Climate 411

What lives when public transportation is used, and dies when it’s not? Potentially all of us.

This message is hauntingly conveyed by a street art installation showing polar bears coming to life as a subway passes beneath them:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Fdu6AD5Y3D0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

I live in New York City, and when I started riding my bike to work last year, I became acquainted firsthand with the obstacles to using this most efficient and green mode of transport. Here’s the short list:

• No sheltered place to park my bike.
• No place to park my bike at all – other bikes chained to all available racks and poles.
• Rules against chaining bikes to city property like trees or poles.
• Theft of anything not locked down – seat, wheels, bell, bike rack, or the entire bike. (Check out this YouTube video: "How to Steal a Bike in NYC".)
• Drivers who ignore bike lanes and seem unaware of how easily they could kill a biker.
• Bikers who ignore traffic laws and come at you the wrong way in bike lanes.
• Car doors that open treacherously into bike lanes.
• Streets with no bike lanes at all.
• Jaywalkers who mistakenly think that bikes can stop as quickly and easily as cars.

Thankfully, help is on the way. New York City has turned decidedly pro-bike under Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Jeannette Sadik-Khan. And the non-profit group America Bikes is helping to bring bike-friendly changes to communities across the country.

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At first I was excited to escape the inferno of August in Washington D.C. for a vacation in Maine, but after three straight days of rain I started to feel a certain amount of self-pity. On the fourth rainy morning, however, a visit to a farmer I used to work for quickly put my woes in perspective. The rain put a minor dent in my vacation, but it put a major dent in the growing season for Maine’s farmers.

Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all have received exceptional amounts of rain this summer, seriously damaging certain crops. Maine’s raspberry and green bean crops were devastated, and livestock feed crops (grain and hay) could not be harvested due to the wet weather. Many farmers will be paying high prices to truck in feed to replace what was lost.

No particular weather event can be reliably ascribed to climate change. But as I talked to my farmer friend, I began to wonder if this summer’s wet weather was a glimpse into the future for farmers in the region.

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