MITPressLog

How to Budget Time to Commute by Bike

Happy National Bike to Work Week (May 14-18)! Miranda Martin, an acquisitions assistant at the MIT Press, recently started biking to the office. Here, she shares what John Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition has taught her about cycle-commuting:

 

Of the handful of us in the MIT Press office who commute to work by bike, I’m the least experienced by several years: this is my first cycling season. I had no experience riding a bike in traffic or farther than a couple of miles until this spring, but I had an urge to try it. (That urge by the way, sprang up in part from my work on MIT Press’s books about bicycling.)

So, I set off with a more experienced partner one Saturday a few weeks ago to test what would be my ten-mile ride to work. The distance initially daunted me, and according to cyclist John Forester in the brand-new edition of Effective Cycling, endurance is a common concern: “When most people consider cycling for any distance, they worry about getting tired.”

Forester goes on to explain that “the cycle-commuting distance problem is not fatigue but time. You know that you will feel better for any daily cycling exercise for which you can afford the time; the question is whether you can afford the time to get it.” I did feel great after that first ride, both because of the exercise and the boost in confidence I got from cycling—effectively—20 miles in one day for the first time. But is there time to fit that ride into a regular workday schedule?

To kick off Bike Week here in Massachusetts, LivableStreets Alliance, Somerville Bicycle Committee, and Cambridge Bicycle Committee hosted a Rush Hour Race: a competition for one cyclist, one motorist, and one public transit rider to find the fastest way to travel the three miles between Davis and Kendall Squares in Cambridge. The cyclist won, showing that at least sometimes, in some places, it’s quicker to go by bike.

Here’s how it works out for me: on days I take public transit to work, I typically spend about 55 minutes total walking to my neighborhood commuter rail station, riding the train, transferring to the subway, and arriving at the office. Last week, I used Google’s My Tracks app to gather some statistics about my bike commute. Total time for the ten-mile ride to work: one hour and one minute.

So, on average, I’m getting an hour of cycling at a cost of only six extra minutes of my time. And on days I happen to avoid even a small public-transit delay by riding my bike instead, I come out ahead and have a much more pleasant experience.

As Forester sums it up, “If you enjoy cycling, whether for itself or because you like the exercise, cycle-commuting is a bargain” when it comes to the time costs.

 

Can Robotic Dogs Help Socialize Children with Autism?

In Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life, Peter Kahn shows how technological nature is better than no nature but not as good as actual nature. In Chapter 9 of Technological Nature, Kahn zeroes in on the first part of his proposition (technological nature is better than no nature) when he investigates whether robotic dogs can help socialize children with autism.

Autism is a developmental disorder that is characterized by three main symptoms: impaired social interaction, impaired communication, and the presence of repetitive behaviors and restricted interests. Kahn states, “In the field of human-robot interaction (HRI), there have been some pioneering studies that suggest that robots might be able to ameliorate one or more of these symptoms.” Many such studies found that AIBO, a robotic dog used to conduct this cutting-edge research, was “more attractive [to children] than a nonrobotic toy.”

How can a robotic animal aid in the social development of a child with autism? Kahn suggests two ways that this might happen: the child interacts with the robot as a social other and robots may provide children with autism with a “pivotal medium for enhanced communication with adults.”

Kahn leaves us with this parting thought: “The key idea, then, is this: AIBO is patterned simply, but it is not simply repetitive. In this sense, AIBO is similar to much of nature. People can be captivated, for example, by looking at ocean waves breaking onto the shore, or experiencing a waterfall, because the water’s pattern is always changing, simple but compelling. I suspect that these engaging 'repetitive' properties of nature—and of technological nature if it is designed right—have not yet been fully recognized as a means to benefit children with autism.”

Check out Technological Nature for more information about Kahn’s study of how robotic dogs might aid children with autism—and, on a completely unrelated but still fun note, here’s a video of an “AIBO on the Typewriter.”

 

Earth Day Giveaway: Food Justice

We're giving away a copy of Food Justice by Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi to celebrate Earth Day! Food Justice tells the story of how the emerging food justice movement is seeking to transform the American food system from seed to table. 

Answer the questions below, which are culled from our previous Earth Day-related posts, for a chance to win a copy of Food Justice. Submit your answers as a comment on this post and you will be entered into a drawing to win. Your comment won't show up so that it's fair. The deadline to enter the contest is April 22nd, and we will notify the lucky winner by April 25th.

Why are the recycling rates that are commonly quoted deceptive?

How much waste is estimated to be produced in the United States each year? Of that, what percentage is actually recycled?

How many  species of invertebrate are estimated to live in Costa Rica?

Costa Rica has built up a system of almost 250 national parks, wildlife refuges and biological reserves. Who owns the vast majority of this land?

 

Reduce, Reuse, Reconsider

We're another week closer to Earth Day (4/22) and our environmental book give-away contest (check back on 4/18 for entry details!). Today's facts are from Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States by Samantha MacBride. Recycling Reconsidered tells how the success and popularity of recycling has diverted attention from the steep environmental costs of manufacturing the goods we consume and discard. Samantha MacBride teaches at Columbia University’s School of Public and International Affairs and is a professional in local waste governance.

 

• Bottles and jars that residents set out with their cans, plastics, and other recyclables rarely arrive at materials recovery facilities intact, but even those that do are sure to get broken as they proceed. As mixed recyclables move along a conveyor belt, a combination of magnets, electrical currents, air jets, and hand picking remove metal, plastic, and paper, leaving only glass. As glass is sifted out of the moving mix, it emerges crushed, mixed with food residues and bits of label. In this form, known as “dirty mixed cullet,” it is not good for much. At best, it can be used as low-grade fill or what is known as “alternative daily cover,” a substitute for the earthen layer that must cover each day’s load of trash at the landfill. If it is going to become anything more, it has to be shipped to a beneficiation facility to get cleaned and color sorted.

 

• Between 1970 and 1980, municipal solid waste generation in the United States had grown from 3.3 to 3.6 pounds per capita per day. By 1986, residents and businesses were throwing away 4.3 pounds a day. 

 

• Recycling rates commonly quoted are deceptive, since they usually are for municipal solid wastes only. Although many American communities are now recycling 25 to 50 percent of the trash they collect, other kinds of wastes are recycled much less and are produced in greater quantities. All told, an estimated 23 billion tons of waste (excluding water) are produced in the United States each year. Of this, less than 2 percent is actually recycled, most of it paper, glass, and metals.
  --- (Quoted from INFORM’s Entended Producer Responsibility: A Materials Policy for the 21^st Century).

 

• If you live in North America, you have probably seen code numbers stamped on the bottom of plastic bottles, tubs, trays, and even some plastic bags, surrounded by the three chasing arrows that since 1970 have symbolized recycling. Although consumers widely construe these code numbers, which run from one to seven, as instructions to recycle the item in question, the numbers are, in the words of the plastics industry itself, “not intended to be-–nor ever promoted as-–a guarantee to consumers that a given item bearing the code will be accepted for recycling in their community.”

 

• At the end of the 2000s, almost 60 proposals exist to ban, assess fees on, or require in-store recycling collection of plastic bags active in states and a few localities across the United States. In some states where in-store recycling, mandatory or otherwise, has been implemented, such as Delaware, Rhode Island, and New York, no program meets the criteria of strong extended producer responsibility to require producers to document baseline quantities generated and quantities diverted and to achieve mandatory targets for recycling.

 

Costa Rica by the Numbers

Earth Day is on April 22nd, and we'll be celebrating in the weeks leading up to it by posting an array of facts from a few of our environmental books each Wednesday (trivia fans, take note!). To top it off, we're offering a give-away contest for an environmental book closer to 4/22, so be sure to check back for entry details.

Today's Earth Day tidbits are from Adrian Hepworth's Wild Costa Rica: The Wildlife and Landscapes of Costa Rica. Adrian Hepworth is a wildlife photographer based in Cartago, Costa Rica.

 

 

• Scientists have recorded 240 species of mammal, 860 species of bird (which represent 8 per cent of the world's total), 221 species of reptile and 174 species of amphibian in Costa Rica. In addition, more than 10,000 species of plant have been identified with another 2,000 believed to remain undiscovered, and a staggering 370,000 species of invertebrate are estimated to live in Costa Rica, of which 350,000 are insects.

 

• Between 3 and 4 per cent of all the world's animal and plant species can be found in Costa Rica. This figure becomes all the more astounding when we consider that, with a land area of just 51,100 sq km, Costa Rica represents only 0.03 per cent of the world's total land surface area; it is less than half the size of England, not much larger than Switzerland or Belgium and more than eight times smaller than the US state of California.

 

• Among the dozens of birds and prey that live in the rainforests of Costa Rica there are five species of eagle, including the Crested Eagle and Ornate Hawk Eagle. The largest eagle of the Americas, the Harpy Eagle, may still survive in the country despite the lack of confirmed sightings in recent years.

 

• Since 1945, Costa Rica has built up a system of almost 250 national parks, wildlife refuges and biological reserves that cover roughly 20 per cent of its land area. The vast majority of this land is government-owned, although almost 150 private properties also account for a valuable part of the country's wildernesses.

 

• Almost 4 km above the palm-shaded beaches and hot, steamy jungles of the Costa Rican lowlands there is a sharp, rocky summit where no trees grow and icicles form at night. With a view of two oceans and looking down on the clouds, this mountain is the pinnacle of the Talamanca Mountain Range. At 3,819 m above sea level, Mount Chirripó is taller than any other mountain in neighbouring Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras.

Monday Eye Candy: Greening through IT

Another reason to think "green" now that St. Pat's is over: Spring begins tomorrow! In spirit of the new season, today's Eye Candy comes from Greening through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability by Bill Tomlinson. Greening through IT contains 2 black-and-white illustrations, 9 halftones, and 8 graphs.

 

 

 

 

 

An oil palm plantation (Dittmar, 2008). © Percita Dittmar.

 

 

 

 

Migrant child from Hunan Province sits atop one of countless piles of unrecyclable computer waste imported from around the world. Guiyu, China. December 2001. Photo and caption © Basel Action Network.

 

 

 

 

Molten television. Use of brominated flame retardants and heavy metals in plastics by manufacturers such as Sony create dangerous emissions when burned and disposed in the way. Lagos, Nigeria. Photo and caption © Basel Action Network.

 

 

 

 

A proposed ziggurat in Dubai (timelinks.org, 2009). © Timelinks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GreenScanner provides environmental impact reviews of consumer products via mobile phones. © 2008 IEEE.

Monday Eye Candy: Climate Refugees

 

Today's eye candy comes from Climate Refugees by Collectif Argos, which features 171 color photos. Happy Monday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 2005. New Orleans. Post-Katrina chaos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even several kilometres from the shore, the lake is never over head-height.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 2005. New Orleans. Post-Katrina chaos. An inhabitant exiled in West Virginia returns to her house fifteen days after the hurricane to salvage whatever she can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Sometimes when the landuntern arrive unexpectedly, they carry away with them hay that was freshly cut earlier on a beautiful summer's day, or worse, they drown a few cows or sheep that we didn't have time to get to safety."

Today's Eye Candy comes from The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change, by Philip Conkling, Richard Alley, Wallace Broecker, and George Denton; photographs by Gary Comer. The Fate of Greenland features 77 color photos and is the first climate science trade book to focus on Greenland, the world’s largest island. Because of global warming, Greenland’s ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice are melting, as evidenced by dramatic photographs made available a couple of years ago that have been the focus of news stories. This dramatically illustrated book describes how Greenland’s changing ice will affect the rest of the world. 

 

Here are a few photographs from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

A meltwater lake on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. Ice flow over bedrock bumps creates local low spots on the surface where water pools. These lakes sometimes wedge open crevasses, draining suddenly and spectacularly through the ice to the bottom and then out to the edge of the ice. (Photo by Gary Comer)

 

 

 

 

A debris-laden iceberg in Scoresby Sound. Glaciers carry material that falls on them, or that they pick up from beneath them or bulldoze in front. This material is eventually left in ridges called moraines, or spread across the landscape or dropped from icebergs to the sea floor. (Photo by Gary Comer)

 

 

 

 

Large iceberg calved from Daugaard-Jensen Glacier, Northwest Fjord in Scoresby Sound. (Photo by Philip Conkling)

 

 

 

 

Statue of Leif overlooking his father's, Erik the Red's, farm Brattahlid. (Photo by Philip Conkling)

 

 

 

 

Except in especially cold places where ice is frozen to the rocks beneath, glaciers usually erode the landscape more rapidly than rivers or wind. Valleys that are "U-shaped" in cross-section are characteristic of erosion by glaciers, such as the classic Qinguadalen valley that drains into the head of Taserssuaq Lake and was full of ice during the ice age. Note the delta and melt water plume built by sediment carried in the stream fed by numerous alpine cirque glaciers. (Photo by Gary Comer)

 

 

 

 

George Denton (right) and Bjorn Andersen study the geomorphology of a raised delta colonized by tundra plants, including bearberry leaves that show this striking red color in autumn, in Milne Land along the northern flank of Scoresby Sound. (Photo by Richard Alley)

 

 

How to Read the Landscape

Last week, MIT Press staff told us which titles they'd suggest as gifts.This week, Daniel Bouchard, a member of the MIT Press Journals Division, recommends A Landscape History of New England, edited by  Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd:

 

A Landscape History of New England  is an ideal primer for answering (and providing) a lot of questions about the common and uncommon landscapes all around as you travel through New England. It’s a resource, serving as a decoder of landscapes. Drawing on a long and scholarly tradition, it teaches you how to read the landscape. As an interested reader of many of the books cited throughout these 21 articles (by 23 authors), and a fan of many of those earlier authors (John Brinckerhoff Jackson, William Cronon, John Stilgoe, D.W. Meinig, and others, not least of whom, Thoreau), I found this collection a significant addition and worthy contribution to the literature. Now, as a pleasantly burdensome bonus, I have two handfuls of new (to me) authors on whom to keep an eye.

But what good is that to you? Well, imagine you and a friend are driving separate cars north out of New York City. You’ve got some time on your hands, opted for a road trip, and decided to “see” New England. It’s not the biggest territory in the States, but it’s still a lot of ground to cover. You pass over bridges, pause thru toll booths, and lean the wheel into the lanes under the big green highway signs boldly declaring “New England.”

Then you do something unique. Your car and the other car part ways to investigate different routes. You will meet up again somewhere way up north, let’s say at a diner in Brewer, Maine, in ten days. There, over lobster rolls and ale, you will discuss what you saw and compare notes. One car will “take a left” off Interstate 95 at New Haven and head north into Vermont. The other will continue along the coast up through Rhode Island, Boston and New Hampshire.

Is it a scavenger hunt for the eyes? What do we expect them to see? When they see the attractive old buildings in a town center painted white will they know those buildings are painted “a starker white paint than had been available to earlier generations”? (31) There is a lot to be gained by understanding such a thing. There’s a lot of history to consider beyond any plaques mounted nearby, and such plaques may indeed be more part of that history than they are a guide to it. Take the town Common: it may look postcard nice when our travelers pull up, but chances are good it was once held with the regard of any uncared for empty lot with junk on it, deep ruts from vehicles and stray animals. That condition wouldn’t be acceptable today, of course, and you can find out why it used to be.

Think about what you would see if you bought someone a coffee-table book “about” New England, one of those over-size picture books (which A Landscape History of New England definitely is not). No doubt, in that book there would be a lot of superb photographs of historic town centers with colonial and Federal style housing on streets radiating out from rising white steeples. In the rural section there would be old farmhouses and barns and piles of pumpkins gathered in the fall. On the coast there would be pictures of beaches and waterfronts, and fishermen on small boats coming in or out of the harbor. There may be pictures of quahogs, oysters or lobsters. There are few better pictorial representations of New England than a close up of a bivalve or crustacean in the hands of an old salt donning rubber overalls. For representations of the city you would see some nicely framed vantages of historic houses like those on Beacon Hill (Boston) or College Hill (Providence) and an aerial shot of Faneuil Hall and Fenway Park and so on. And in the mountains some photos of the colorful fall foliage with more farms and attractive town centers nearby. But what do any of the pictures tell us about New England? They only show us what we already know is there. And it is pretty.  

In both cars the challenge for the groups (yes, I’ve populated the front and back seats of the two cars—it’s more fun) is the same as they speed across the highways. They have the option to take any exit and explore whatever towns they come into and also the back roads between the towns as well as the large and small cities. The car along the coast exits and heads toward the water. They want to see some little town where there are fishing boats and a decent seafood restaurant. They will get out and take some pictures before they eat. The other car off-ramps in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. They admire the farms and meadows they pass and soon they come to the white steeple of a church and an old town hall and then the car pulls over by a small bridge where a handsome brick factory sits next to the water. The travelers get out, stretch, take some pictures and then go find something to eat.

If we have been in New England we have an idea of what others may expect to see in it. Now the questions turn to what can we understand about what we see all around us on the trip. The roads everywhere are lined with old stone walls. Sometimes, from the highway, you see the same stone walls rising up off the roadside and heading up over a hill covered with trees. Who put them there? The harbor atmosphere in a seaside tourist destination tries hard to evoke an earlier time. Why? Is the past more authentic? It is common knowledge that New England is the place to view autumn foliage but were those beautiful autumn views always highly valued?

Anyone can give you a dozen good reasons to visit Cape Cod. With this book you begin to see it from the eyes of a geographer. People on the Cape work hard to make a living from the land and sea. They always have. But after the First World War the economy shifted from working the land’s natural resources to working the industries and services that comprise a tourist seasonal-resident destination. The Cumbler chapter traces those changes with a cautionary note on the Cape as a “fragile ecosystem.”

So as our travelers compare notes they realize that they can now list dozens of towns all founded in the mid-18^th century, from each state. Some look like they are still in that time period with sprawling old farms and pastoral views—beautiful. Some simply look ravaged. Some look like revived mill towns, with humming, retro-fitted brick factories. And some mill towns look simply dilapidated with no help on the way. Some towns, after 250 years, appear to be just two highways crossing by a gas station and some, maybe a town or two away, are congested with upscale housing and fancy shops. Are the current economic winners also the past economic losers, thus preserving the things now highly valued as “New England”? Read the Wood chapter to find out.

This book informs like a startling tour guide. What it can’t answer directly it points you in the direction to find out for yourself. Did you know that three-quarters of New England was deforested by the mid-19^th century? Today it is three-quarters forested, and it reverted to its forested state “even more rapidly” than it was stripped (41). A Landscape History of New England offers everything our travelers need except restaurant recommendations. It offers everything they need to really see, the forest and the trees. After reading this book your trip on the Mass. Pike or the Merritt Parkway or the Spaulding Turnpike or through the Northeast Kingdom or the road to Mount Katahdin (after you finish your ice cream in the Bremen diner) or on what Jack Kerouac called “one long red line called Route 6” from the tip of Cape Cod to where it leaves Connecticut west of Danbury will never be the same. 

 

Failed Farms to Fall Foliage

Fall is upon us, bringing with it gorgeous landscapes that mesmerize tourists and native New Englanders alike. Yet, fall foliage was not always something that people flocked from both near and far to appreciate; in fact, Kent C. Ryden writes in A Landscape History of New England (edited by Blake Harrison and Richard Judd), “New England’s fall colors seemed to be a secret…[people] paid little heed to fall foliage because it served no aesthetic or imaginative purpose for them, so it remained simply a part of the backdrop to their everyday lives.” How did New England’s vibrant fall colors transition from ignored to revered? The following excerpt from A Landscape History of New England explains.

From earliest European settlement until well into the nineteenth century, the primary story of the New England landscape was the conversion of wooded space into agricultural space. Given the economic calculus of the times and the set of understandings guiding the minds and hands of New Englanders, “forest” meant “potential farm,” which meant that trees existed to be cleared for fields and fuel, with some left standing as woodlots to provide farms and villages with continued timber resources. In a remarkably short time, as much of the New England landscape as was practicable was converted to farms, with the line of agricultural settlement reaching north into Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont by the 1790s. By the middle of the nineteenth century, according to some estimates, three-quarters of New England had been deforested, primarily for agricultural use.

Today, however, those same estimates gauge the region as three-quarters forested. What had been a massive landscape conversion over the course of three centuries has reverted even more rapidly to some semblance of its former self in only half the time. It is not a matter of the original ground cover reasserting itself; indeed, the ecological composition of New England forests today is largely a result of human action. To summarize a long and complex story: once the American Northeast was connected to the agricultural lands of the Midwest by first the Erie Canal (finished in 1825) and then by railroads (completed in the 1840s), New England agriculture became a more difficult economic concern. It is not that New England farms failed absolutely; rather, given their comparatively thin soils, their shorter growing seasons compared to other states, and the impracticability of new farm machinery on many smaller holdings, they were at an economic disadvantage in competition with the influx of cheaper foodstuffs arriving daily from other parts of the country. Some farmers—particularly those in the more hardscrabble hill farms of northern New England—abandoned their lands…much of the New England landscape was allowed to revert to forest…

Far from being heartened by the return of trees on the played-out farms, many early commentators looked at the New England landscape according to the old calculus of productivity. From their perspective, New England was a failed region…

By the early twentieth century, however, we also begin to see a change in how that landscape is perceived, a change that reflects a larger regional and national evolution in the cultural meanings of natural places. Just as changing nature-culture relations have molded the physical landscape of New England, so have changing cultural ideologies regarding nature altered the perceived significance of the landscape. Basically, this change amounted to thinking of forests not as “failed farms” but as “foliage,” an altogether different category of landscape. A new one, too: the popularity of, and regional pride in, colorful leafy hillsides is very much a twentieth-century development…[allowing fall foliage to become] not only a New England regional symbol but the main focus of many an autumnal bus trip along the region’s back roads.