Sexiest radios ever.
# • Posted on Jun 04, 2008 • Tags:
Bicycle! Bicycle!
Annie and I moved to Appleton, WI from Portland, OR last September, and we just did something that on the surface doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Despite living in the most bike-friendly city in the United States for a year and a half, we didn’t have bikes, but we moved to bike-unfriendly Appleton and bought bikes! We’re enjoying our new bikes so far, and it got me thinking about why we didn’t have them in PDX.
Portland is a great bike city, but it’s also a great public transportation city. When we lived there, I could walk or take a streetcar to work from our first apartment, and take a frequent-service bus from our second. The streetcar, the MAX light rail, or walking was always easy for us to do, so I don’t think we needed another alternative to our car. For us, Portland was so transit-friendly that we didn’t even need to take advantage of it’s great bike system!
Now that we’re in Appleton, the alternatives to driving are slim. Appleton and its surrounding cities share a bus system, but service is sparse and infrequent. There are maybe one or two routes that we would find useful, but our car is so much more convenient for those trips.
We moved into a duplex within walking distance of downtown, which has been great so far. Appleton has a pretty nice downtown for a city its size, and it allows us to walk to church, the performing arts center, the library, restaurants, and shopping. In fact, we have a Walk Score of 78.
So, while we’re able to walk many places easily, there is still a huge hole in our transit lives. Without reliable bus, light rail, or streetcar service, we’re in need of another way to get around town. That’s where biking comes in! Bikes allow us to do our walking trips faster, and it expands the reach of where we can go under our own power. Plus, it’s fun and good exercise. I don’t think biking in Appleton will ever compare to biking or public transportation in Portland, but we’re making the best of what we have here.
Now if only Appleton would become more bike-friendly… but I’ll save that for another blog post.
I’ll leave you with a video about how wonderful Portland is:
# • Posted on Jun 02, 2008 • Tags:
A Digression on Generations, Food, and Farming
When I’m at work, I’m usually behind a computer screen. Now, I’m not complaining, but at times it does become hard to focus when it’s a sunny afternoon. Because of the gardening I’ve been doing, I’ve daydreamed about what it would be like to run a much larger garden. I’m thinking of the kind of garden one could make a living on. It’s a romantic dream; the honest organic farmer working the soil, harvesting the crops, and selling it to nearby city dwellers. It’s so captivating of an idea, I even mentioned it to Annie, who, rightfully, laughed and pointed out that I know nothing about market gardening.
While I have put aside my bucolic aspirations, others in my generation have taken up the challenge. I just read this New York Times article (from the Fashion & Style section, oddly), about young urbanites leaving the city to start up small vegetable farms. The thrust of the article is that young people are tired of hearing about the issues around genetically-modified food, food importing, etc., and have decided to take matters into their own hands. Now, I’m a sucker for articles that talk about trends in my generation (mostly because I think we’re on the right track), so I would’ve read this article anyway. But I loved it because it talked about something I daydream about and something I know others my age dream about too.
I know there’s a certain danger in trying to go deeper into trend the New York Times pointed out, but I just can’t help myself. I think the article gets to the issues I (and friends of mine) have with food these days. When I look down the aisles of the supermarket, I can’t believe how much processing it all went through. For every fresh cheese, bread, or vegetable, there’s a Gogurt, Hungry Man Meal, or pre cooked bacon. How did it get this way? When did it happen? TV dinners were invented in the 1950s, those living then probably saw this as an innovation. Never before were meals so convenient, and I don’t think people then understood how much worse they were than actual food (and maybe I’m wrong). Between the 1950s and today, I think TV dinners, as well as other pre-packaged and processed food, have gone from innovative to simply a norm.
My generation (Generation Y) has started to think a little harder about food. Again, I may be reaching, but so much of what we see today is mass-produced and mass-marketed to us. It’s natural for the younger generation to start asking questions about what kind of culture we have and if it’s good for us. Food is a natural place to to begin because it’s something we deal with every day.
My hope is that my generation will be the one who brings us back to supporting local, sustainable agriculture. While I can’t help but think that the young farmers mentioned in the New York Times article are a tad naïve, I hope that they’re successful and can change society’s perception about what constitutes quality food. I’ll keep doing my part by tending to my own crop in my community garden plot.
Community Gardening
It’s finally warm in Wisconsin! After a chilly spring (we had frost advisories last week), it was over 70 degrees today and Annie and I took advantage. We had prepped our beds in our community garden plot a couple of weeks ago, so it was just a matter of planting today.
The community garden we’re in is pretty great. They’re asking plot-renters to try and use no-till Lasagna Gardening, and they provided some organic material for the layers. We decided to give it a try. I’ll be interested to see how it works compared to the veggies we planted in our yard using traditional techniques.
I’m extremely excited by the scale of this garden. Last summer we were in a small fourplex in Portland, OR, so we only had room for some containers on our front porch. For whatever reason, we never got a community garden plot. This year, if all goes well, we’ll have veggies out of our ears!
Here’s a diagram of what we planted and where:
Via TreeHugger
What’s This Blog About?
When I was a junior in high school, my civics teacher gave me a copy of Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken, Amory and L. Hunter Lovins. At the time, I didn’t really understand why he gave it to me; I didn’t think I came across as an environmentalist. Of course, now I know it wasn’t just about the environment, but instead a book about changing the way we think about everything from carpet to cities. The chapter on Jaime Lerner and his city of Curitiba, Brazil changed my life. I loved reading about novel solutions to typical urban problems like transportation, poverty, and suburban sprawl. I majored in Urban Studies because of that chapter. I’m not sure if my teacher intended all that by recommending the book, but I have to thank him for it!
Since college, I’ve been lucky enough to work at Idealist.org. The only downside to an otherwise great job is that I don’t get a chance to think about cities, the environment, and urban design. That’s what this blog is for.
Here’s a 15 minute video of a presentation by Jaime Lerner so you can get a quick look at what drew me to the topic in the first place:
# • Posted on May 23, 2008 • Tags:
Colorified photo from 1940, via The Library of Congress.
