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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
bicycling, trains, renewable energy & climate change
NEW CANAAN ADVERTISER, NEW CANAAN, CONN., THURSDAY, APRIL, 17, 2008 PAGE 7A
Eco Man
Spring brings green efforts
Easter Sunday, March 23, was the first holiday to fall at the outset of spring 2008. I celebrated that brisk, sunny day with a bicycle ride from New Canaan to an unnamed neighborhood south of Chinatown, south of the Williamsburg Bridge. Easter Sunday – the unofficial start of the cycling season.
My destination was Broadway East, where I would feast on what turned out to be an unquestionably un-Easter Sunday-like dinner.
After bicycling down Old Stamford Road I traversed a subdued U.S. 1 to New Rochelle. There I turned left on Echo Road and right on Pelham Road. That allowed me to ride through Pelham Bay Park and down Westchester Avenue. I entered Manhattan on the Third Avenue Bridge, which led me on a fast ride down Second Avenue.
Broadway East is a bright, new, upscale eatery (it opened April 7) with a palate that is decidedly low on the food chain. Our server, Annabelle, was 20-something who sheepishly revealed she was from Fairfield County (Greenwich, Darien and Wilton) and had boarded at Westminster School in Simsbury. Annabelle, who traveled in Africa and beyond, while pursuing pre-med at University of Edinburgh, shared with us the restaurant’s philosophy and her favorite dishes on the menu.
After dinner I bicycled back to Grand Central Terminal and with my bicycle boarded the train back to New Canaan. Fortunately, Easter Sunday isn’t one of the ten holidays each year in which Metro-North policies dictate that bicycles are prohibited on its trains.
The downside of those arbitrary restrictions (especially prohibiting boarding bicycles at peak hours) came to the attention of outgoing Metro-North President Peter Cannito on March 26 at the annual President’s Forum. That evening nearly a dozen cyclists expressed their outrage at Metro-North’s recent announcement to continue its current restrictive policies toward bicycles and not include bicycle parking on 300 new M-8 cars even though cyclists had been repeatedly assured that parking would be provided. A forty percent increase in the New Haven Line fleet (380 MNR M-8 cars plus critical systems replacement rehab of 132 M-2 cars), cyclists argue, is the perfect time to integrate bikes on to trains. Add climate change and potential future fuel shortages into the mix and agency-sanctioned bikes-on-trains-at-peak-hours certainly makes sense.
Of course, other issues arise when it comes to climate change.
New Canaan resident and longtime Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp posits solutions in “Earth: the Sequel – the Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming,” which he co-authored with Miriam Horn. Consider it to be a 21st Century update to “Energy Future: Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School Project,” the 1979 energy strategy primer edited by Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin (Mr. Yergin’s 1991 tome “The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power” is a great read.) “Earth: The Sequel” opens with an easy-to-bite read into the research, resource and production challenges facing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs transitioning a solar future into the solar decade.
The 2008 Conference of Governors on Climate Change (http://research.yale.edu/envirocenter/) will take place at Yale University on. On Friday April 18th, Governors M. Jodi Rell. Jon Corzine, Kathleen Sebelius (Kansas), Eduardo Bours (Sonora, Mexico), Martin Bursick (Czech Republic) and Premier Jean Charest (Quebec) will convene in a 10:30 a.m. plenary session open to the public at Woolsey Hall, 500 College Street. At 1:30 p.m. a signing will take place and at 2:00 p.m. Nobel Laureate Dr. R.K. Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will give a public address.
The 2008 conferences serves as a centennial anniversary of President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 Conference of Governors, which is credited as launching the modern conservation movement.
Theodore Roosevelt, IV will pay tribute to his great-great grandfather’s legacy in a private ceremony on Thursday evening
Gifford Pinchot, who in 1900 founded the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (the centennial event host) and later himself served as Governor of Pennsylvania, organized the 1908 conference.
Thirty years have passed since Fred Krupp founded New Haven-based Connecticut Fund for the Environment (CFE.) On Sunday April 20th one of his protégés, Don Strait, CFE’s current executive director will address a Earth Ministries gathering at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. The talk – a primer on past, present and future Connecticut Fund for the Environment initiatives – will take place in the church’s Library Room at 11:30 a.m. That will be preceded by an organic coffee, organic cookies hour in Morrill Hall at 11:00 a.m. Everyone, regardless of religious affiliation is welcome and encouraged to attend.
Keep it green.
Richard Stowe is president of the New Canaan Environmental Group, an environmental education organization, and founder and director of Rail*Trains*Ecology*Cycling, a nonprofit advocacy group promoting sustainable modes of transportation.
television pundits ignore climate change in presidential race
NEW CANAAN ADVERTISER, NEW CANAAN, CONN., THURSDAY JANUARY 24, 2008 6A
Eco Man
By Richard M. Stowe
Warming warrant greater attention
Dateline: January 11, 2008
Location: New Canaan
Time: 2:00 p.m.
Temperature: 55
Average January High: 38
Average January Low: 19
Record January Low: -18
I know what you’re thinking: What is the record January high? Well, that was set last year (2007): 69.
Try to imagine a new record low being set this year.
The latest climate change research reveals that Greenland’s glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously thought.
60 minutes re-broadcast its hour-long “The Age of Warming” on Sunday evening. It’s well worth the time to read the transcript, or watch the video at the Age of Warming link, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/30/60minutes/main2631210.shtml.
Warmer winters is a growing concern among Olympic skiers and professional hockey players, such as Andrew Ference, the Boston Bruins defenseman, who is seeking a commitment from the entire National Hockey League to go carbon neutral.
Winter athletes have joined concerned citizens in requesting that “our leaders (to) freeze and reduce carbon emissions now” in an online petition (stopglobalwarming.org).
A national organizing effort called Focus the Nation (focusthenation.org/) is assembling a mass teach-in on global warming solutions for America at schools and churches in communities across the United States on January 31. Focus the Nation website lists New Canaan Country School and St Luke’s School as participants. At New Canaan Country School fourth graders will talk about global warming at their weekly assembly and at home will ask each one of their families to switch at least one fixture from incandescent to compact fluorescent. Upper school students (seventh through ninth grades) will screen “The 2% Solution” on January 30.
Another voice calling for greater focus on global warming is the League of Conservation Voters.
It asks: In 2007 how many times did Sunday talk show hosts – Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos, Bob Schieffer, Wolf Blitzer and Chris Wallace – mention global warming?
Answer: 3 plus 24 global warming related questions (12 by Tim Russert, 5 by George Stephanopoulos, 4 by Chris Wallace, 3 by Wolf Blitzer).
Question: How many presidential campaign questions did these 5 hosts ask in 2007?
Answer: 2484
According to Gene Karpinski, President of the League of Conservation Voters these statistics were culled by reading the transcripts of every one of the five Sunday morning talk shows and every debate that one of the aforementioned journalists was associated with in 2007.
That was in 2007, the year the International Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize! And, let’s not forget that Vice-President Al Gore, a former presidential nominee, won the Nobel Peace Prize, too.
Question: Who asked those questions in which they mentioned global warming?
Answer: Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday asked two questions and Wolf Blitzer of CNN asked one question.
Question: Who didn’t mention global warming in any of their questions?
Answer: Bob Schieffer, host of CBS’s Face the Nation, asked zero out of 238 questions; Clinton protégé and former Clinton senior advisor on policy and strategy, George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s “This Week,” asked zero out of the 726; Tim Russert, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” asked zero out of 755 questions.
The League of Conservation Voters believes global warming warrants more coverage by these Sunday talk show hosts.
If you agree that greater attention is warranted, the League of Conservation Voters has set up an online petition for you to register your support: whataretheywaitingfor.com/
This is how the remaining Presidential candidates, who serve, or have served in Congress, line up in terms of the League of Conservation Voters lifetime voting record rating on environmental issues.
Senator Barack Obama 96%
Representative Dennis Kuchinich 92%
Senator Hillary Clinton 90%
Senator John Edwards 59%
Representative Ron Paul 30%
Senator John McCain 26%
Senator Fred Thompson 12%
The candidate’s positions on energy and global warming are spelled out at lcv.org/voterguide/
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.
