Category: Environmentalist Ramblings

I’ll admit that I am smug about my bicycling instead of driving. I like the exercise, I love never having to hunt for parking, and most of all, I’m having fun. But the smugness can go too far. To wit, here is a letter from today’s Mr. Roadshow column in the San Jose Mercury News:…

For all I know this phenomenon may be nationwide, but I think I’m pretty special and lucky to live in a neighborhood where, during strawberry season, a man appears on a street corner just a few blocks away selling farm-fresh strawberries at a below-market price. It’s always the same guy, though I have yet to…

I’ve always liked using my bicycle (the road bike with a seat for Kelly) for short trips, when time and distance allowed. More recently, the record high gas prices have inspired me to, well, first of all, put off optional driving, like a trip to the zoo or art museum, and secondly, to use my…

I originally intended to write about the destruction wreaked at the last Critical Mass bicycling rally in San Francisco last month. As an urban bicyclist who has lived and worked in San Francisco, I understand the anger and frustration on both sides. I have actually never biked in downtown San Francisco, but it’s a yukky…

I was surprised to realize, via a homeschooling site, that Earth Day used to be Arbor Day. And oddly the tradition of Arbor Day–to plant a tree–is and was more environmentally proactive than say, buying carbon offsets. Earth Day involves a lot of whining and chest-pounding about how mankind is damaging the environment, the importance…

When Peter and I lived in Mountain View, I had a brief infatuation with buying milk in return-for-deposit glass bottles. It was made possible by the fact that Mountain View had a small dairy store, The Milk Pail,  that sold milk in that form. I’m hoping to write a blog post about whether buying milk…

Most of the milk I buy has a small label saying that it comes from cows not treated with rBST (recombinant bovine growth hormone.) Ironically, the not-made-with-rBST costs the same, sometimes even less, than its less holistic counterpart. But getting more milk out of cows with chemical stimulation, it seems, isn’t more profitable than getting…

Now that Al Gore has won an Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth, I will declare that global warming hysteria has reached its peak. Just the weekend before, the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle showed a map of the Bay Area showing us how our region would look when all the glaciers melt,…