Paul Shreenan is a true renaissance man.
He has been a geography and urban planning prof , a two time GPC candidate, a very successful urban food gardener,a father, an avid cyclist and lately a bus driver.
He tries very hard to live green and use as few resources as possible.
So he doesn't own a car ,for example.
But Paul can't take a bus to get to his work, because he is one of the bus drivers arriving at the bus garage while it is still dark to drive the early morning buses we use to get to work.
A bit catch-22.
So most bus drivers drive back and forth to their early morning shifts - often over great gas-consuming distances.
A mantra of centralization means all buses for a city 400 kn across sit in one big garage.
Paul's solution, as he told me last night at his house-warming party (shout out to all the other attendees for helping make it a great do !) is to buy a heavy ,sturdy, cheap ,one-speeder bike (aka a beater to biking fans) and cycle for 30 minutes up and down Dartmouth's notorious hills to reach the bus barn.
Luckily it has showers, because it is heavy sledding er biking.
Sure it helps kees Paul slim and fit but most of us aren't that fit or committed ----- simply can't walk or bike to work.
Work is here , in this corner of metro Halifax-Dartmouth, and homes are there - many miles away.
By way of contrast, both my granddads walked to their jobs at car plants in Windsor Ontario - because factories were built next to people in the GOOD old days.....
Showing posts with label dartmouth cole harbour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dartmouth cole harbour. Show all posts
Sunday, June 24, 2012
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...