family … ate at least two meals together everyday and food was cooked from scratch.”

So, this movement championing pleasure might be more revolutionary than it sounds. It’s hard to think of a societal problem that couldn’t be improved if more of us enjoyed the simple pleasure of cooking and eating good, clean, and fair food together – including the state of employment, prisons, schools, landfills, waterways, or our health care system.

To learn more about Slow Food USA and find a local chapter, click here.

Are you a fan or member of a movement fighting for social, cultural, or environmental change? Leave a comment! Your movement could be highlighted in a future article.

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