Shan and I just celebrated our one year anniversary on Sunday. We took a quick overnight trip to Catalina to commemorate it. Catalina’s a strange and peaceful little place. Not a lot going on, but that seems to be the point. It’s managed to maintain an old fashioned vibe, and it’s amazing how Mediterranean it feels. The fact that California enjoys a Mediterranean climate is more evident on Catalina than anywhere I’ve been.

Oh yeah, and I screen printed the poster you see above. The 1st anniversary is known as the “paper anniversary”, so I couldn’t think of a more appropriate gesture. It’s a 6-color print on sky blue paper of our first home here in Pacific Beach. It’s been a great place to build a home together.

I hand cut the stencils (on rubylith), which makes me a nerd and also gives the print its handmade appeal. I’m especially proud of how the flowers came out, and the way I scattered pink and white ink among them. You can see a detail of the print and the photo it’s based on at Flickr.

This won’t mean much to anyone unfamiliar with printing, but I printed it with plastisol instead of any kind of poster ink. It’s a weird thing to do because plastisol doesn’t dry unless you heat it. I essentially had to bake the posters to get them to dry. It warped the paper a bit, but it all came out nicely in the end.

I have 5 other prints, let me know if you want to buy one for $40.

That said, we don’t want to ruin everyone’s fun. So, if anyone insists on spending money to honor us or show their affection, we encourage them to do it by making a donation. We helped raise money for The City of Hope (the cancer research center that gave Shannon more priceless years to spend with her mother) when we got married.

Now we have a wider variety of options available to us thanks to Changing the Present, which is a non-profit that allows people to give gifts in the form of specific donations to charities.

In honor of our 1st anniversary, I used Changing the Present to buy a bike for a girl in Cambodia to help her get to school. It’s a tribute to Shannon’s lifelong devotion to education and how I’m trying to guilt her into riding her bike all the time. It also makes me all misty thinking about how my nieces are starting their education.

Oh, and there’s always the added bonus of being able to write about how awesome I am for doing it on my blog.

Anyway, I got to interview Robert Tolmach from Changing the Present a few weeks ago for NetSquared. I loved what he had to say, so I’m reproducing some of the interview here. Enjoy!

Can you tell me about how Changing The Present got started?

Robert Tolmach: Changing the Present is a new kind of non-profit website for people who want to make a difference, and it makes giving more rewarding by letting you choose exactly what you want to accomplish. So, instead of just writing a check to a non-profit, which is perfectly fine, you get that emergent satisfaction, for instance, that you can preserve an acre of the Rain Forest, you can fund an hour of cancer research, you can provide a child her first books so she learns how to read.

For $60.00, you can restore a blind person's eyesight with cataract surgery. There are thousands of these donation opportunities, donation gifts from hundreds of leading non-profits, addressing a full range of causes. We hope that this makes giving more rewarding and will give people more awareness of the problems that exist in the world and their opportunity to do something real about them. We hope it encourages people to give more. But also, one of the key elements of the site is that we encourage people to give these donation gifts in a friend's name, instead of buying a traditional present.

At the same time, none of the non-profits have enough money, and we're all passionate about our favorite cause. We're spending 250 billion dollars a year in this country alone, buying presents for each other. We've all given and received some great presents, but we've also all given and received some not so necessary ones. A lot of people just don't want any more stuff, so, you don't have to buy stuff to show your love. Another way to show your love is do something meaningful in a friend's name.

By offering these very tangible donation opportunities, we think it's more rewarding and meaningful for both the gift giver and the recipient. We have Wish Lists and registries so people can let their friends know what it is they really much care about, and it insures just the perfect gift. We also have personalized printed greeting cards so you can write or choose a caption and write your message inside. The card we mail out for you includes a photograph, a description of the gift you gave, so it's very real to the recipient exactly what you've done. And people are using this for wedding registries.

One couple recently created a wedding registry about a week ago. 141 donations had been made in their name. And they thought that was a more meaningful way to celebrate their love and their lives coming together than more gravy boats, blenders and whatever. It's wonderful. Together, they and their friends made a big difference in the world. We're never going to put Bloomingdale's out of business, don't quote me on that, but the 250 billion dollars a year in gift money would be a lot of new money for non-profits.

My wife and I had the same impulse. There's only so much we wanted to register for, so we had a lot of guests donate for us. What's really nice is knowing we can do this for all sorts of events, for all sorts of different causes, and that you're formalizing it.

You can stand on the street corner and admonish people to do it, but unless you make it easy and rewarding, convenient and tangible, giving them a way to express and share it with their friends, it's hard to compete with so many different companies and retailers who work very hard to do just that.

How many non-profits do you have on board now?

I think there are about 300 or so, though you can give to any of half a million non-profits. We have a database of all the public charities that file a tax return, and there are about a half million of them. You can give to any of them. You add any of them to Wish Lists, you can add any of them to registries, create a fund-raising drive and raise money for any of them. If you give a donation in someone's name, you can send them a greeting card about it. But, the number that currently have tangible donation gifts on the site with pictures is currently about 300 and growing.

Any non-profit that's a public charity can come to the site and click the tab that says, "For non-profits," sign up and avail themselves of all these tools. The cost to the non-profit is $100.00 a year, really cheap. The only cost beyond that is the transaction fee which is just a standard credit card fee, it's three percent or 30 cents just to cover our out of pocket expense of processing it. If they took the donation on their own website, they would pay the same and if they took it through a lot of other donation portals, they would pay more.

One of the things I want to make very clear in this interview is that I want non-profits to know that they're all welcome to come to the site and use all the tools to capture some of this gift money&and use the banner, widgets, everything else, encouraging members to help raise money for the organization. It's very much the social media approach, right? And start spreading the word, promoting this idea of the donation gift, the charitable gift, instead of buying more stuff. We provide those tools to make it easy.

Changing the Present is a non-profit?

Changingthepresent.org is the website of a 501-C3 non-profit. So, when you're donating, you're donating to it with the instructions to pass your money through to Unicef, for instance. You're further instructing them to use it as you specified for the blankets, not books, for the kids. When they sign up on the site and list their donation gifts, they agree in advance that they will use the money for that purpose, so you give with total confidence. You know exactly where the money's going, exactly what's being done with it and exactly what it will accomplish.

Can you tell me about how you've marketed the site so far?

Yeah, it's a number of things. Some of it is we're running banner ads that have been donated from a whole bunch of different websites. Some of it is non-profits that are sending members to us because this is probably the best opportunity for them to capture some of their share of that 250 billion dollars in gift money. Statistically, their members spend more money buying presents than they donate to non-profits each year. Americans spend 250 billion dollars a year on presents, and individuals donated 232 billion, so pretty close.

Some of the non-profits recognize that there's an opportunity to capture their share of that money by making sure that their members and supporters know about this opportunity. The smart ones tell the non-profit, their supporters, "Go to the site, create a Wish List, create a registry, and let your friends know that you would welcome a donation to our organization in lieu of more stuff. And when you're giving gifts, keep us in mind."

So, that's another way that we give some exposure. There's been a good amount of press. We get a wonderful response. The New York Times referred to us as "the Amazon.com of non-profits." Oprah Magazine, Kiplinger.com, Motley Fool, Parenting.com, Huffington Post, repeatedly, it goes on and on. We've been getting this wonderful, warm, loving response from a bunch of publications. We get a little bit of television, a lot of blogs, and that's really heartening.

How did you get the idea, how did you get into it?

I used to be an architect and real estate developer. I had a long-term personal belief that you have to do something meaningful in life. I discovered when I was in my teens I wasn't going to be a doctor as my father is because I don't like blood and guts. I'm not patient enough to be a teacher, nor noble enough to be a social worker. And what do you do?

I was really moved by my hero, Bill Drayton, and the whole concept of social entrepreneurship, of going to find a problem and fix it, build or change a system. I used to be an architect, and what architects do is they design systems, right? Build a new system of how to do all these different activities and pieces come together and how do you fit into the larger system of your fabric? And what real estate developers do is they martial resources to make things happen. Those are the two things that I do now, but in this realm.

In particular, Changing the Present came about in conversations with a friend, named Steve Spiegel, a lawyer who used to be at Skadden Arps, who's now the Chairman of Important Gifts, a non-profit that owns Changing the Present. One of the things we talked about was "Gee, none of these non-profits have enough money and what do you get as presents?" There are a few non-profits that make giving meaningful by making it tangible and then, starting to tap a little bit of that 250 billion of gift money. But, what you really need to make that happen or to facilitate it and to promote it as a service more is you need a system with all these different elements that I alluded to earlier.

And so, we started putting the pieces together and we got wonderful people on the Board of Advisors; it's an amazing group. It's Bill Drayton from Ashoka, Alex Counts from Grameen, Susan Davis from all sorts of things, the head of Sesame Workshop, Sierra Club and the Rain Forest Alliance. It's an amazing group, about 125 very prominent leaders from the non-profit world. We worked with them to hone the idea and figure out what are our prominent causes, what are the issues we want to address within each, and which non-profits do we want to invite?

We've similarly had a lot of great input from people in the business world and the web world, people like Esther Dyson, the Internet luminary. And like any creative venture, it gets its changes as you work on the design and progresses. There are still a lot of things we're planning on adding and modifying. What you see now is just where we are at this step of the process. It's not by any means, the end.

Well, that's really inspiring, to come from architecture into web development.

One of the nice things about the web is compared to buildings, it's much faster, much less expensive, and you can change it and move a column. You can keep adding on. You don't have to worry about there not being any more land.

Right, it's much less resource-intensive!

If you figure out a way to use this wonderful technology and social medium, it's also a really powerful medium for social change.

What have been the more popular charities that you've seen so far? What's getting the greatest response?

I've never looked to see which non-profit gets the most money or which gift item gets the most. If we had more resources, we'd spend time analyzing it more I'm sure than a retailer would. But right now, we're so busy doing everything else that it is what it is. The real point isn't what's the most popular; the real point is when you come to the site, you will find something you really find meaningful. When your next-door neighbor and your sister and your father come, so will they because whether they care about animal welfare or human rights, Veterans, cancer or AIDS, you name it, it's here, with really compelling stories and pictures. The stories are of the problem, putting in context why you might care about this.

Here's the opportunity, here's what the gift does: A problem in one case, many girls in Africa don't get to attend school because they simply don't have shoes. The roads are really hot and uncomfortable. They say you get hookworm from walking barefoot. In a lot of schools, you're ostracized and not even allowed to attend if you don't have shoes. There are girls who simply don't have shoes and can't attend school because of that. That's the problem that's defined on the site. The gift says for $14.00, you can provide a girl a pair of shoes, so she can attend school, get an education, and totally change her life for 14 bucks! OK, I'll take two. For $14.00 a pair, I'd take two pair!

YouTube - Kelly’s Apollo.

I keep meaning to write a post about Internet art—what it is, why I like it so much, why I think it’s actually good for you—but it keeps getting bumped down on my to do list.

It’s probably all for the best. There’s not that much to say other than this: Internet art is great because it’s a perfect channel for postmodernism and it allows postmodernism to be as awesome as it could ever be.

Postmodernism being, per Wikipedia, “a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality, in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself.”

For instance, the above video pairs footage of various NASA launches with a beautifully cathartic pop song (sung by Kelly Clarkson, American Idol winner) made epic through some tremendous distortion.

What does it all mean? Is it beautiful? Is it stirring? Baffling? Serious? A joke? Anything? Is it art? I say all of the above. Am I right?

Could this piece exist outside of the internet? Absolutely. It’d fit perfectly well in a gallery, but another appeal of Internet art (for me) is how it can confuse medium and venue. Is video the medium? Or is it YouTube? Or is YouTube the venue? Is the impact of this piece different when embedded here or on Channel 53 where I found it this morning?

Discuss.

Per Matt’s recommendation, I read Ask the Dust by John Fante over the weekend. This passage struck me.

The blue and white of stars and sky were like desert colors, a gentleness so stirring I had to pause and wonder that it could be so lovely. Not a blade of the dirty palms stirred. Not a sound was to be heard.

All that was good in me thrilled in my heart at that moment, all that I hoped for in the profound, obscure meaning of my existence. Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and i was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.

I relish any (gentle) reminder that the veneer we’ve put on the landscape with our buildings and roads is just that. It inevitably opens the mind to thoughts of the sublime. The evening wind rustling in our neighbor’s washingtonian palm does it for me every time.

Shannon and I were pleasantly surprised about a month ago when we noticed that The Fishery had opened back up. The Fishery is certainly the best restaurant in Pacific Beach (although not the most affordable), and it had been closed for renovations for what had seemed like forever.

The renovated restaurant features a fair amount of new seating and a beautiful bar, as well as a slightly different menu. We were glad to see that they’re still making their amazing macadamia crusted halibut, and I was pleased to see that their menu now includes this little blurb:

We strive to support sustainable seafood, local farmers, independent local businesses, as well as the use of green products wherever possible.

It’s statements like this that make it easier for me to spend a little extra. I feel good knowing that I’m at a restaurant that actively supports a diverse bunch of local food workers, particularly people like fishermen and farmers who have strong incentives to maintain healthy seas and land.

But then I got thinking. What does it mean to “strive to support?” It could mean anything.

Before I say anything else, I should point out that I don’t know anything about how The Fishery sources its food. For all I know, they might get everything locally! The problem is that given the blurb on their menu, I just can’t tell if that’s the case or to what degree.

I sent an email to Jay Porter from The Linkery yesterday, asking if he was aware of any thought being put into developing a set of criteria that restaurants could meet to be considered a legitimate bastion of our local food economy. If restaurants meet those criteria, they could receive a certification of sorts. Perhaps that would solve my problem.

I heard back from him almost immediately:

I don’t know of anyone, but frankly I wouldn’t want to be certified anything. (You can ask the Green Restaurant Association to verify!). IMO certification builds opacity between the business and the customer, rather than transparency. Plus it inevitably puts in weird incentives to the business that aren’t really the priority for the business or the customer.

Instead of certification, radical transparency is IMO the way to accomplish the same goals. That’s why we go to such lengths to detail where all our food comes from. Or you go to a place like Laja where you literally see the food you’re gonna eat growing outside the restaurant, and then “local” really means something.

I agree with Jay that radical transparency is the right means to go about this, for the concerned customer’s (i.e. my) sake. Having a garden onsite would be ideal, but lacking that, having a more detailed menu and educated waitstaff can help as well. I’m often disappointed when waiters can’t tell me anything about their salmon other than how it’s prepared. It’s refreshing to talk to a waiter who knows a lot about what they’re serving.

Of course, Jay takes things further at The Linkery by writing excellent blog posts about where pork comes from and why they do things the way they do.

It was, after all, the same kind radical transparency sparked Alice Waters’s interest in local cuisine at a meal in Brittany in 1968. From The Green Gourmets:

I’ve remembered this dinner a thousand times… The chef, a woman, announced the menu: cured ham and melon, trout with almonds, and raspberry tart. The trout had just come from the stream and the raspberries from the garden. It was this immediacy that made those dishes so special.

There’s nothing more transparent than the air between your eyes and the garden.

It’s that same immediacy that my cousin Sam White and his colleague Jerome Wang have made people contemplate with the OPEN Restaurant project, in which diners are served the actual soil from which their food was grown.

What do you think? Would we foodies benefit from a certification system? Do you have any other examples of “open” restaurants? Are there any clear best practices for restaurants who want to be truly local?

Apologies to everyone who’s wondered where I’ve been for the past few weeks. My writing time has been absorbed by a contract with NetSquared, which is a group that seeks to highlight and encourage the use of social web tools (social networks, google maps, wikis, etc) by social benefit organizations.

I interview people who either work for tech savvy social benefit organizations or work for technology companies that assist social benefit organizations. I post two interviews each week on my blog at NetSquared.

It’s been a great opportunity to be inspired by people who have devoted their lives to saving the world, whether through non-profits or by building great businesses that enable people to connect and collaborate. Check out the interviews if you’re interested in learning how the Internet is being used to effectuate real change in our lives.

If they’re too boring for you, too bad. My contract with NetSquared allows me to re-post the interviews wherever I please three days after I post them on NetSquared’s site, and I plan on sharing some of the more widely appealing interviews on here in the future, so I’ll find a way to bore you with them no matter what.

You can try it here! Try searching for “little italy” or “bahn mi.”

It’s a Google-powered custom search engine that searches the sites of San Diego’s food bloggers. Including, among others:

• Adventures of an amateur foodie
• Alice Q. Foodie
• Casing the Joint
• Cherry Blossoms in My Dreams
• Clayfood
• Firefly Fifty Five
• FoodBuzzSD
• foodies: a southern california food blog
• Fooding 411
• Koko’s Corner
• Livin’ La Vida Local
• mmm-yoso!!!
• Oh So Yummy
• Pinch my Salt
• San Diego Eats
• San Diego Foodstuff
• San Diego Restaurant Reviews
• The Fifth Deadly Sin
• What we Dig
• Yummyfoodsd
• Zen Foodism

Please email me if you think I’m missing any key players in the online San Diego food scene and I’ll add their sites to the engine.

Marriage is great because of the give and take. I get to bore Shannon with my non-stop rambling about slow food and the importance of walkable communities, and she gets to enlighten me with a greater appreciation for fashion. I never thought I’d write a blog post about fashion.

The fact is that fashion, or rather style, has always been important to me, but a fear of looking stupid and a love of subtlety keep me from dressing too elaborately. Shannon’s helping get me sort out my feelings on the whole thing. She introduced me to the Sartorialist a few weeks ago, and his photographs are helping me sublimate all my vague notions of how I would really like to present myself. Now I actually pay attention to the fashion world, and ended up reading a few articles about Yves Saint Laurent this past week.

Yves Saint Laurent has helped me figure things out a bit further. I like these quotes from him:

The silhouette counts more than anything. It should never be overloaded.

I always believed that style was more important than fashion. They are rare, those who imposed their style while fashion makers are so numerous.

I suppose I like the quotes simply because they give credence to something I already believed (funny how that works)—that is that simplicity is to be admired and style cannot be manufactured, which makes it so rare and wonderful.

While I’m becoming more aware of how I’d like to dress, I’m still a long way from actually doing it because I have no time and I hate shopping. In the meantime, I’ll keep depending on my strong aversion to trends and my constant hope to surprise people with a weird mind rather than wearing my weirdness (literally) on my sleeve.

That said, I’ll keep wearing my weird sunglasses. I’m sure Yves would have approved.

Four years ago, I had the good luck to take a small guided tour of the Argentine National Congress. Throughout the tour, I became increasingly curious about Argentina’s coat of arms, particularly its focus on Papa Smurf’s lonely red hat hanging on stick.

I mustered the courage to ask our tour guide about it. He told us that the coat’s rising sun represents the birth of a new nation, the blue and white background reminds us of the clear sky and the Río de la Plata, the laurels symbolize Argentina’s successful struggle for freedom, the joining hands represent the solidarity of the Argentine people, and the staff represents the power of the people’s union.

“Yeah, but what about the hat?” I asked.

“Yeah…that’s just a hat.”

His response was simultaneously disappointing and totally awesome. None of my curiosity was assuaged, but I was left imagining a priceless exchange between the original coat of arms designer and the first president of Argentina.

If only it were so simple.

The hat is a liberty, or Phrygian, cap. Its inclusion on the coat of arms completes a graceful visualization of Argentina’s motto, En Unión y Libertad (In Union and Liberty).

Phrygia was an ancient kingdom in what is now Turkey. Its inhabitants would wear soft, red caps with the top pointed forward to distinguish themselves from their neighbors. Over time, the Greeks came to dominate the region, and the Phrygian caps eventually came to represent anything eastern or non-Greek. The caps became a symbol of freedom much later when freed Roman slaves started wearing them to represent their new status as Roman citizens. Freedom lovers worldwide have been wearing them ever since.

The cap became immensely popular in the late 18th century when French revolutionaries adopted the red Phrygian cap as their symbol, winning them the name of Red Republicans. Bostonian revolutionaries also placed a red cap atop a liberty pole during the American Revolution, an image echoed by the staff in Argentina’s seal. The symbol survives today not only on Argentina’s coat of arms, but on the seal of the United States Senate and the coats of arms of Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti and Nicaragua.

Psychedelic mushrooms (Psilocybe semilanceata) are even called liberty caps by those seeking liberty from the confines of space and time.

From L to R: Vikram Ray, Klaus Daimler, Steve Zissou, Vladimir Wolodarsky, Pelé dos Santos, Eleanor

And yes, Papa Smurf and all the Smurfs wear them—which brings me to what is probably the greatest controversy surrounding the Phrygian cap our generation will face. That is, do Steve Zissou and his team wear Phrygian caps?

The Phrygian cap is traditionally red, although records exist of some white Phrygian caps (most notably, the Smurfs’). Regardless of color, Phrygian caps have all had their tops pointed forward. Team Zissou’s hats are merely knit caps with no clear top to point in any direction. The fact is that Zissou’s cap is clearly an homage to Jacques Cousteau who almost certainly wore his in homage to his country’s revolutionaries. It appears that Cousteau brought the Phrygian cap into the 20th century, adopting the red and discarding the traditional pointed top. Wes Anderson’s Steve Zissou carried the tradition from there.

It’s a shame that the cap’s significance is essentially lost to the masses. Most freedom lovers in the United States show their love by wearing variations of the American flag, despite its inelegance and the fact that it’s illegal—United States Flag Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 8 (j) states:

No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However a patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations.

If you really love freedom, why not wear a red cap instead? It’s legal, it’s recognized worldwide, and perhaps most importantly, it’s classic!

Today is ride your bike to work day. I work from home, but I wanted to ride my bike, so I decided to co-work at my friend Patrick's place downtown. According to my bike's odometer, Patrick lives about 13 miles from my place.

The ride was intense. I never feel very safe riding with cars, and some of the city's bike lanes are in terrible shape. That said, I get a certain pleasure out of riding my bike from point A to point B that makes up for any inconveniences along the way. It's probably just a feeling of self-righteousness.

By the end of the day, I'll have ridden at least 25 miles. In today's world of $4 gas, my trip would cost a little over $4.30 in our Volvo, and around $2.50 in our new Prius. My bike ride cost me a little extra time and a few extra cupcake calories that I ate yesterday. I don't begrudge losing either.

Time on a bike, riding over the contours of the Earth with wind on your face, is time well spent—especially when it's taking you somewhere you want to go. Commuting (or running errands, or visiting a friend, or going to dinner, etc) on a bike is better than arbitrarily running around (i.e. jogging) to get rid of excess calories.

Energy Independence

This election year, we're going to hear a lot from our current and hopeful lawmakers about energy diversity and energy independence. Many of them will talk about finding alternative fuel sources. The cynic in me can’t help wondering how many perks our lawmakers get from nuclear energy lobbies or the ethanol lobby, or any other energy firms.

For instance, Texas’s Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison recently wrote a great op-ed about ethanol's shortcomings and recommended that we "accelerate production of all forms of domestic energy." She recommends that we tap into Alaskan oil reserves as well as "clean coal, nuclear power and wave energy." Her advice seems prudent, but she fails to mention one of the most tremendous energy reserves in world: the extra fat most of us are carrying on our waistlines.

The reason so few lawmakers encourage biking or walking is due to a collective action problem. There are only a few firms who know how to make money off of a particular kind of energy, and they all stand to benefit tremendously from making friends on Capitol Hill. It's easy for these few people to recognize the benefit of joining forces to lobby politicians (e.g. $14.5 billion in tax breaks).

Meanwhile, it would be very difficult to assemble everyone who would like to be able to walk to the store or ride their bike to work. What's more, while it would be nice to be able to walk to work, dealing with a commute and taking a hit at the gas pump is easier than bugging my representatives. I mean, it's not like I can afford to buy them off.

Sadly, until the walking shoe or bicycle lobbies get their act together, we’re on our own. According to Geoffry Stlyes, the fact is that…

If we all drove just 12 miles less per week, fuel demand would fall by 5%, the equivalent of almost half a million barrels per day, or all the ethanol produced last year. The impact of that on gas prices would be much more dramatic than waiting for someone else to fix the problem.

That’s if we just cut out 12 miles of driving a week. For many of us that’s telecommuting, walking, or biking once or twice a week.

I would like to hear some lawmakers talk about rewarding developers who build walkable and bike friendly communities. I wish more companies encouraged telecommuting or living closer to work (Facebook pays a $600 rent stipend to every employee who lives within a mile of their offices). As Michael Pollan just said, it would be really nice if we encouraged more people to fuel their legs with food from their own gardens, kind of like the Victory Garden efforts of WWI and WWII—we could call them Freedom (from foreign oil) Gardens.