(There are affiliate links in this article and I may earn a modest sum on any purchases made through the links.)
Since I don’t really have anything art or music related to share right now I thought I’d share something a little bit different. Before I jump in, I do have a new painting I’m about to start so there will be more art to come, just not this post. Now, on to the good stuff.
How it started. Well, that’s probably not true. It probably goes back farther than this. This is when I really started looking at some things differently, and it’s why travel outside of packaged tours and outside of your home country is really, really important. I made a trip to Australia a few years ago, just before the Covid-19 pandemic, I wrote about it on this blog. I landed in Sydney on my own and was free to see the city the first day, the only thing on that day’s agenda was a tour of the Sydney Opera House. And yes, that was cool and I have some great pictures from it. What I think was more impactful was the experience of being in a vibrant, bustling, lived in city.
I grew up in suburbia. I am not bashing my childhood experiences. Some of mine were much different than my peers and cohort. And a very early experience likely shaped my thinking about things even today. Sydney was my first experience where I saw a living city, not just one for working in. I’d been to Los Angeles a few times, but I never felt like it was someplace where people lived in the city. In Sydney, I walked from my hotel, that was just at the edge of the Asian district, to the Opera House. I walked. And on the way I noticed how there were shops interspersed with apartments, or maybe condos. I saw people coming out of their homes on the way to work or wherever and not getting into cars and driving. Oh, there were plenty of cars, don’t get me wrong. There was also public transport in abundance. This was a different view for me. And even visiting my friends in Melbourne our car time was specific. We took a road trip and there were specific things that we used the car for. But we walked and took the train. Where I live, I have to get into a car to pickup take-out from the Chinese Restaurant across the street from me or I risk my life trying to cross the road on foot or bike.
Since that trip I’ve read a few things on a different economic model, a bike centric city, and some history that I was not at all taught in school. And more recently we have had the degrading of Twitter. Not that it was likely a very healthy place to begin with. However, the shift in the environment at Twitter encouraged me to look at other social media type of places that might be more interesting. I landed on Mastodon. I’ve mentioned it before. There is easier access to a more diverse viewpoint, or not, it’s up to you. And that’s the beauty of it. Because I choose to read more than just my myopic feed, I come across some interesting things that I might not have encountered without consciously looking for them. Remember how bookstores and libraries were places for that?
Recently someone linked to the video for the ‘Not Just Bikes’ channel on YouTube. Awesome. This is a guy who, I believe, is an urban planner, or works in urban planning, something like that, who has moved from Canada to Amsterdam and shares his take on the differences between living in Amsterdam and North America particularly when it comes to the urban/suburban environment as well as city livability. He did a collaboration with the guy who has the ‘Climate Town’ channel that was really interesting and informative. And it turns out, some of the discussion is relevant to a book I’m currently reading. ‘Palo Alto – A History of California, Capitalism, and The World’ by Malcom Harris. The collaboration between Not Just Bikes and Climate Town centered on zoning laws and how that came about. In ‘Palo Alto’ there is also a discussion of how some of the zoning in California came about, and just a hint of why Oakland and Compton are what they are today. Don’t get me wrong. I have fond memories of living in California and have relished every visit I’ve made since leaving after high school, and I definitely benefitted from some of what I’m reading about in the book, because, the ideas, concepts, laws, and thinking didn’t just stay in Palo Alto. However, it is definitely not the history I was taught in school, even there.
The book I read about the city of bikes is about Amsterdam and the history of bicycling in the city. And it is fascinating. That one is called ‘In the City of Bikes – The story of the Amsterdam Cyclist’ by Pete Jordan. It really just covers what it says it is about, it also has just a little bit of the history of the automobile in it and its relationship to bikes, particularly in Amsterdam, also in North American cities, just enough that when you put it together with a couple of other books I read, ‘Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream’ by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, and ‘Walkable City – How Downtown Can Save America, On Step at a Time’ by Jeff Speck, you start to get an idea of how the United States has become what it is, and just maybe how and why we’ve become more polarized, less healthy, and more depressed as a nation. It’s really interesting to see that there is a different way to live that might be more beneficial to people and the planet.
I’ve read a whole host of other books in the past few years that have covered histories of various areas and how we got to where we are, from David Attenborough’s ‘A Life on Our Planet’ to Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’, Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity Without Growth’, books that offer the analysis of how we got here and even some ideas of what we could do to change things, including ‘How to Save the World for just a Trillian Dollars- the Ten Biggest Problems We Can Actually Fix’ by Rowan Hooper. I’ve even read Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Whatever you may have thought of him as a politician, set that aside and have a read. That book along with Attenborough’s will give a really good picture of how things have changed.
And as I read these books I am fascinated, appalled, disgusted, enlightened, and frustrated. I feel like I have always known that there was a different and probably better way to live. I think I’ve been saying something along those lines since I was about 10. One year, while visiting my father, my mother sent me a newspaper clipping of a study that was done by a Pennsylvania university that essentially said, I was right. So this many years later, to see that we haven’t made changes that would make things better and that they have only gotten worse, it’s frustrating. And mind boggling. There is so much evidence that what we are doing isn’t working that it is dumbfounding that we aren’t doing something about it. We say we want change and then do the exact same things we have always done. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Or at least one definition of it.
I would like to see things change. After I finished reading one of these books I wanted to order take out food from the Chinese restaurant across the street. I was so inspired by the idea of doing something different that when I got to my garage, I briefly thought of taking my bike. It would be so much less hassle. Well, except that I probably needed to air up the tires. After thinking about that for a moment I realized that taking my bike, though on the surface better for me, was actually the most dangerous thing I could do. I was irritated and dismayed as I got in my car to go get my food. The mood lasted because a few days later as I was driving, again, to my Taekwondo class, less than five miles away by the way, I saw a nice shiny suburban light truck and thought ‘damn it, it’s my planet too.’ That truck wasn’t some farmer or construction worker it was some suburbanite who thought it looked cool or tough and I know, as you know, that they guzzle gas like nobody’s business.
All of this is to say, there is a lot of really good, informative reading out there and if you want to understand why the United States of America is in the state it is in, it might be worth doing some reading. And look beyond the obvious titles. The ones that say ‘this is how America became what it is’ or ‘how America got here’. I suspect that even those books will only offer a small slice of what the cause is. I only suspect that because, in all fairness, I haven’t read a book that has that sort of analysis. And don’t just read one book. Read a few more. Because the problem is bigger than one little corner of the society.
You know I have more to say about this. But this post is getting a little long so I’ll save it for another post. Until then I’ve linked to some of the YouTube Creators and Books that I’ve found really interesting lately and that I mentioned above. There are easily a few missing, these are just for a start.
Sites
Not Just Bikes – YouTube channel – also has a Nebula channel and a Patreon
Climate Town – YouTube channel – also has a Patreon
Never Too Small – YouTube channel
Books
‘Palo Alto – A History of California, Capitalism, and The World’ by Malcom Harris
‘In the City of Bikes – The story of the Amsterdam Cyclist’ by Pete Jordan
‘Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream’ by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck
‘Walkable City – How Downtown Can Save America, On Step at a Time’ by Jeff Speck
‘A Life on Our Planet’ by David Attenborough
‘Doughnut Economics’ by Kate Raworth
‘Prosperity Without Growth’ by Tim Jackson
‘How to Save the World for just a Trillian Dollars- the Ten Biggest Problems We Can Actually Fix’ by Rowan Hooper
‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore