I know life works better when I go to bed at a reasonable hour and get up reasonably early. I’ve experienced it many times. But at night, after the kids have gone to bed, I’m easily seduced by the quiet, in which I can do whatever I want! And sleep is good, but there are also books to be read, games to be played, and dusty corners of the internet to be explored.

So now I’m heading for bed before the kids even get there, and I’m going to make a fresh start in the morning.

Sometimes it just seems too hard. Heck, I even take the easy way out sometimes. My husband had the day off on Friday, and I happily accepted a ride to work because it was supposed to storm.

But if you look at the big picture, sustainable living is actually what people want, and not just to be trendy.

The city of Portland, where I live, recently passed a new Climate Action Plan, which calls for both city and county to reduce emission levels to 80 percent below 1990 levels. That’s ambitious. The old Kyoto Protocol called for only a 5.2 percent reduction from 1990 levels.

WorldChanging.com recently interviewed Michael Armstrong, Portland’s Deputy Director of Planning and Sustainability, about how in the world this is going to happen. Armstrong closed with these remarks.

One of the things that gives me hope that we can achieve very large carbon reductions is that many people enjoy the exact things that make a low-carbon community possible: walking to the neighborhood business district; eating fresh, seasonal food; enjoying a cozy, well insulated home; and having affordable, convenient choices about how to get around town.

Sustainable living isn’t a sacrifice. It’s a way of living the best life possible.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/neighborhoods/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

We don’t normally get flu shots, but since we’ve basically got twice as much chance of getting a flu this year, between the regular flu and H1N1, I thought it might be prudent to try to avoid catching at least one of them.  I still don’t know if we’ll get H1N1 vaccines. If it continues to be something you have to wait hours in line for, we probably won’t.  Also, we had a flu-like illness in August, so it’s possible we’ve already had the H1N1 virus. And we’re still determined not to succumb to panic. If the H1N1 vaccine is available, and we really feel we need it, we’ll get it. But we don’t want to do it just because the government and news media are determined to spread panic about it.

Speaking of the government, what exactly are the government’s priorities in this pandemic? The public health? Children, pregnant women and the elderly? Or is the main priority actually keeping the economy going?

The reports today of Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America being given doses of H1N1 vaccine for their company clinics raised a lot of hackles. People asked why these firms would receive this scarce vaccine when many children and other high risk groups can’t even get it yet.

I reacted this way at first, too, wondering whether the government were protecting Wall Street to keep the economy from collapsing; a case of seriously misplaced priorities.

It wouldn’t surprise me if that happened, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case here.  According to the AP report on this situation, vaccine is distributed to state health departments, who then decide where to distribute it. Occupational, company-sponsored clinics are a common choice. However, those clinics are still only allowed to give the vaccines to high-risk groups at this time.  Wall Street companies do employ pregnant women, people with babies at home, people with high-risk health conditions, etc.

So I can’t give you the rant I was planning earlier today, because I did a little research, thought about it a little more, and realized I’d be wrong.   Hey, I know of a few people in cable news who would benefit from that approach…

Public domain photo of the H1N1 flu virus taken in the CDC Influenza Laboratory

Sometimes people make a big deal out of this. Occasionally I make a big deal out of it (like, um, here).  I do appreciate the compliments and support. But it can feel a little weird, too.

Mikael Colville-Andersen of the blog Copenhagenize spoke at a reception for the Dreams on Wheels exhibit at Oregon Manifest last Thursday, and explained how biking works in Denmark.

“Our relationship to the bicycle in Copenhagen is much like the vacuum cleaner… The bicycle and the vacuum cleaner are just tools. One of them we clean our homes with, the other we use to transport ourselves around the city.”

Cycling shouldn’t be a big deal. It isn’t a big deal. It’s just a way of getting around.  And almost anyone can do it.  Even you.

In other news, I’m planning to do NaBloPoMo this month. What? That’s National Blog Posting Month. That means I’m going to write at least one post per day. They may not all be on this blog, though. You can also find me at What’s the Mission, ParkroseGateway.com, and Portland WordPress User Group.

Yeah. So, while I’m waiting for the rain to maybe clear up or just stop for a little while, I’ve been reading a piece in the New York Times about programs that help get fresh produce and other healthy foods into corner markets and convenience stores. Why? Because in many urban areas, these are the only nearby stores, so residents’ choices are limited to typical convenience store fare: chips, cookies, candy, soda, and a small selection of canned and packaged foods. And this tends to mainly affect lower-income neighborhoods.

Programs in Newark, New Jersey and other cities help owners of small stores add the healthy offerings with grants for equipment, help with promoting healthy foods, etc.

The article doesn’t mention it, but when small neighborhood markets offer healthier foods, or a wider variety of foods, it also enhances the neighborhood’s walkability, getting more people out of their cars and onto their feet or bikes. That increases the health of the community, as well as property values! It’s a win for any neighborhood, regardless of income levels.

We have a neighborhood market less than half a mile away. Sometimes I pick up a gallon of milk there; more often I’ll stop for a soda.  Over the summer, the owner put out some homegrown vegetables for “sale” (he actually requested donations in exchange). I don’t think it went over all that well. A lot of people in the neighborhood don’t like the store because it’s shabby and stocks porn magazines and knives and things, too. Well, they stock these things because they’re profitable.  What if they found that other things were profitable too? I could definitely see a program like the one in Newark working here — if the owner could get proper refrigeration for produce, and some help promoting the new offerings, maybe people would come.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to go to either the farmers’ market or the grocery store for some produce. I could just drive…I want to just drive. But I also read Adron’s post about going car-free this morning, and now I’m feeling guilty and weak for wanting to drive.

Steel is also the author of a book, Hungry City, which covers this topic in-depth. It’s not available from our local library, so I’m waiting for an inter-library loan. Her talk also caused me to add Thomas More’s Utopia to my “to-read” list on Goodreads, as I haven’t read it!

I’m most interested in Steel’s idea of “sitopia.” She describes this briefly near the end of her talk. It’s a made-up word; a hybrid of the Greek sitos, which means food, and topos, which means place. Steel sees centering the life of a community around food as the key to restoring a sustainable relationship with food.  I look forward to reading more about this.

First, Ariel Kaminer wrote in a City Critic column about the problems of NYC pedicabs (three-wheeled, human-powered cabs). Despite the fact that relatively few New Yorkers drive cars, pedicabs and autos have had trouble getting along. Kaminer mentions a highly publicized brawl between a pedicab driver and a taxicab driver, and a pedicab involved in an accident because it was someplace it wasn’t supposed to be.

Kaminer’s conclusion is interesting:

In 2007, a city councilman was quoted in the Village Voice saying that pedicabs caused pollution by increasing congestion. Perhaps he’s right; perhaps pedicabs and cars cannot coexist in Manhattan. Maybe it’s not safe to have three wheels darting in and out of four-wheel traffic. Maybe the time has come to make a change. How about we get rid of the cars?

Next, we have an article by Micheline Maynard, “Is Happiness Still That New Car Smell?” Maynard looks at the increasing number of people choosing to live car-free or car-lite, “whether because of cost, convenience or environmental awareness.”  Maynard also looks at the issues automakers face because people are making these choices — will they just make fewer cars, or different kinds of cars, or develop entirely new forms of transportation? And then she says:

At least in the short term, automakers face an imperative to make sure that the fundamental basis of their business — selling cars — remains intact. If public opinion swings too far away from cars, some environmentalists warn that the car industry could find itself in the same circumstances as cigarette manufacturers, who have hung on to their most fervent users even as public policy, health concerns and public opinion have cast a shadow over their products.

Yep. Cars are like cigarettes! And at some point, we’re going to have to quit. Or at least cut back severely. It will be interesting to see if public opinion really does swing this way eventually.

Fortunately, there’s more:

Offsetting that car-reliance, however, is a finding that Orenco residents also walk to shopping and use mass transit for nonwork trips – to the zoo or symphony, for example – at rates that beat other suburban communities.

This says to me that despite the car-commuting to jobs, the walkable community itself does work. Put people in a community where they can walk to shops and amusements, and they will do it.

One remaining issue, however, is that jobs for most people are still not walkable. Some people may be able to work at the local retail establishments, or perhaps local schools and services, but most still have to leave the neighborhood to work. The article does note that many Orenco Station residents work for nearby Intel.

It is surrounded by Intel campuses, and a fair number of its residents work for Intel. It’s worth noting that while these folks tend not to use MAX to commute to work, they do show relatively high rates of bicycle ridership and carpooling to work – by some measures the better environmental approach.

So why aren’t people using the nearby light rail and buses to get to work?  The survey didn’t ask this question, and the article doesn’t address it either.  I don’t know anyone who lives in Orenco Station, but I have heard reasons from other people from time to time. One common reason for driving to and from work is time. If transit takes significantly longer, people are less likely to use it. Also, transit doesn’t provide the flexibility of a car. If a busy working parent, for instance, needs to be able to get from work to a soccer game, he or she may not have time for transit. And if transit doesn’t go where people need to go, that doesn’t work either.

Now, if more jobs were available in or near the walkable communities, that might make a difference. Like with the Intel employees, you’d probably see more walking, biking, and carpooling. Will that work for all residents of a given community? Of course not. But it is certainly something to keep in mind when designing or redesigning neighborhoods.

Myself, I probably wouldn’t move into someplace like Orenco Station unless I did have a job nearby or easily accessible. I definitely couldn’t live there, regardless of its walkability, and continue to work at my current job, which would be 23.3 miles away by car, one hour and 26 minutes away by public transit, and don’t even ask me about riding my bike over the West Hills.  So the question for me is, how can we make our east side neighborhoods more walkable and bikable?

Personally, I think the most important thing we can do to diminish climate change is to get out of our gas-powered automobiles. And that’s just what I’ve been working on over the past year, but with a little extra push these last two weeks. I’ve been trying to use my bike (or my feet) for everything within two miles of home, and have been mostly successful. For instance, yesterday on my way home from work, I stopped at the grocery store, and cycled home with two full bags of groceries and two gallons of milk.

And right now, I’m downtown at a Portland WordPress User Group meeting, which is more than two miles from home, but I rode light rail down, so I’m still out of my car.  Unfortunately, I had to leave my bike behind at work in order to get here — my Xtracycle is too big to take on light rail. So tomorrow morning, I’ll make my way to work by bus.

Going car-lite isn’t easy. You have to deal with the weather, tiredness, and lots of inconveniences. And I don’t always have a good attitude about it.

But I’ve shared plenty about my bicycling habits. If you’ve been here before, you’ve seen it.  So what would change your mind? What would really get you to stop using your car, even for one or two days per week? Or for errands within a certain area? How can we make it happen?