Last night I went to Plan B (SE 8th and Main) for “An Evening with Roger Geller”, an interview of Roger Geller, PBOT’s Bicycle Coordinator, by Jonathan Maus of BikePortland. The main subject was the draft 2030 Bike Plan, which is likely to be adopted by City Council in January. It was a good conversation […]
Category Archives: Environment
Ten is cool, seven is cool
Xtracycle on Twitter today pointed me to a great blog post from Doug about his seven years as a car-free commuter (in Minnesota, no less). I mentioned to someone recently that it’s been nearly ten years since I owned a car. (Actually, I’m not sure I ever technically owned a car, since the car I […]
When you say “as in”
” ‘With any luck we will be able to ftp some suitable software and get it running on the Tera.’ ‘The Terror?’ ‘Tera. As in Teraflops.’ ‘That does me no good at all. When you say “as in” you are supposed to give me something more familiar to relate it to.’ “ I got a […]
Does anyone have Staythesame.gov yet?
I haven’t generally been extremely hopeful about Obama as president as far as “Change” goes — my feelings tend more to the “intelligent, self-reflective, moderately liberal guy? okay, that sounds pretty good” sort — but I am fairly disappointed that he’s appointing a Secretary of Energy who thinks the problems are on the supply side […]
tying together two themes of my life lately
I’ve been to or known of a lot of weddings of people I know this year, including two in June (both lovely, and very different). Thus I was charmed to find my interest in transit combined with this recent swell in weddings in Annie’s post about a couple traveling to their own wedding on the […]
Never thought it would happen but…
…I think I’ve fallen for California, or at least for the Bay Area. I fell for San Francisco a bit before I moved here, loving the little houses all packed up in the hills. It reminded me a little of Edinburgh (the city I love best). I also had an affection for BART — the […]
Disposing local
The single paragraph in Garbage Land: On the Trail of Trash that most annoyed me was this one: According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which made exhaustive studies of consumers’ environmental impacts, the things that make the biggest differenc to planetary health are transportation, housing, and meat eating. It isn’t worth it, they said, […]
Keep us in tofu, and also in bananas?
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing. –Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle This beautiful expression reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad a while back about spending and saving money. We both enjoy watching money accumulate, and tend not to buy things, even though we […]
Why I bother
Michael Pollan has an article in the New York Times magazine this week called “Why bother?” It’s essentially a long apology (in the old rhetorical sense) for personal action, personal virtue, in the cause of reducing our carbon emissions. One of the last entries I wrote in my old journal before I switched over was […]