Some food for thought as to the consequences of our every-day actions. (One of my favorites articles, reposted for those who missed it.)


1. Law of entropy. Everything is bad for the environment, because everything consumes more energy than it produces. The real question: Can humans live in harmony for the life of the planet and sun?
2. The infrastructure of today’s society is inherently non-sustainable. Perhaps if our societies were designed around bicycles or trolleys, I wouldn’t be writing this. However, our society’s are built around cars, which means re-building the roads, or subtracting lanes from the cars, or impeding traffic. What is the environmental cost of increased traffic jams (time driving) or reduced parking spots and circling vehicles. (This legal issue halted San Francisco’s bicycle progress for 4 years.) Indeed, whole communities would have to be rebuilt to a more medieval European scale.
3. Indirect use of petrol. Most cars that pass a bicycle will slow down, swerve and then accelerate. This constant indirect acceleration and decceleration of passing vehicles uses more gasoline than simply driving your own car slow and steady. Compound that by bad drivers, angry motorists and even overcautious motorists creating a mini-traffic jam as they wait to pass the bicyclist.
4. Increased food consumption. Cost of food is approximately 1/2 gallon of oil per 1000 food calories, or about 17 times (up to 54x*) more energy is used to grow the food than is gained by eating the food. In other words, every time we eat we are indirectly consuming petrochemicals (and sometimes we are actually eating the petrochemicals). More info.
5. Increased lifespan. The active lifestyle of a bicyclist is estimated to add at least 2 years to your life, which indirectly increases the population and energy consumption.**
6. Increased chance of serious bodily injury to the bicyclist due to accidents (and on a lesser scale simple wear and tear, such as worn out joints, smog-damaged lungs, overexposure like sunburn and dehydration) and the related costs of medical care and equipment. (25% of the average American’s working life is devoted to paying for healthcare.)
7. Being cool. Environmental cost of bicycle, clothes, tools and high-tech gear, especially in addition to a car, or additional modes of transport, like trains, buses and cabs to support the car-less bicyclist.
8. Cold beer and hot showers. I think just about everyone loves a cold beer and hot shower after a day of cycling; however, some research studies have concluded there is not even enough energy (re-newable or not) to produce a hot shower or a cold beer every day for every citizen of the planet until time’s end, nevermind the cost of manufacturing and transporting these materials.
9. Angry bicyclists. Being a bicyclist myself I hate to admit it, but lots of us, particularly the gearheads and fanatics types, just plain have bad attitudes, and bad attitudes correlates not only into increased backlash in most of my points, but also if you are metaphysically inclined, the bad attitude is polluting the atmosphere with a bad vibe.
10. Lost time and energy. Bicycling takes time and can be exhausting, which could drain resources and passion away from all other endeavors, including saving the planet, and/or increase resources needed to recover.

Copyright © 9-22-2010. Please attribute Scott Stoll and www.theArgonauts.com

Sources:
*”The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Michael Pollan. The Penguin Press.
**“The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling”, Karl Ulrich. University of Pennsylvania.

Faceless corporations versus buying direct from your local entrepreneur.

CAVEAT EMPTOR (Let the buyer beware): Please make informed decisions, because every decision we make has an influence on the community we live in, which eventually raises or lowers the standard of living for everyone, as our current financial crisis is proving. Every dollar you spend is like voting for a business.

Before I begin, I should say there are many reasons why Amazon.com has been a great resource to book lover’s everywhere. One reason is the selection of rare and used books and the worldwide network of resources, and their innovations in the e-boos and e-boo reader. Amazon has even helped authors earn higher royalties with other publishers like Barnes & Noble and Apple. However, along with this came a host of parasites.

Example: mega-stores and online bookstores are driving your friendly corner stores out of business, and seriously impeding an author’s ability to earn a living wage and bring new products to the market. Not only are the online bookstores impersonal, automated machines, but they take up to 8 times the profit that the author earns (depending on cost of printing, discounts, service fees, etc). In addition, with the growing number of competing online stores (computer programs), most offer bargain discounts that further undercut authors and entrepreneurs. Ultimately, these tactics drive down the entire economy by reducing the cash flow and de-motivating innovation.

Here’s how it works: Some of the country’s largest bookstores are Amazon.com affiliates with no actual brick-and-mortar store or helpful staff. Many online stores, believe it or not, don’t even have any books. A very simplified version of their business model looks like this: After the author/publisher invests the time, money and effort to produce a book (which can take years and thousands of dollars), they upload the book into the book distribution database and begin their marketing efforts (spending additional time, money and effort). Meanwhile, the online bookstores have automated systems that download the book database, posting thousands of books on Amazon.com, and just wait for the author’s marketing efforts to begin to reap rewards. Every time a potential customer searches for a book, it appears as “in-stock” in various online bookstore warehouses across the country; however, most new books are actually printed on-demand. There is NO stock. LIkewise, if it says “Used — Like new” it is also probably being printed new on-demand. So, when a customer purchases a book, the online bookstore’s computer relays the order to the author’s publisher/printer. The printer prints the book (on-demand) and ships the book to the customer on behalf of the online bookstore.

Since there is little to no human effort these online companies can afford to offer huge discounts, spend extra money on commercial shipping and the additional printer service fees for individual or rush orders, not to mention the dozens of other costs of doing business to simply piggyback off someone else’s efforts. In fact, I have calculated that most online bookstores are earning roughly $0.25-1.25 per book. Some bookstores I suspect make zero profit on books, while compensating with inflated shipping prices. A nickel here and a dime there adds up to millions—so they hope!

These tactics artificially inflate book prices and drain the cash flow away from the people that created the product, which eventually reduces the cash flow for the entire community, because in turn the entrepreneurs have no cash to invest in their own community.

There are a lot of good and bad reasons to use Amazon, we just request that you make informed decisions.

Thanks for your support,
Authors and artists and small business owners everywhere

PS. We recommend the movie Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price. Or at least click here to watch the movie trailer. You’ll see one small friendly bookstore be driven out of business and the owners become employees of Wal-Mart.

Thanks for supporting your local community when you can, but if you choose to purchase through Amazon, please click on the below Amazon banner. Then I get 76¢ of my book back.

Here’s an idea that will make your head spin. The Omnivore’s Dilemma says: “Unless you grew up on organic food, most of the kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch process.” The Haber-Bosch process is the method used to make ammonium nitrate fertilizer out of petroleum. Nitrogen is one of the body’s basic but essential building blocks like carbon. So, this means: if you are the average American, approximately two pounds of your body weight or about 1% is literally composed of petroleum by products, most likely Saudia Arabian oil.

So considering conservative estimates show it takes approximately 0.5-1 gallons of oil to grow 1 bushel of corn (not including processing this into other food stuffs and shipping them to your store), and corn is used to make sugar, starch, feed cows (accounting for beef and dairy products) and tens of thousands of other things, and considering when you are eating corn based products, you are essentially eating oil, it makes me wonder if riding a bicycle, burning more calories and thus eating more, and demanding more food be grown and shipped, is an environmentally friendly thing.

Read the update.