Wolfgang Sachs - The Development Dictionary (1992)

Calls for securing the future of the planet are often, on closer inspection, nothing else than calls for the survival of the industrial system.

 

This weeks green thought comes from Wolfgang Sachs’s essay Environment in The Development Dictionary (1992), which he edited.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Sachs

Enrique Penalosa - Mayor of Bogota

This weeks green thought comes from the former Mayor of Bogota, Mr Enrique Penalosa

 

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars, it’s where the rich ride public transportation”.

During his term of office, Enrique Penalosa built 300km of protected bike lanes, and said:

“When we build very high quality bicycle infrastructure, besides protecting cyclists, it shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally as important to one in a $30,000 car.

Every Sunday and on public holidays, motor vehicles are banned from 18 out of 20 districts of the city of Bogota. Since 1976 (i.e. for more than 35 years), the “Ciclovía“, the day of the week, when almost the whole city becomes a bike lane, is carried out.  In 1980, the Ciclovia was enshrined in law.

 

Besides the bicycle infrastructure, the former mayor established the TransMilenio, a bus rapid transit system, which provides “public transportation that improves traffic flow and reduces smog at a fraction of the cost of building a subway.” The TransMilenio and the bike infrastructure are interlinked: “TransMilenio stations at each end of a line have huge bicycle parking facilities to facilitate bicyclists using the system.”

 

Just like Stafford !

 

http://www.openideo.com/open/how-might-we-improve-health-care-through-social-business-in-low-income-communities/inspiration/about-enrique-penalosa-former-mayor-of-bogota-colombia

 

http://www.pps.org/reference/epenalosa-2/

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Pe%C3%B1alosa

Neil Evernden - ‘Natural Alien’

‘As a member of industrial society it is difficult for any environmentalist to step fully outside that society’s assumptions, or to make sense of it if he does’.

 

 

This weeks Green Thoughts are taken from page 37 of Neil Everndens’ ‘Natural Alien’ (2nd Edit. 1993).

 

http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_natural_alien.html?id=pPBeaElorjsC&redir_esc=y

 

http://www.arthurmag.com/tags/neil-evernden/

Ivan Illich - Energy and Equity

"Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. The bicycle lifted man’s auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible."

"Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems."

From the 1978 book "Energy and Equity by the late Austrian philosopher and ‘maverick social critic’ Ivan Illich (1926 – 2002). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich