We are recently back from Santa Fe, Argentina, where, under the Secondary Cities program of the US Office of the Geographer, Ecocity Builders teamed up with a local NGO, the Mayor’s office, and the local public university to host a three-day technical workshop on urban...
[/caption]What a beautiful day! I’m floating across the vast landscape of Detroit
under bright blue skies with big white clouds billowing up, enormous
distances between. My rental bike from the Wheelhouse downtown by the river
feels like a magic carpet and the air temperature is perfect for a thin
shirt, fresh breeze on the skin. One surprise: the waters of the Detroit
River are deep and clear blue almost like those of the Bahamas and not at
all like the Mississippi and muddy rivers of China, India and Brazil I’ve
visited lately.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks in changing the ways we move around, eat, or do business, is the common perception that living a less fossil fueled life means sacrifice and inconvenience, even drudgery. In the case of the bicycle, the danger factor is often added to the list of reasons of why it would be such a bad idea to get out of our cars.