Always true, just now laid bare by the pandemic:
In transit conversations we often talk about meeting the needs of people who depend on transit. This makes transit sound like something we’re doing for them. But in fact, those people are providing services that we all depend on, so by serving those lower income riders, we’re all serving ourselves.
Cool! This is my local transit system!
The first hydrogen articulated buses in the US goes to… MTD. New Flyer has secured an order for two sixty-foot Xcelsior CHARGE H2, powered via
Source: MTD finalizes the first order for articulated hydrogen buses in the US – Sustainable Bus
An interesting and important article about a researcher gathering data that seem to show that although more carbon in the air means plants grow faster, the result is plants with more sugar but less protein, minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients:
http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511
the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2.
From the IMF blog, a great chart showing the rate at which motor vehicles took over from horses early in the 20th century. Putting current motor-vehicle and electric-car use on the same graph makes a pretty good visual case that we might be as little as 15 years from the cross-over point where half the vehicles on the road are electric.
Greater affordability of electric vehicles will likely steer us away from our current sources of energy for transportation, and toward more environmentally friendly technology. And that can happen sooner than you think.
Source: Chart of the Week: Electric Takeover in Transportation | IMF Blog
This great article in Al Jazeera America hits a whole bunch of my interests: healthy eating, decolonization, sustainability, preserving culture: Eating indigenously changes diets and lives of Native Americans. Basically, more than one group of researchers who are also Native Americans have decided to look into seeing if they could eat the way their ancestors ate.
Reinhardt, a professor in the Native American Studies program, was helping to serve up fry bread, Indian tacos and other offerings at the annual First Nations Food Taster, a fund-raising event for the Native American Student Association, when he had an epiphany: “Would my ancestors even recognize this as food?”
If you, like me, are a fan of Michael Pollan’s work, there’s a lot here to find interesting. There is considerable overlap with the “paleo” diet (although the researchers set their time threshold at 1602, rather than the dawn of agriculture) and with the locavore movement (with different locales for different Native American researchers).
The article touches on all sorts of question: Do we even know what they ate? Are the plants and animals still available? Is such a diet healthier than a modern Western diet?
Interesting as the food issues are, the issues having to do with decolonization are at least as interesting, as are the issues having to do with sustainability.
The News Gazette had an article yesterday saying that the Champaign City Council has agreed to “schedule a study session” on the topic of legalizing backyard chickens.
Tom Bruno, who was the guy who offered me some encouragement when I inquired earlier seems ready to support the idea. Other members of the council sounded more ambivalent. The comments on the News Gazette article are decidedly mixed as well. (The people who object not because they think the chickens would actually cause any sort of problem, but because they’re afraid that it would make the area seem too “redneck” surprise me.)
So, it’s by no means a sure thing. Time to get organized.
One utterly predictable consequence of climate change is that the price of northern farmland will rise as growing regions shift north.
Tobias Buckell yesterday shared a report that just this sort of price shift is now occurring—interesting to me because this result is not merely predictable: I predicted it my own self, way back when I was in high school.
Global warming was still pretty speculative then (in the 1970s), but people were already talking about the greenhouse effect and trying to figure what the result would be. At the time, I was mainly thinking about the geopolitical implications of shifting the growing regions north—how things would change if Canada and the (then) Soviet Union were suddenly way more productive of food, while places like the United States, China, and France suddenly less so.
What I discovered, though, was that those northern regions aren’t nearly as fertile as places like Illinois, where 8,000 years of tall grass prairie left an incredibly thick layer of rich soil.
No matter how perfect the climate is, Saskatchewan is not going to produce the bushels per acre of Illinois or Kansas. Their soil is not only less fertile, it’s also much more fragile than the soil of the tall grass prairies. The fertile layer isn’t as deep, so the land must be plowed with greater care, and it will in any case be more quickly depleted.
I’m sure there’s a lot more and better data available now than there was back then, but I doubt if it changes the fundamentals. Shifting growing regions means winners and losers, but it also means less total food production.
We usually buy our peanut butter from a local health food store that grinds it fresh. The owner comes out from behind the counter, grabs a 1-pound package of peanuts from the cooler, and then takes it back behind the counter and grinds it while you wait. (I think you’re supposed to get the package yourself and bring it to her, but I didn’t know that. Jackie usually does the shopping there.)
Sadly, we just used up our package of freshly ground unsalted unsweetened peanut butter, and for lunch today had to make do with our backup supply—some national brand peanut butter. We keep it on hand for two reasons. It’s less runny than good peanut butter, which is nice when we’re making peanut butter sandwiches to take to a lunchtime lecture at OLLI (or any similar brown-bag event) and want a minimally messy lunch. And it stores well.
It’s not as healthy. It’s salted and sweetened. Worse, some of the healthy peanut oil has been replaced with some less runny oil. (Although they now use less hydrogenated vegetable oil than they used when I was a kid.) But you know what? The commercial stuff tastes good even so.
Still, we’ll get some more freshly ground peanut butter first chance we get.
