Showing posts with label bikes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bikes. Show all posts
Anticipating biodiversity in the car spaces of yesteryear (or, CARtesian idiocy momentarily renewed)
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Yesterday I received this strange email from a project manager acting on behalf of the university where I'm conducting research:
Dear Students,
Over a 10 week period commencing Wednesday 23 February 2011, 200 additional car park bays will be constructed on the southern side of the P4 car park on B campus. During this time, a small section of the P4 car park will be fenced off as part of the construction site.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and ask for your patience and understanding while the works are carried out to extend the P4 car park.
Regards
Neil H
A/Senior Manager
Major Projects
Capital Works and Facilities
The strangeness of this email prompted me to respond immediately, as such:
dear neil,As chance would have it, my friend Ianian sent me this image today of a parking lot at one of the abandoned car factories in Flint, Michigan:
200 additional car park bays?
we're entering a period of permanent expensive oil as this resource has peaked and entered decline.
any construction based around the car is twentieth century thinking, wasteful and is heading in the entirely wrong direction.
cld you pls let me know what public transport and bike infrastructure works the university is currently developing.
university buses with the ability to carry bikes is now urgently required to cope with today's economy.
it is simply not good enough for a progressive university to be making provisions for regressive and polluting technologies.
many thanks,
patrick (doctoral student, b campus)
"Speaks volumes," said my friend.
I look forward to Neil's reply and the chance to respond to him with this image, alone, because what else can one say?
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A bit more shoulder on the road to Argy-Bargy
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
The sense of entitlement that many drivers have on the road has become decidedly apparent since we gave up our car and began riding greater and greater distances. It got me thinking about that ridiculous word 'progress', and got me redefining it, absent of the prejudices of twentieth century thinking.
Image: Meg Ulman
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Human generated electricty
Friday, January 7, 2011
Since selling our car it's been treadlie power everyday:
Bike work,
bike tour,
bike camp,
bike draw,
bike fun.
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Permablitzing on pushies: critical mass goes Daylesford NYE parade
Monday, January 3, 2011
Fifty cyclists turned up for critical mass this month, which landed on NYE, so we joined the annual parade, as we're want to do. Here we are getting ready on the back streets...
Pia, Brett and Fyfe beside my new bike.
Peak oil Zephyr and mates.
Nicholas Hansen and Ivan Carter (behind mask).
And then when we were ready, Meg and Zero lead the ride down the main drag.
Carless in the country
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Three years ago we gave up supermarket food. Two years ago we took down the kitchen clock. A year ago we gave up air travel. And, this week we sold our car.
We have spent money on cleaning it and having it “worthy” of the road. We’re a little tense as it’s raining and one of us, eight years old, is not so aware or interested in the effects of the mud on his shoes on the upholstery. We still have some petrol in the tank. It will be enough for the journey. It’s been a year since we made the decision and we have rehearsed being carless all through the winter recording each kilometre travelled, each litre expended, and the extent to which our participation in global resource wars disables our reembodiment, our relocalisation, our humanity. And now, we’re at this point, at this significant milestone of our transition, ready to drive for the last time from the town with very little public transport to the city dripping in it, where the young guy who works for the Armed Services Credit Union, will unironically hand us a cheque which we will in turn cash in at the bicycle store. (from a letter to a Hamish Morgan, Dec 2010)
We kept a logbook for this past year for no other reason but to enable a more conscious examination of our largest polluting activity.
Yesterday we headed to Melbourne on foot, bus and train to collect our new long-tail cargo bikes. We had our helmets with us so we thought we'd give the Bike Share a go en route to the bike shop.
Then the exciting moment... Our new bikes and a tourist-like snap in the city by a passer-by.
After a quick lunch we hopped back on the train.
And rode 30km from Ballan to Daylesford. We sang and screamed for joy at the immense sense of freedom. Cars and trucks belted past, some only a foot or two away from collecting us.
We both have front baskets to take Zero, the family's Jack Russell, and Zephyr, our awesome eight year old, has new panniers and a pack rack on his ten speed racer. Stay tuned, probably on the Artist as Family blog, for bike camping/touring adventures and, more generally, a family's everyday refusal to participate in the chronic abusiveness of the dominant culture and its industrial military complex.
Robin Hood
Friday, December 18, 2009
There's so much to speak to today. Here's the local news: Firstly, my friend Josh, who I write about in the special bike issue of Greenwash, delivered my 'Junkie' (pictured below). He has put it together over the past several weeks using many reclaimed parts and a few new ones such as the spokes. As you can see it is absolutely beautiful with a Brookes seat that dates back to the 1940s and an Australian Rob Special frame that could be just as old. I've decided to call it Robin Hood after the red robins that appear on the original paint-work, and in honour of our 'hood, this beautiful neck of the world wide woods, and, of course, because of the carbon I wont be emitting for the profits of corporate pop-fascists – stealing from the grossly rich by generating my own renewable human generated electricity.
In other news, I've just been awarded a three-year scholarship to do a doctorate at the University of Western Sydney. I'm hanging up my tool-belt, at least for commercial building work. My research basically concerns permaculture as a modus for the arts, centring on relationships between poetics and ecology. I will be arguing that the twentieth century delivered the flawed threesome Communism, Capitalism and Fascism, none of which offered human settlements an embedded ecological framework, and as a result, humans and non-humans alike have suffered terribly. The arts have largely operated as the dutiful court jester to triumphant capitalism's anthropogenic riches. However, I will also argue that the arts have radical genes, fit and flexible enough to lead an ecological insurrection across fields. I'm going to be spending a lot of time on my bike.
And, then there's Copenhagen, the global news: What a mess. At least with Bush, Blair and Howard we knew they were evil. It helped that they were upfront about it. With Kev and Barack it's the same as before just a more ambiguous, fuzzy-feeling style of politicking, utilising 'clever' semiotics. With these latter two so-called leaders we were made to feel change is in the air, but really it's growth as usual. Where is the critique of growth-capitalism at Copenhagen? Growth, of course, is at the heart of ecological crises. When Obama was sworn in not all of us were wishful though. Regarding his 'change' and 'hope' wash, this is what I wrote almost a year ago:
Obama will either be shot or fully bought within 12-24 months. And most likely we'll be just as disappointed as we are with Kevin07.
But to keep an eye on global politics is a rather hopeful, wasteful occupation. It generates in people a deep sense of powerlessness and futility (with some moments of apparent redemption and hilarity, as above). In the twenty-first century, our three future scenarios (David Holmgren outlines four, and I'll speak to the fourth at a later stage), are Brown Tech, Green Tech and Earth Stewardship (permaculture, and the like). At a systems level, the former two are based on just growth and consumption, the latter based upon biomimicry where growth and consumption are dynamically relational with birth, decomposition, death and rebirth (regeneration) – alltogether making up what I call the six seasons of circularity.Permaculture together with steady-state economics offers human settlements relocalised food, water and energy while repairing the ills of twentieth century capitalism and anthropocentric idealism. Permaculture bypasses two-party hopefulness and re-engages us with the local. Holmgren, in this book, is quite simply outstanding.
For more on this book go to futurescenarios.org Read more...
Greenwash #7 in Trouble
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Special Bike Issue.
Environmental writer Derrick Jensen believes the only level of technology truly sustainable was developed in the Stone Age. Pretty harsh claim at first glance. Then there are the majority of folk who believe technology can redeem us, who believe that only an investment in newer and better technology can rescue us from the mess we’re in. For me this argument is perennially flawed. Technology nearly always creates more problems than it solves. Take dentistry for example. It appears that we have progressed immensely in this field, but this level of technology has only come about as our diet has become more and more disembodied from natural systems; as our diet has been fashioned by food technologists and their commercial patrons.
Read on here.
Steve Futo, Bike Ball, Daylesford NYE Parade, 2008. Photo: Lisa Gervasoni.
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