Better Living Through Biking

By Gavin Hudson

Imagine that you could wiggle your nose and magically get a quarter of a million dollars (yes, $250,000), better health, great legs and buns (your own), a sharper mental edge, easy parking everyday and an enjoyable commute, and maybe a couple new friends for good measure. What if these benefits also came with better air to breathe, less daily stress and more fun, less air pollution, safer streets, and more time spent outdoors?

To get all of these benefits, you don’t really have to wiggle your nose. In fact, if you can wiggle your nose, then please teach me how. All you have to do is to use a bicycle to get around.

From Paris to Portland, bicycling is catching on as one of the best methods of transportation for commuting, running errands, and just plain getting around town. Some bicyclists have even installed batteries on their vehicle, making it an electric "hybrid bicycle." Bicycling is ideal for trips of about 5-20 roundtrip miles; and for experienced bicyclists, even a trip of 50-miles or more is an enjoyable way to spend several hours getting from point A to point B.

Some companies, like Starbucks, are also recognizing the trend and are starting to offer their employees benefits for bicycling or taking public transit instead of driving.

Here is more information about some of the many personal, environmental, and social benefits that can be harnessed from your two-wheel wonder.

Personal Benefits

Your Wealth
According to Motor Trend and the American Institute for Economic Research, the average American car-owner can expect to pay between $240,704 and $349,968 during his driving lifetime. These figures will increase with the price of fuel and the rising cost of the vehicles themselves.

A bicycle can serve your transportation needs for commuting, shopping, and getting around town. Urbanites who are well acquainted with the frustration of paying parking tickets and towing fines will also find that bicycles are an excellent solution. Of course, you’ll still need that fuel: the occasional sandwich or cup of coffee will do nicely.

Your Health
Using a bicycle as your primary or secondary form of transportation is an excellent way to stay active. Cycling provides aerobic exercise, which burns calories, shapes leg and gluteal muscles and improves cardiovascular health. Health experts attribute current soaring rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity largely to a sedentary lifestyle. Bicycling is an excellent and often needed solution to these and other health issues.

In addition to the exercise that bicycling provides, bicycle commuters find that they are exposed to much less stress traveling by bicycle than by car. Bicycle commuters also report arriving awake and refreshed to work. And, as the Department of Health and Human Services reminds us, “exercise is related to positive mental health as indicated by relief in symptoms of depression and anxiety.”

Cycling is also a favorite way to enjoy the outdoors and gain an appreciation of nature. Benefits of bicycling in the outdoors include immersion of the traveler in his/her surroundings, the ability to appreciate the scenery and the ability to pull over at any time to for a closer look or a romantic moment when bicycling with a sweetheart.

In a sobering perspective on health, over 42,000 people die each year (1 million, worldwide) in the United States and some 2.8 million are injured as a result of automotive accidents. Another 70,000 lives are claimed each year in this country from medical conditions associated with air pollution (3 million, worldwide). Therefore, for personal safety and the health and safety of others, giving up the car keys is extremely important. As anyone who has experienced a car accident will tell you, car crashes can happen to anyone, not just bad or drunk drivers.

The good news is that studies indicate that bicyclists breathe in less air pollution, making cycling an even more healthy activity. Of course, bicycles emit no air pollution themselves, which ensures cleaner air and better lung health for everybody.

For traffic safety, it is also important that bicyclists following the rules of the road and cycling defensively and politely are important ways to avoid collisions, the most dangerous of which can occur with automobiles.

Environmental Benefits
Bikes get an infinite number of miles to the gallon of gas. Now that’s hard to beat! Bicycling emits no greenhouse, ozone, or any gasses of any sort. Cycling, therefore, is an excellent way for all of us to stand up to Global Warming, ozone thinning, acid rain, and other negative effects of air pollution that come in part from automobiles. If everyone biked or rode on public transit instead of driving, we could instantly cut 30% of the nation’s air pollution in a single stroke.

Bicycles also require smaller streets. By improving city planning to include more bike paths and fewer streets, more room is left as open space to beautify the city and protect the environment.

Social Benefits
One cannot overlook the social benefits of bicycling, both locally and around the world.

Locally
Healthy individuals are more apt to lead healthy social lives. Parents can help their children to stay healthy by teaching them to bicycle and thereby exposing them to outdoor exercise. Also, there are few more memorable a moment for children and parents alike than when a parent teaches his or her child how to ride a bicycle.

In communities, bicycles help to calm traffic by reducing the number of cars on the road. If you’re ever experienced road rage when driving behind a group of bicycles or a transit bus, just imagine how much more traffic it would create to place each cyclist or bus passenger in a car and place them on the road. Bicycling saves space and helps to reduce traffic.

Bicycling also encourages closer communities. Urban sprawl, which decreases property values, harms the natural environment and forces people to commute increasingly far distances for work, is a result of our dependence on cars. By contrast to North America, most European cities are built so that citizens can easily walk or bicycle from home to work or the grocery store. Bicycling discourages sprawl and encourages close-knit communities and better city planning as well as neighborhood stores and community centers.

Bicycling allows people in the community to easily stop, wave and greet one another as well as other passersby. This creates healthier, friendlier, happier neighborhoods.

Most cities and some states are also home to bicycle advocacy groups, which lobby to add bicycle lanes, improve roads, promote education about bicycling, and support clean air initiatives. These groups generally also offer a wonderful and vibrant sense community for bikers with regular social events and advocacy opportunities. Some examples of bicycle groups such as these are the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, MassBike (Massachusetts), the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, and Bike New York.

Internationally
In countries like the United States, fossil fuels maintain a strong grip on the national economy and psyche. Access to oil is a strong incentive for territorial conflicts and even large international wars. It has been widely suggested, for example, that access to oil was one of the key motivators behind the U.S. invasion of the country of Iraq. Bicycling removes the incentive for these violent conflicts, thus helping to cure what has become known in the United States as an "addiction to oil."

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Eating plant-based meals conserves natural resources and slows global warming

By Larry West

Looking for small ways to make a big difference for the environment? Why not start by making yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

As members of the PB&J Campaign (no, I’m not kidding) like to say, “You don’t have to change your whole diet to change the world. Just start with lunch.”

Eating a plant-based lunch (such as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bean burrito, vegetarian chili, or a hearty salad) instead of an animal-based lunch (such as a hamburger, a tuna or grilled cheese sandwich, fish and chips, or chicken nuggets) will save water, preserve land and slow global warming.

How Eating a PB&J Sandwich Slows Global Warming
Every time you eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or other plant-based meal instead of an animal-based lunch, such as a hamburger, you save the equivalent of almost 3.5 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, including 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide.  That’s about 40 percent of the carbon you would save by driving a hybrid vehicle for the day instead of a standard sedan.

How Eating a PB&J Sandwich Saves Water
Growing plants for food takes a lot less water than raising animals. As a result, every time you substitute a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or some other plant-based meal for an animal-based meal such as a hamburger, you save about 280 gallons of water. Eat three PB&J sandwiches a month instead of animal-based meals and you can save as much water as you would by switching to a low-flow showerhead.

How Eating a PB&J Sandwich Saves Land
Raising animals for food takes a lot of space. For example, animal products require 6 to 17 times as much land as soy to produce the same amount of protein. Eating a plant-based lunch like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of a hamburger, ham sandwich, or another animal-based meal saves anywhere from 12 to 50 square feet of land from deforestation, overgrazing, and pesticide and fertilizer pollution.

How Eating One PB&J Sandwich Helps the Environment
By eating lower on the food chain—plants instead of animals—you also consume fewer resources. Why? Because, basically, everything you eat comes from plants. You either eat plants directly—in the form of fruits, vegetables and plant products such as peanut butter—or indirectly after animals have converted plants into meat, milk, eggs, butter and cheese.

The problem is that animals are not very efficient as living food factories that convert plants into food for humans. Animals use most of the plants they eat to produce the energy they need to walk around and keep breathing. To stay alive long enough to become part of your lunch or dinner menu, every cow, pig and chicken has to eat much more protein, carbohydrates and other nutrients than it will yield once the ax finally falls. As a result, it takes several pounds of plants to produce one pound of beef, pork, chicken, eggs or milk.

Inevitably, that means it also takes a lot more land, water and fuel to produce one pound of meat, milk or eggs than it does to produce one pound of edible plants. Not only do the animals need food, water and room to roam, but growing the plants to feed the animals that will, in turn, become food for you requires even more land and water as well as fuel for farm machinery and irrigation pumps.

To help provide some context, the PB&J Campaign says the water required to produce the beef in one hamburger could grow enough peanuts for 17 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And the land required to put that same beef patty on your bun could produce enough peanuts for 19 PB&J lunches.

How You and Your Diet Can Make a Difference
Basically, this all comes down to your power as a consumer. Every time you choose a hamburger, omelet or grilled cheese sandwich over a plant-based meal, you’re telling your local restaurants and supermarkets to buy more meat, eggs and dairy products. By choosing more plant-based meals, you’re asking for less meat and a more efficient use of resources. Either way, your unspoken but unmistakable messages are received by your local merchants and conveyed to wholesalers and farmers.

Want to do more? Share this information with your friends, coworkers and family members and urge them to take action. Urge your school or office cafeteria, or the local restaurants you frequent, to offer more plant-based dishes. Organize a weekly PB&J lunch (or other plant-based meals) at work, home or school and calculate the positive environmental contribution you’ve made.

A Special Word About Seafood
Often, when people start thinking about reducing their meat consumption, their thoughts turn to seafood. Unfortunately, if your goal in consuming fewer meat-based meals is to eat more efficiently, reduce your carbon footprint, and free up more resources, then seafood is no better option than beef, chicken or pork.

All seafood arrives on your dinner plate from one of two sources: it’s either caught by commercial fishing boats or raised on fish farms. About half of the seafood we eat is wild-caught, but commercial fishing creates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions because fishing boats use a lot of fuel.

There are also other environmental problems with wild-caught seafood. First, 69 percent of the world’s major fish species are endangered and in decline, according to estimates by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Second, many commercial fishing methods do a lot of environmental harm. For example, trawling scrapes up everything in its path, turning delicate marine ecosystems into undersea deserts, while long-line fishing results in a tremendous amount of bycatch, fish that are hooked unintentionally and discarded in pursuit of the target species.

Aquaculture, or fish farming, poses many of the same problems as the process of farming other animals for food. If farmed fish and shellfish eat grain and soy, then raising them commercially is as inefficient as fattening cattle or hogs. If the farmed fish eat fish meal, which is made from wild- caught fish, then they contribute indirectly to the environmental problems caused by commercial fishing: greenhouse gas emissions, over-fishing, bycatch, and environmental degradation.

The next time you go grocery shopping or order a meal in a restaurant, don’t think exclusively about flavor and price. Give some thought as well to the long-term environmental effects of the food you choose to eat. It makes a difference.

Sources:

• Global warming statistics: The global warming calculations are based on information from “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming,” by Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin of the University of Chicago.
• Water statistics: The water figures are based on information in “Water Footprint of Nations,” a report by the 2004 UNESCO Institute for Water Education.
• Land statistics: The land statistics are based on information from the “Quantification of the environmental impact of different dietary protein choices,” by Lucas Reijnders and Sam Soret, which appeared in a 2003 supplement to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and on the protein output per acre for soy and peanuts reported in the 1996 edition of Food, Energy, and Society, edited by Pimentel and Pimentel.

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Minimalist Running...why?

crossfit / minimalist / running

The last 12-18 months has given us more change in the footwear industry that maybe the last 8 years. So much that is almost getting ridiculous how many footwear companies are jumping onto the minimalist shoe bandwagon...

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