Ecoman
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September, a challenger to ‘Bike month’
New Canaan Advertiser, Thursday, September 18, 2008 6A
Eco Man
By Richard M. Stowe
Any month is a ‘Bike Month’
May has been known as Bike Month since 1956, but it turns out September is growing in stature as a bicycle-friendly month. It helps that the weather is generally warmer in September than in May.
For starters there’s World Carfree Day, hosted by the Prague, Czech Republic-based World Carfree Network, which takes place this year on Monday, September 22nd.
Most events take place in Europe, but look for World Carfree Day to pick up in American communities in years ahead.
Coney Island
Then there’s Transportation Alternatives’ NYC Century Bike Tour, which took place this year on Sunday, September 7th. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to bicycle over the Brooklyn Bridge, through Prospect Park, past Coney Island, Brighton Beach and Canarsie Pier (sections of Brooklyn that I visited for the first time) on a sun-filled day before volunteering as a marshal on Randall’s Island.
Hell Gate Bridge
Founded in 1973, Transportation Alternatives’ mission is “to reclaim New York City’s streets from the automobile and to advocate for bicycling, walking and public transit as the best transportation alternatives.” Transportation Alternatives strives to influence elected officials to direct New York City Department of Transportation officials to implement measures such as traffic calming, car-free parks and bike lanes with the goal of creating safe streets.
Brooklyn Bridge
Friday September 19th is National Parking Day (http://www.parkingday.org/) and it is promoted on the home page of the Trust for Public Land at tpl.org. It is an effort to create temporary parks in parking spaces.
Finally two new cycling events have emerged this September.
Bicycle For A Day occurs on Saturday September 20th from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM at South Street Seaport in Manhattan. More information is available at bicycleforaday.com.
Founded by actor Matthew Modine, Bicycle For A Day is an initiative to reduce an individual’s carbon footprint by traveling by bicycle and other carbon free modes instead of by petroleum-powered vehicles
Brita Climate Ride is a five-day bicycle ride from SOHO in Manhattan to the Capitol in Washington D.C. in which “climate riders” raise money for non-profits Focus the Nation and Clean Air-Cool Planet, which has a branch in New Canaan. (See related story on Page 8)
Climate lectures will take place in the evening each day of the ride. Further information is available at climateride.org
Four cyclists from Connecticut have registered for the 300-mile fundraiser including me. To make a donation, click “sponsor a rider,” enter the climate riders name, click on that name, and click on the riders name that appears below.
Climate Ride is no bike-cation, but it provides an opportunity to network, raise money for two climate education organizations while traveling by bicycle to the nation’s capital.
Richard Stowe is president of the New Canaan Environmental Group and founder and director of Rail*Trains*Ecology*Cycling. He may be reached at bike.rail.politics@gmail.com
bicycle vacation
OPINION
Eco Man
By Richard M. Stowe
Gas prices too high? Take a ‘bike-cation’ this summer
On Thursday May 29, Henry Stowe finished breakfast at H&M restaurant in Sanford, Florida. In between jobs, he would return to work on Monday June 2, but at that very moment he was about to transform a stay-cation, in which one remains within 50 miles of one’s home, to his very first bike-cation, riding 215-miles in three days.
A bike-cation is travel by bicycle to and from your vacation destination. A bike-cation is an antidote to escalating summer gas prices. On bike-cations, you burn carbs, not carbon.
Five years earlier in 2003, Mr. Stowe, my younger brother and a life-long subscriber to Car and Driver, accepted my challenge to ride in the 42-mile Bike New York. Riding a total of 57 miles by bicycle that day was a watershed event for him.
By 2006, he had relocated to Sanford, Fla., and bicycle-commuted eight miles round-trip per day.
After breakfast, Mr. Stowe embarked on a 55-mile bicycle ride to Ormond-by-the Sea that included an ocean swim break in Daytona Beach. The next day he blazed into uncharted territory on A1A, riding 95 miles, a personal best. That ride took him to St. Augustine, where he lunched at Blue Planet on organic fare, a hummus wrap with ginger dressing, salad and berry smoothie, before heading back down A1A to bed at a motel in Flagler Beach.
An ocean swim at Flagler Beach commenced day three; at Daytona Beach, Mr. Stowe put the wind to his back by cycling due west easing the 65-mile push back home.
My first bike-cation this summer began on June 27. The trip from New Canaan ended at the Flagpole on the Green in New Haven, where I addressed a hundred-plus cyclists about a June 6 letter from Governor Rell to Mayor DeStefano in which she expressed concern “that the new rail cars provide adequate bicycle storage” adding that “there is sufficient time to modify the design without delaying scheduled delivery.”
The cyclists had gathered for a June critical mass first in New Haven in which police corked intersections for participating cyclists.
Saturday, I rode in the New Haven Century, one of the free Arts & Ideas festival rides organized by Elm City Cycling, which passes through West Haven, Milford, Orange, Woodbridge, Bethany, Hamden, Wallingford, Durham, Killingworth, Madison, Guilford, Branford and East Haven.
About 70 miles into the ride, I bicycled into the Boston Post Road entrance to Hammonassett Beach State Park in Madison.
Cyclists experienced beautiful stretches of Connecticut back roads,
passing nearby West Rock Ridge and Sleeping Giant State Parks in Hamden, a picturesque farm in Durham and classic Connecticut shoreline in Madison, Guilford and Branford.
Bicycling 160 miles in two days, I was spent at the end of the century. I stretched and showered before a salad, soup and pizza dinner and walk down to Firehouse 12, an upscale lower Crown Street subterranean pub that draws Yale grad students and cyclists.
I re-fueled at Claire¹s, a vegetarian eatery, with a whole-wheat blueberry pancake Sunday brunch for the 40-mile ride back to New Canaan. I powered by the Boston Post Road malls in Orange and Milford and a Connecticut Avenue neighborhood in Bridgeport before watching a few minutes of Bridgeport Bluefish baseball from the right field fence at Harbor Yard Ballpark.
Calories burned: Countless. CO2 emitted by fossil fuel on these bike-cations: Zero!
Cycling for a purpose. Riding back into town from a short-lived party during the Sunday, June 8, heat wave, I reversed direction upon randomly sighting six touring cyclists featured in the Darien Times and rode with them up Oenoke Ridge. They were cycling across the America to advocate an end to extreme poverty through microfinance.
Not primed for a bike-cation, or cycling coast-to-coast?
Consider the two-mile challenge (http://www.2milechallenge.com/)* that substitutes short car trips with bike trips (http://www.1world2wheels.org/.)
Why not ride? After all, the number one contributor to carbon dioxide emissions in New England is the automobile-and truck-dependent transportation sector. New England’s transportation produces more CO2 than direct use of fossil fuels in New England’s homes, businesses and industrial buildings combined. In fact, the region¹s transportation sector alone emits more CO2 than the aggregate economies of Austria, Portugal, Israel and 150 more nations. And 74 percent of those emissions are gasoline-driven, fuel burning to move cars, light trucks and our “High and Mighty” SUVs.
Forty percent of all automobile trips are less than two miles and account for 60 percent of automobile-created pollution. At eight miles per hour, a two-mile bicycle trip takes 15 minutes.
No bicycle? Why not bike sharing? A town bicycle fleet could be located at Mead Park, for example, and be administered through recreation department employees.
Links to information about safety, the beneficial cultural values that cycling and being green impart on a community, and a two-mile route in New Canaan can be found by clicking on this column under the opinion tab at ncadvertiser.com.
Richard Stowe is president of the New Canaan Environmental Group and founder and director of Rail*Trains*Ecology*Cycling.
Below are links to information about safety, the beneficial cultural values that cycling and being green impart on a community, and a two-mile loop in New Canaan:
• Bike New York http://www.bikenewyork.org/rides/fbbt/history.html
• New Haven Century http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2014408 • Microbike USA|Accion http://www.microbikeusa.com/home.html • The End of Poverty http://www.earth.columbia.edu/pages/endofpoverty/index • Two-mile New Canaan route** http://www.2milechallenge.com/map.php?address=198%20Elm%20Street,%20New%20Canaan,%20CT%2006840 • Streetfilms: Return of the Bike Box! http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/06/27/streetfilms-return-of-bike-box/ • How to Not Get Hit by Cars http://www.bicyclesafe.com/ • Two wheels http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/wellbeing/story/0,,2287337,00.html • Streetstyle & Bike Advocacy from the World’s Cycling Capital (Normal people in normal clothes on normal bikes http://www.copenhagencyclechic.com/ • Copenhagenize [the planet] – LIFE IN THE WORLD’S CYCLING CAPITAL (Debunking the flat country myth) http://www.copenhagenize.com/2007/11/debunking-flat-countrybike-country-myth.html • The New Yorker – A Reporter at Large (The Island in the Wind: A Danish community’s victory over carbon emissions) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_kolbert/?currentPage=all) * Enter your home address into this site & find out what locations are within a 2-mile bicycle ride of your home! ** This shaded area in this map represents a two mile radius from the New Canaan Metro-North RR station at 198 Elm Street
unconstitutional acts compromise environmental policy
NEW CANAAN ADVERTISER, NEW CANAAN, CONN., THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 2008
Eco Man
By Richard M. Stowe
Orchestrated Deception
The Center for Public Integrity recently released Iraq – The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War, a project (publicintegrity.org/WarCard/Default.aspx?src=home&context=overview&id=945), which documents 935 false statements made by President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and six other top administration officials in an easily accessible database.
A crescendo of false statements commenced circa August 26, 2002 when Vice-President Cheney falsely declared: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
Elizabeth de la Vega referenced that false statement in her book United States v. George W. Bush, et al. She asserts that those false statements conjointly constitute a “conspiracy to defraud” Congress and Americans. She argues that committing fraud is a crime and President Bush has committed fraud. Article II Section 4 of the United States Constitution states that “The President, Vice President” and administration officials are subject to “Impeachment” when they commit “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Florida Democratic U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler’s online petition (wexlerwantshearings.com) calls for commencing impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney. On that site Congressman Wexler joins fellow House Judiciary Committee members Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) and Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois) as co-authors of an opinion piece outlining reasons for holding impeachment hearings.
Joining the call for impeachment hearings is 60-year old college professor John Nirenberg (marchinmyname.org/) who recently completed a six-week 485-mile walk from Faneuil Hall in Boston, Mass. to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in the Capitol.
I learned of those impeachment efforts when I attended a theatric performance entitled “A Question of Impeachment: Trial by Theater – They Took It Off the Table So We Put It on the Stage” (a cheeky reference to Speaker Pelosi’s 2006 election year proclamation) at the Culture Project in So Ho. The highlights of the multi-part performance, which took place from November 18th to December 16th, are on the Culture Project’s website (cultureproject.org/). Ed. Note: currently accessed through this link: (http://cultureproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=62)
The performance included many accomplished individuals representing a broad spectrum of American cultural and political interests.
New Canaan’s own Lewis H. Lapham, a great-grandson of the founder of Texaco, participated in the political theater. I spoke with Mr. Lapham during intermission. The Yale University graduate, author and editor of Harper’s magazine from 1976 to 2006, drew me out to Mercer Street where he lit up a cigarette while reminiscing about living at Waveny, then known as the Lapham estate.
Participants also included former New York State District 16 Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who at the age of 31 became the youngest woman to serve in the House of Representatives. She served on the House Judiciary Committee and participated in the impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon during the summer of 1974.
“A Question of Impeachment” concluded with a performance by Jackson Browne, a gifted folk-rock-singer-songwriter (his songs have been performed by the Byrds, the Eagles, Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt and others).
I was drawn into “A Question of Impeachment” by the opportunity to see Bruce Fein, a noted constitutional lawyer and 1972 graduate of Harvard Law School. A resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation, an adjunct professor at George Washington University, a columnist for The Washington Times and a former associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Fein asserts, among other charges, that Vice President Cheney “summoned the privilege to refuse to disclose his consulting of business executives in conjunction with his Energy Task Force.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, President of Waterkeeper Alliance, senior attorney for Natural Resources Defense Council and a renowned environmental advocate, details Cheney’s role and actions in the Energy Task Force in Chapter 6: “Blueprint for Plunder” of his 2004 book “Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country & Hijacking Our Democracy.”
Mr. Fein penned a commentary entitled “Impeach Cheney: the Vice President has run amok and must be stopped” (slate.com/id/2169292/) on Slate on June 27, 2007. It may have been this opinion (plus his testimony about presidential signing statements in front of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, also on June 27) that likely led to a July 13, 2007 “Bill Moyers Journal” interview on PBS television. That show in turn became the inspiration for “A Question of Impeachment.”
In the Slate commentary, Mr. Fein opines that Vice President Cheney has overtly and willingly exercised an unconstitutional taking of power from the President. He contrasts the duties accorded the Office of Vice President by the 12th Amendment and the powers Vice President Cheney has taken beyond what is allowed by Section 3 of the 25th Amendment. Mr. Fein refers the reader to a four part series in The Washington Post titled “Angler: the Cheney Vice Presidency” (blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/). Of notable interest is the final installment “Leaving No Tracks” (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/leaving_no_tracks/index.html), which focuses on Vice President Cheney’s influence on environmental policy.
Keep it green.
Mr. Stowe is president of the New Canaan Environmental Group.
martin luther king, jr. and the apollo alliance
NEW CANAAN ADVERTISER, NEW CANAAN, CONN., THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 2008 3A
Eco Man
By Richard M. Stowe
King’s environmental legacy celebrated at Yale Sunday
Today as I write it is January 15, 2008. That would have been the 79th birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. if he were alive. At this time last year (2007), I briefly met his son Martin Luther King, III, a human rights advocate, at the Riverside Church in New York, where nearly thirty years earlier on April 4, 1967 Mr. King gave what was then characterized as a controversial speech – “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”
As we celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr. this coming weekend I invite you to join me in attending the 7th Annual Arnold J. Alderman Lecture (http://www.peabody.yale.edu/events/mlkday.html#lecture) at the Yale Peabody Museum on Sunday January 20th at 2 p.m. This year’s speaker is Jerome Ringo, the President of the Apollo Alliance (http://www.apolloalliance.org/). His lecture is entitled “Environmental Injustice: The Other Inconvenient Truth.”
The lecture is the keynote during a two-day tribute at the Peabody Museum to the slain civil rights leader called “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Legacy of Environmental and Social Justice.”
Keep it green.
the machine produces greenhouse gases
NEW CANAAN ADVERTISER, NEW CANAAN, CONN., THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2007 OPINION_PAGE 5A
Eco Man
“Step it Up” to reduce greenhouse gases
By Richard M. Stowe
The machine’s coal, oil and gas suppliers are often located in Texas.
Dallas, Texas-based TXU, which serves over 2.4 million customers, boasts on http://www.txucorp.com, that “TXU Power owns and operates one of the nation’s largest lignite surface-mining operations, producing about 23 millions tons of lignite a year.”
In April 2006, TXU announced plans to build eleven new coal-fired plants in Texas.
By February 26, 2007, plans for eight of those plants were scrapped when Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Texas Pacific Group purchased TXU in a 45 billion dollar leveraged buyout.
The agreement doubles wind power investments and directs $400 million toward energy efficiency programs. TXU promises to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, endorse a mandatory federal cap on carbon emissions precludes and not expand coal operations outside of Texas.
In a first for a leveraged buy out, Environmental Defense and Natural Resources Defense Council, two opponents of those coal-fired power plants, were invited to take part in seventeen-hour negotiated agreement in San Francisco, California.
Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator William K Reilly, now vice-president of Texas Pacific Group, invited Environmental Defense participate in the negotiations.
Environmental Defense president Fred Krupp said “we shifted this from a local debate over generating electricity to a national debate over capping and reducing carbon emissions”
The increase carbon emissions, which is attributable to human beings burning coal, oil and natural gas, is a macro-environmental indicator.
The 2000 Democratic presidential candidate, Vice-President Al Gore is using his brand name recognition to focus the nation’s attention on global warming.
The 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary box office hit and accompanying book, An Inconvenient Truth, is part autobiography and part explanation of the documented and projected impacts to human health and ecosystems by climate change.
In it Vice-President Gore recounts his awe as a student in the 1960’s at Harvard University under the tutelage of Roger Revelle, the eminent Harvard scientist who, in 1957, the International Geophysical Year, became the first scientist to set up a research station (atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii) to measure greenhouse gases.
With the esteemed Dr. Revelle as his professor, no wonder that Vice-President Gore has displayed a passion for climate change.
In 2005, Australian scientist and conservationist Tim Flannery provided a more in-depth and scientific account of global warming in The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth. After reading “The Weather Makers,” Richard Branson pledged three billion dollars toward developing sustainable energy.
On January 26th Mr. Flannery was the recipient of the 2007 Australian of the Year award.
For a more passionate and urgent reading of climate change scenarios we may face, tap the thoughts of Mike Tidwell in his 2006 non-fiction tale, The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities. In 2002, Mr. Tidwell founded Takoma Park, Maryland-based Chesapeake Climate Action Network (http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/), a regional grassroots climate change advocacy group. Mr. Tidwell may be the nation’s pre-eminent regional climate change proselytizer.
In 1989, then-28-year old Bill McKibben penned “The End of Nature,” an environmental epic, chronicling the coming travails of climate change. Mr. McKibben became an instant ecological icon. Today, the prolific and lanky Mr. McKibben, who serves as a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, has set alight a grassroots brushfire for “Step It Up 2007: A National Day of Climate Action (http://www.stepitup07.org).” Scheduled to take place on Saturday April 14, 2007, Mr. McKibben hopes to inspire a heartfelt movement to act against climate change. The decidedly philosophic Mr. McKibben is taking on a Herculean challenge to garner media attention through a strategy to move the discussion of global warming from blog suites to America’s streets.
“Step It Up” organizers hope to mobilize Congress to pass legislation to cut carbon by 80 percent by 2050.
Richard M. Stowe is president of the New Canaan Environmental Group. Prior to that he served six years as a board member for the Environmental Council of Stamford, and advocates for improving conditions for commuter rail and bicycling via Rail Transportation Excellence Coalition. He received a bachelor of science degree in environmental science from Marlboro College in 1980.
welcome to the machine
“Addicted to oil?
OK, but what we’re really addicted to is the machine.
The machine invariably runs on carbonaceous fuels – coal, oil, or natural gas – or those so-called atoms for peace.”
That’s the opening crescendo in my inaugural Eco Man column. That first column was edited and the lines that followed in that column have yet to be published.
For the first time ever I share those lines with the public:
Ironically, the machine is most visible at night.
Ninety-nine percent of Americans and European Union Europeans and two-thirds of the world’s population live under light polluted skies.
Eighty percent of Americans, two-thirds of the European Union Europeans and twenty-five percent of the world’s population live in under night skies superimposed with manmade light equivalent in scale to that of the light output of a full moon.
According to the National Park Service Night Sky Team, just one percent of landmass in America’s National Parks is light pollution free.
Those measurements indicate how widespread the machine’s imprint is on our planet.
This blog catalogs Eco Man columns that have already been published.
New columns will be posted on the blog as they are published.
I encourage readers to interactively express their own views on ideas conveyed in this blog’s posts.
