What sorts of things do you think cities and towns (in the U.S. in particular) should be doing to entice people out of their cars?
AG: There are several key ways:
1.Make alternatives more appealing: Make the roads safer for bicyclists and pedestrians with more separated bike lanes, bike racks, wider sidewalks, and so on. Improve public transport. Divert some infrastructure dollars from highways to rebuilding the passenger train network.
2.Make the public realm much more appealing to people: More places to gather, such as plazas and parks; more public art, greenery, and graffiti abatement; more public events to draw people out into the streets. Then people won’t need to drive to distant places to enjoy good company and pleasant places.
3.Elect more dignified public leaders: Encourage all political leaders to walk, bicycle, and take public transit. Get leaders to tell the public the truth about peak oil and that we must start transitioning to a simple, smaller-scaled way of life.
The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.
I think it’s pretty amazing that people and local as well as the federal government know and are already planning to deal with the unsustainable overgrowth of certain suburbs and developments.
Much has been made in certain circles recently of the many shining examples of functioning democracy in the south of our fine hemisphere. This is particularly in different levels of the governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, and Colombia (and let’s not forget that the presidential elections in Chilé are in December of this year, where the country could see a change of president from the current socialist Michelle Bachelet, to the center-right Sebastián Piñera).
These democratic successes in the South vary in weight and reach of effect (as much as the awareness of the rest of the world varies regarding South American goings-on). Noam Chomsky has brought up Bolivia in particular on many occasions as being a far more earnestly democratic country than even the US of A, partly by virtue of previous corruptions, and the process of overcoming them. President Evo Morales is the first full blooded native to be president of Bolivia, and, i believe, the first Native-American to be elected president of any country (electing Barack Obama is a definite success for us as a nation, but just imagine a full blooded native being elected . . . i digress).
Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, after a self-imposed exile in Japan, was brought to face criminal charges in Peru in 2007. A few days ago, he was convicted of the crimes perpetrated on his citizens during his 10 year presidency.
More on the effects of the trial, and his crimes, from Gisela Ortiz, the sister of Luis Enrique Ortiz (a victim of La Cantuta Massacres:
An article in Business Week caught my attention recently, one on ‘The Girl Effect.’
First a bit on the concept: the phrase is one of practical wisdom well known by many on the outer edges of economics, social sciences, and human rights movements, but it has been recently codified, organized, and brought to the the mainstream of the business world by, of all groups: Nike.
A lot of ill can be said of Nike, in both their business practices and their human rights effects, but a lot of good can be said of their efforts in sustainable design as well, and so too of this: their efforts with the Girl Effect. (The company would seem to be one of deep ambivalence about it’s place in the global community. But i would argue that that’s better than the alternative of completely disregarding the good that the company can do, as so many do.)
A video from the organization, explaining the concept:
There are 600 million adolescent girls in developing countries, but they are largely invisible to the world at large. Included among them are girls affected by armed conflict, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, sex trafficking, and internal displacement, as well as girls in child-headed households or locked in early marriages. To ignore them is to miss the “girl effect,” which could be an unexpected answer to the global economic crisis.
Consider the situation in Kenya. Some 1.6 million girls there drop out of high school every year. If they finished their secondary education, they would make 30% more money and contribute $3.2 billion more to the Kenyan economy every year. Instead, many take their place among Kenya’s 204,000 adolescent mothers and cost the economy $500 million a year.
[ . . . ]
In Ethiopia, if you are a 15-year-old girl, you have a 43% likelihood of being already married. A pilot program run by the Population Council gave families a $25 goat as an incentive to allow their daughters to go to school instead. Within two years, some 11,000 girls, or 97% of the participants, had stayed in school, gained confidence, and delayed marriage and childbirth.
The article mentions another organization, BRAC (an NGO founded in Bangladesh in 1972), a group offering, among other things, micro-finance opportunities for us in the affluent west, to support our friends in the south. Remember that estimates (by the likes of Ashraf Ghani) are that 1 dollar invested in the ‘developing world,’ can be roughly equal to 20 dollars of ‘foreign aid.’ That is, with a minimal investment, each of us, can have a major impact.
So, this is the first video from The Global Oneness Project that i’ve posted on the site, but they’ve been over in the bibliography for the past 8 months (in the organizations section). This is by no means because this is the first piece that they have made which is deeply thought provoking or insightful. Far from it. I’ll be posting more from them in the future, but if like this, please do check out their website.
