Open Letter to President Bush: Save Democracy

I have written the letter below to former President Bush at info@georgewbushlibrary.com.

Please feel free to copy or adapt to send to President Bush or any other former Republican with any power who you think might be willing to act.

=========================

Dear President Bush,

I am writing to you to ask you to take action to preserve democracy in the United States.

As a Republican former president, you are uniquely positioned to reach out to current Republican leadership, including President Trump and Senators McConnell and Graham, and urge them to pay heed to the results of the election, concede the loss to President-Elect Biden, and allow the transition of power to proceed smoothly.

I also urge you to talk with more moderate Republicans in the Senate with the goal of persuading them to vote out Senate Majority Leader McConnell and replace him with someone whose only goal is not to obstruct any actions of government coming from the House or the President.

Thank you for considering this request.

Heide Estes

Hey New Jersey, Prioritize Bike and Pedestrian Street Access

This week, I'm taking part in a virtual course led by Al Gore for the Climate Reality Project to become a more effective climate activist. One of the tasks in the course was to do some research on climate impacts and solutions, and write about it. I took a look at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection web page, and I had some thoughts.

Governor Phil Murphy is committed to addressing climate change, and the state’s Department of Environmental Protection has a page called Take Action with sections addressed to business owners, households, local governments, and schools, plus a summary of “New Jersey’s Key Initiatives.”

The homeowner section includes a carbon footprint calculator that allows people to see how much carbon they are using, and where. This is a great resource to start your own journey with awareness of your own impact.

To help the environment, the page recommends several actions, including using energy efficient light bulbs, appliances, and heating and cooling systems; driving “green”; installing home solar panels; saving water; recycling; and planting trees. 

According to the page, “the majority (42%) of New Jersey’s Greenhouse Gas emissions come from transportation.”  To mitigate this, the state is encouraging residents to buy plug-in electrical cars while also planning to buy electric vehicles for use by state offices and as part of the public transit fleet. New Jersey is committed to transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy sources, so the electricity powering all those electric cars would ideally come from wind and water, not from coal and gas.

The NJDEP site also contains the 148-page 2019 New Jersey Energy Master Plan: Pathway to 2050, and this more comprehensive document includes several references to improving public transit and rethinking streets to make pedestrian and bicycle access more widespread and safer. But the “Take Action” page does not make any reference to these goals. 

A third of all car trips in the United States are less than two miles long.  If there are safe options for walking and bicycling, many of those trips can be made without using a car at all, which is good for emissions, and also good for people’s health.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that the state’s public-facing recommendations don’t do more to encourage people to take short trips on foot or on a bicycle, and provide information and resources to make it easier for individuals to do so. 

The state could create an ad campaign on radio, television, and the web about how drivers can behave to make bicycling safer, as well as reminding cyclists to ride with traffic, be visible, and signal intentions. Municipalities could give out helmets and demonstrate the use of baskets and panniers to carry groceries or schoolbooks. Increasing the number of bicyclists on the roads also makes them safer for pedestrians.  

Instead of just encouraging drivers to buy electric cars, the state of New Jersey should build infrastructure, disseminate safety information, and give away gear to bike riders, in order to make the streets safer for everyone, reduce emissions, and improve the health of the population.

Reduce your Carbon Footprint for Lent

The suggestion comes around every year that instead of giving something up for Lent, folks should use the season to declutter their homes, finding one item per day to give away.

The problem is, we're drowning in excess stuff. Decluttering, whether to spark joy or find God, doesn't address the problem of how we got all that stuff.

I'm going to suggest, instead, taking action to reduce your carbon footprint for the days of Lent.

Instead of giving things away for Lent, we could give up buying things. Give up a category, like clothing, and make the things you have in your home work for a few weeks longer.

Or give up food waste. Or plastic supermarket bags. Or single-use plastic packaging.

Or give up beef, as the meat that's highest in emissions, and for the 40 days of the holiday eat only fish and fowl. Or reduce the quantity of meat you eat rather than the kinds.

In the solar year, Lent crosses the last few weeks of winter and the first few weeks of spring, a time when many of us are waiting eagerly for light and warmth, the change of season that will bring more light and enable more outdoor time and allow us to manufacture more vitamin D as we shed winter layers and take a big breath of relief that the dark cold of winter is over

For our ancestors, it was the hungry time, when stores of late summer and fall crops like potatoes and apples were running out and the spring lettuces and early berries had yet to grow.

Giving up a category of food as a religious exercise was a way to give meaning to the season's privations.Today, though, while poverty is an entrenched and serious problem, it doesn't follow the solar seasons the way it used to.

Today, referigeration and global shipping allow us access to wide varieties of foods year-round -- so much so that if you didn't grow up in a rural community, you might not actually know what foods are seasonally available in your local area.

Lent is a short time frame during which you can try out an action that will reduce your carbon footprint, and see if it will work for you in the longer term.

What do you think?

Circular Economies

To slow the release of carbon into the atmosphere, we can turn to renewable energy and biodegradable packaging, but to stop it, we need to return to a circular economy, with localized nodes all over the world.

Our current global and local economies depend on "natural resources" and "human resources" with the assumption that these are limitless, that the earth possesses or will continue to generate enough raw materials for the endless production and transport of new goods. In fact, many of our global industries depend not just on stable markets, but continuously growing ones, for financial stability. We have now reached the point where this will no longer allow for environmental sustainability.

In order to reach a point of truly circular economy, we need to reuse, recycle, compost, or burn (as fuel) everything we produce. And we're doing a terrible job at that.

While glass and metals can readily be recycled and similar products created, with less energy output than refining new materials, recycling plastic is much more difficult. Plastic, once produced, can't be melted down and re-used in the same form.

Water bottles (#1 plastic), for instance, can be made into fleece sweaters, but not into new plastic water bottles. There's a problem, though: every time you launder that fleece, you release microplastics into your town sewer system, and they end up in the ocean where they're killing wildlife.

Here's a table from Oxford University that summarizes how plastics are generally recycled by communities:

Go here for the full-size image

It turns out, though, that the situation isn't quite as dire, in theory: Plastics labeled  #2, #3, #4, and #5 can be turned into plastic wood. The town of Long Branch started a program last year to recycle plastic bags and wrappers (#4). They promised a park bench after 500 pounds of packaging was collected, and this January, the first bench was installed near Lake Takanassee.

Meanwhile, the town of Middletown, NJ recently opened a styrofoam recycling center, open to residents of the entire county. It only collects styrofoam used in packaging and shipping, not food-grade products, so you still need to get a reusable mug for your Dunkin Donuts coffee, and avoid take-out that's packaged in styrofoam.

There's a breakdown, however, been theory and practice. Between 1950 and 2015, the amount of plastic products produced annually rose almost 200-fold, from 2 million metric tons per year to 381 million metric tons, and only 9 percent of that was recycled.

We need to do better, and when it comes to plastics we need to address this in several different ways.

Governments need to enact carbon taxes to encourage corporate and individual consumers to use less carbon, by making it more expensive.

Producers of plastic products need to do a better job of making containers out of more easily recyclable products when possible, researching and developing biodegradable containers, and avoiding excess packaging.

Consumers need to send a message through individual purchases and buying habits that we don't want plastic. We need to:

• stop buying bottled water and other products packaged in single-use plastics
• refuse excess packaging, for instance when we buy loose produce
• advocate with local and state governments to enact plastic bag bans, and meanwhile make the choice to use reusable bags for our shopping
• boycott Dunkin Donuts and other corporations that still use styrofoam instead of paper hot drink cups, and tell them why

... and more. Those are starting points, not end points. We need to move to an economy where everything we produce can be repurposed in some way. It's going to take imagination and persistence. If we don't do it voluntarily, the effects of climate crisis will force the issue.

Biking in New York

After a bad crash almost three years ago, I've been biking in New York again. Some things have changed, some things have not.

Unchanged: pedestrians. They step into the street without paying attention, they walk in the bike lane, they text and walk, they behave with complete unpredictability. I appreciate the anarchy on a philosophical level, but on a practical level I’d like them to acquire some level of self-preservation.

Changed: a flashy new protected two-way bike lane on 20th Street, between 1st Avenue and the East River. That used to be the scariest part of my ride, with unprotected bike lanes going both directions on a two-way street, constantly blocked by parked and stopped cars, an access road on the other side of a sidewalk, and parked cars that made it really hard to know where the next 2000-pound barrel of death might come from.

Changed: protected on-way lanes on some of the cross streets, with plastic bollards to keep the cars out AND no line of parked cars, so you can actually see the traffic.

Unchanged: construction projects that block the bike lane, forcing cyclists out into the stream of motorized traffic streaming down the avenues.

Unchanged: drivers that use the bike lane as a stopping zone, loading zone, unloading zone, delivery zone, temporary parking. Whatever. Sometimes, every block has an obstruction in the bike lane.

Unchanged: the “protected” bike lanes on the avenues with a line of parked cars that make it so you can’t see the traffic, you don’t know if a driver is going to open a door into your path, and if a pedestrian steps in front of you, your options are to slam on the brakes or hit a parked car. Sometiems both.

Changed: the sheer numbers of cyclists. There are more of them than ever. This provides a certain amount of protection by sheer numbers, because drivers know to look for us. But New Yorkers being New Yorkers, it also means a net increase in chaos, with more people riding against traffic in one-way bike lanes.

Unchanged: the city still doesn't have an infrastructure or a culture that prioritizes anything other than motor vehicles. Vision Zero is still a dream.

More Biking in the New Year

I teach a couple of classes in which I ask students to undertake a semester-long personal project where they commit to some small change that will benefit the environment. I generally make my own commitment as well, and write about it in the same on-line discussion board where the students write about theirs.

My point: we can’t stop climate change, but we can make it less bad. It’s going to take efforts on the parts of individuals, corporations, AND governments. It’s our problem, not somebody else’s.

In the Fall, I told my Humans and the Environment students that I was going to do my grocery shopping by bike.

I failed spectacularly. I made it to the supermarket twice all semester.

When I’ve lived in Cambridge, I’ve done all of my shopping by bike, regardless of weather conditions. I didn’t have a car, so I had no choice. I shopped once or twice a month at the big supermarket on the other side of town, on weekends at the farm stand, and at the small shop in the center of town when I needed something quick.

And when living in NYC, I’ve always done all of my shopping on foot or by bike. Parking, at both ends, is just too much of a hassle.

But having a car in New Jersey, and the presence of ample free parking everywhere, made it too easy to drive.

I’ll pat myself on the back for this: even though it wasn’t an articulated goal, I always managed to bike to the gym when I wasn’t already on campus for teaching and meetings. I also either walked or biked to work almost every single day, except for the weeks when I had walking pneumonia.

This spring, I’ll try again to add grocery shopping into the biking mix.

Problem in the fall: I didn’t make my goal concrete enough, and I didn’t give myself time to get up to speed. Plan for spring: In January, I’ll aim for at least one trip to the supermarket by bike, in February, at least two, in March, at least three, and thereafter, four per month (or once a week).

Problem in the fall: I didn’t commit to times or days when I was going to shop by bike. Solution: I’ll pick the days and plan ahead to make sure I have the time and equipment.

Problem in the fall: I didn’t plan ahead. I’d be at the end of the work day and realize I was missing a key ingredient for dinner. Plan: always bike to work with an empty pannier, locks, and lights so I can ride by the supermarket on the way home.

Also, I’ll be more careful about planning menus at the beginning of the week and buying groceries that will support them, rather than buying a bunch of random stuff that looks good and assuming it will come together.

Problem in the fall: I didn’t pick specific stores that I was going to bike to. Proposed solution: plan one trip to the health food store, one trip to each of the two closest supermarkets, and one trip to the farmer’s market. Figure out what I can do comfortably, and then do it.

Wish me luck. Hold me accountable. And tell me what you’re doing this year to make a difference.