Personal Action, Political Action, and the Power of the Pen

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Let’s say you’re sickened and dismayed by the Gulf oil spill and want to do something about it. You’ve been watching images of oiled pelicans, of slicks killing marshland, of unemployed anglers and Gulf residents in shock and fury. You can’t believe the inability of both BP and the federal government to contain this spill after more than two months. Maybe you’re one of the many who tune in to the live feed of the Gulf spill each day. It’s devastating, and you wish you could do something, but you feel helpless.

I’m guessing many of us have felt these things – I know I have – and so as I write here, part of what I want to communicate, as well as remind myself, is this: We are not helpless. Maybe we can’t dive under the sea to plug the spewing Deepwater Horizon well, but there is much we can do to stem the demand for oil that is the ultimate cause of this disaster, to help those suffering as a result of this spill, and to advocate change.

Petroleum products are such a part of our lives that it’s hard sometimes to see how to stop using them (in fact, I first drafted this post with a petroleum product, a plastic pen filled with petroleum-based ink, and decided as I was writing that I must look for a source of pens made without petrochemicals; know of any?). As I hope I began to show in my posts of the last few days, though, there are ways to cut back, ways that can both help us withdraw from our oil addiction and, in the long run, help the people of the Gulf.

We can make a difference both with personal action and with political action. In the first few of my planned 30-posts-in-30-days I’ve touched on personal actions that can make a difference, and in future posts I’ll cover more. As far as political actions go, there seem to be a swelling number out there now which address the crisis in the Gulf. One I discovered yesterday is Hands Across the Sand, a show of support for cleaner energy instead of offshore drilling. Hands Across the Sand started in Florida and since the Gulf spill, has grown into an international movement. There’s a Hands Across the Sand event tomorrow, June 26th, at 12 noon; the website lists locations around the U.S. and the world. I’m inviting others to join me in supporting this where I live near Lake Superior.

For political action, I also believe in the power of the pen, the power of writing. I believe in it partly because, since writing Divorce Your Car!, I have had the honor of being approached by several people who've said, "Your book changed my life." But you don't have to write a whole book for writing to work this way. Even small bits of writing can do it. Just sending postcards to the Prez or to our Reps in Congress saying something like “Please help the Gulf economy shift to cleaner energy” will help that point of view get counted. It might not bring immediate action, but it can add up to a tipping point. Writing does make a difference, and it can make a difference with the Gulf oil spill as well as with getting us off oil.

Transporting Stuff in Bike Trailers

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Yesterday’s post on cargo bikes touched on some creative ways to haul feight without fossil fuel. Bike trailers provide yet another means of moving goods via human power. I like bike trailers for their versatility. They come in a variety of designs, you can take them on and off a bike as needed, and you can stow stuff in them just as you might toss things into the trunk of a car.

Bike trailers are astonishingly adaptable. I’ve known people who have hauled canoes on them for camping trips, as well as people who use them to carry their pets (and children!). A few landscape services use bike trailers to haul their tools to jobs, and some of the services that use cargo bikes also use trailers to expand their hauling capacity.

My own bike trailer (pictured above left) is pretty basic but serves nicely for things like grocery shopping, hauling books to the library, or doing several errands at a time. I generally use it if I have to carry more than will fit on my bike rack or in panniers. It’s not fancy but I’ve had it for years and it suits my needs. The collapsible feature means it’s not as sturdy as other trailers, but it’s darn easy to store.

The heavy-duty trailers built by Bikes at Work occupy the other end of the quality spectrum. If cargo bikes can be likened to pickup trucks, then Bikes at Work trailers can turn a standard bicycle into a semi. You can see where I got this idea from the photo below.

The two heavy-duty Bikes at Work trailers above are on a house-moving job

Each of the two Bikes at Work trailers above can haul a load up to 300 pounds. When the company was founded, its services included hauling recyclables in Ames, Iowa (last I heard, that service had split off into a separate organization). Bikes at Work also maintains an impressive Carfree Information section on its website, a great go-to source for anyone wanting to get off oil.

I’ll close today’s post with a mention of another bike trailer I own. This one goes with my Bike Friday folding bike, and it’s a suitcase trailer. The bike itself folds and disassembles to fit into the suitcase for easy transport on a train or bus (or plane, for those who fly with them). When the bike is re-assembled ( a process that takes just a few minutes, if you’re good at it) the suitcase hooks on to the bike’s rear hub and can carry your other luggage.

In Toronto on one of my car-free book tours with my Bike Friday New World Tourist folding bike and suitcase trailer

This Bike Friday suitcase trailer is plenty big for the two duffel bags I used when I set off on several car-free book tours after writing Divorce Your Car! This set-up enabled me to transition easily from train to bus to bike travel as I journeyed literally thousands of miles without using a car. My goal in doing this echoed the reason I wrote the book: to demonstrate how many great alternatives we have to petroleum-based car travel.

More tomorrow!

Consider the Cargo Bike

This is the third in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

More bad news today from the Gulf of Mexico as removal of a collection cap again allowed oil to gush unrestricted from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well. And so the graphic display of oil-dependence dangers continues. Recovering from oil addiction takes on further urgency if we acknowledge, as Alaska writer Charles Wohlforth points out, that total clean-up from large oil spills is just not possible. In a superb essay for Seed Magazine, Wohlforth notes that less than 10% of the crude spilled two decades ago by the Exxon Valdez was ever recovered. Even as we gape in horror at the current larger spill disaster in the Gulf, significant oil still remains along the shores of Prince William Sound.

Here’s the good news: our heavy dependence on dirty oil needn’t continue. With this post, I’d like to highlight another of the bounty of cleaner ways to move people and goods. Human power doesn’t get much press, so I was delighted yesterday to see Alan Durning’s fabulous piece on Sightline Daily about cargo bikes. If you want to be amazed by what can be carried on two (or three) non-motorized wheels, check out the terrific images of "human-powered pickup trucks” in this post. As he introduces these photos, Alan chimes in on the healing-from-dependence theme by writing: “Catching glimpses of a life cured of addiction can be a step toward recovery.”

The pix compiled by Alan and urban planner Alyse Nelson inspired me to set down a few of my own experiences with cargo bikes. I first learned about hauling by bike when the cycle delivery company Pedal Express formed in Berkeley, California in the early 1990s. Still in business, the service will deliver up to 500 pounds and uses a fleet of bikes that includes the one pictured below. The Pedal Express website also includes a scrapbook of PedX cargo bikes carrying some really big loads.

One of the cargo bikes used by Pedal Express in Berkeley

I have used Pedal Express on a few occasions to deliver birthday presents to folks living within their service area. I’ve done this from Michigan by purchasing presents by phone from Berkeley or Oakland stores, then arranging for Pedal Express to deliver.

These days, you can find delivery highlights on the Pedal Express Facebook page. My favorite highlight went up last November: “We are delivering an entire Thanksgiving dinner by bicycle today! Awesome.”

I got further experience with human-powered hauling when my household owned a cargo trike. Though it ultimately proved to be more than we needed, this beautiful recumbent trike was both fun and a good teaching tool as it garnered admiration from people who saw it. Custom-built by Lightfoot Cycles of Montana, this “ice trike” could navigate snow and ice as it carried cargo, an important feature for our long winters. Lightfoot, by the way, also makes cycles for people with disabilities and special needs, including hand-cycles.

"Ice trike" cargo bike built by Lightfoot Cycles

When I wrote Divorce Your Car! I mentioned BikeCartAge, a Victoria, BC, bicycle delivery service that used this slogan: “Is there anything we can’t deliver by bicycle? Not much!” It applies to cargo bikes overall, which you’ll see when you check out Alan Durning’s stellar photo compilation (did I mention you should take a look at his post?). I particularly like the “pub bike” built for Portland, Oregon's Hopworks by Metrofiets and designed to deliver beer and pizza, complete with bike-mounted kegs and a serving bar.

From a different and older source, I also liked the pair of cargo-bike services (not affiliated, as far as I know) that operated in Toronto several years back. As page 152 of Divorce Your Car! relates:

• “One enterprising Canadian promotes safe sex in Toronto by selling condoms from a three-wheeled ‘Condom Cart;’ using a bike gives him a competitive advantage, writes the Community Bicycle Network, because ‘bikes are a good way to go where the action is.’ And should the condoms fail, ABC Diaper Service of Toronto provides a complete daily diaper delivery service by bicycle, offering diapers made with unbleached cotton and washing them with environmentally safe products.”

Note: I’m not sure whether these services still operate, but I’m checking. Stay tuned.

Obviously, cargo bikes alone won’t get us off oil. Rather, they offer this take-home message: cycling technology can do much more than most of us realize. If we take greater advantage of these capabilities as part of an integrated strategy, they can indeed aid our recovery from oil addiction. And I agree with Alan: simply glimpsing what’s possible can be a first step.

The more adventurous among us might go on from there to have our own cargo bikes, but even those who don’t can support their use by patronizing services which use them. If you know of more such services, please share links or contact info in the comment section below. Thanks!

Taking the Train

This is the second in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first gives an introduction to the series.


In the U.S., close to 70% of the petroleum we use fuels transportation. We consume about 20 million barrels per day; around 13 million of those go to moving us around.


Portland, Oregon's Union Station

Given this, and given that I authored a book called Divorce Your Car!, you might expect me to start a series on recovering from oil spills and addiction by advising, “Drive less.” Clearly, we have to drive less to recover from oil addiction and to relieve pressure on fragile ecosystems like the Gulf. Yet that admonition has never done much for me. Though “driving less” describes a primary path to oil-addiction recovery, it’s so non-specific that it doesn’t do much to help envision that path.

So instead of writing “drive less,” I prefer to focus on particulars that foster less car use, such as today’s suggestion: Take the train. I’m talking long-distance trains here, which are generally a very efficient means of moving both people and freight. They can do two important things when it comes to recovery from oil addiction: use less energy, and use cleaner energy.

On average, a train uses less energy to move people than any other enclosed mode of motor travel. U.S. DOE’s Transportation Energy Data Book offers the following 2007 figures for BTUs of energy used per passenger-mile:

Amtrak ..................................... 2,516
All rail ..................................... 2,586
Airplanes ................................... 3,103
Cars .......................................... 3,514
Light trucks ............................. 3,946
Buses ........................................ 4,315
Single-occupant cars .............. 5,517
Single-occupant light trucks ... 6,788

Because of differences in the nature of these travel modes, these figures aren’t precisely comparable, but it’s still safe to say you save energy by taking the train – especially compared to something like a single-occupant SUV (classed as a light truck).

Passengers from the Empire Builder stretch on the station platform in Whitefish, Montana as the train stops for a break. This route goes right through Glacier National Park.

U.S. trains don’t yet measure up to Europe’s or Japan’s or Canada’s, but despite that, the Amtrak system has much to offer. You can get as far as clear across the country in less time than it takes to drive, and relax or work along the way (Joe Biden recently described how he has worked on Amtrak commuter trains in this nice little essay). Some trains can also save you time compared to flying. In Divorce Your Car! I pointed out that certain Amtrak routes are cheaper and faster than short plane hops between major cities (see p. 168 for examples).

Some of Amtrak’s best runs service commuters. The Northeast routes, the Hiawatha between Milwaukee and Chicago, the Cascades between Oregon and Seattle, and California routes – the Capitol Corridor and Pacific Surfliner – are all popular and see high ridership.

If you’re on the way to the Gulf to help with wildlife recovery, or to cover news of the spill, you can take trains to New Orleans from points north, west, or northeast. Chicago to New Orleans is an overnight trip on the City of New Orleans; New York or DC to New Orleans is likewise overnight on the Crescent. Los Angeles to New Orleans takes two days, but that’s still less than driving.

Waiting for the Southwest Chief in the Los Angeles Union Station.

Amtrak is not without problems. Decades of tight budgets have limited equipment upgrades, so many train cars show wear and are subject to facilities breakdowns. I can say from experience that there’s nothing like toilet failures on a train to make a journey unpleasant. Delays have plagued some routes, because freight trains have priority on most tracks; recently, though, Amtrak’s on-time performance has gone way up. I’ve ridden several trains that have reached their destinations early.

Right now, trains run on a combination of electric power and diesel (some Amtrak locomotives are diesel-electric, some all-electric; as an aside, some locomotives used by Amtrak were made by GM, which suggests a way to bring more jobs to Michigan). This means that although most trains now run on fossil fuels, their power source can easily shift in two ways: one, by using biodiesel in place of petroleum diesel in locomotives, which has already been done in some spots.; and two, by shifting grid electrical power into cleaner energy sources such as solar.

Such changes, combined with rail travel’s efficiency, give trains great potential to cut our collective oil dependence. You can cut your own by checking out train service in your area, and riding the train.

This Amtrak locomotive is pulling the Coast Starlight into Salinas, California.

Paths to Recovery from Oil Spills and Addiction

How can we heal from the devastating Gulf oil spill, and from our crippling dependence on fossil fuels? A pledge to count the ways ….


I’ve just returned from a six-week sojourn to California. I rode Amtrak there and back, visited family and friends, took a break from writing and blogging, and all through the trip, followed news of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster with the sort of horrified helplessness I’m sure many of us feel as we watch BP’s ruptured well spew petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico.

Nodding-donkey pumpjacks bring oil up from wells under California fields. Photo taken from a passing train. ©2010 by Katie Alvord

Eleven men went down in flames as this debacle began. Now more than two months into the spill, scores of birds and animals have died in oil, beaches in at least four states have been fouled, the entire Gulf seafood industry is at risk, and we still have another two months to go before the Deepwater Horizon’s geyser of toxic crude can be fully stopped.

The Gulf of Mexico and the human and non-human lives that depend on its ecosystem are casualties of our addiction to oil. This spill is nothing if not a wake-up call about the dangers of that addiction.

Ghost in the water: From shore, you can still see oil platforms like this one in the Santa Barbara Channel, where a 1969 oil spill was a major wake-up call about the dangers of offshore drilling. This was taken through a train window. ©2010 by Katie Alvord

It’s not just this worst-in-U.S.-history ecotastrophe that compels us to end oil dependence. As headlines astound us with the quantity of crude pouring into the Gulf, the gallons of petroleum products that consistently flush, leak, or spill into streams and seas also poison the planet. In her fine book Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay wrote of the spills that occur at all stages of our oil use, from drilling to driving, as she pointed out: “The whole system is a leaky vessel.” As of the 1990s, when Kay wrote this book, an estimated quarter-billion gallons of oil regularly escaped into the environment each year just in the U.S.

This routine spillage has only gone up, and it occurs around the globe. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Anene Ejikeme of Trinity University noted that petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta – which supplies significant oil to the U.S. -- has spilled the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez into Nigerian coastal waters every year for the last 50 years. As a result, Ejikeme writes, “Dead fish and oily water are part of daily life for Niger Delta residents.” She cites an Amnesty International report documenting that these Nigerians “have to drink, cook with and wash in polluted water, and eat fish contaminated with oil and other toxins.”

Is this the future for the Gulf Coast, and for the globe – a future we are now watching unfold before our eyes as we view live video of Deepwater Horizon’s dark and ongoing underseas gusher?

It doesn’t have to be. The good news: there is a tremendous amount we can do to turn away from fossil fuels, to recover from oil dependence and pursue paths to cleaner energy. Based on prior research and writing on this topic, I believe that we can all help to do this now, today, in our own lives, in ways large and small. We can all help in recovering from the Gulf spill and in recovering from our crippling addiction to oil.

Toward that end, I make this three-part pledge:

1) I pledge to write a blog post every day for the next thirty days about actions and policies that can move us down a path to cleaner energy, help us recover from the Gulf spill, and/or help us recover from oil addiction. I’m counting this post as the first of these thirty.

2) I pledge to pursue the personal oil-use-reducing actions I will write about, and describe my experiences in my posts.

3) I pledge to donate $2 per post to non-profits working on cleaner energy and spill recovery, and invite you to join me by pledging to donate anywhere from 10 cents on up per post I write over the next 30 days. In a future post, I’ll give details about how to do this.

Many of my posts will be here on this “Divorce Your Car!” blog – appropriately enough, since so much of the oil we use gets consumed by driving. Some posts might be on other blogs, but I’ll link to those here and make this site “pledge central.” Besides pledging to contribute, I invite you to read and comment on these posts, tell your friends, and reduce your own oil use by trying out the personal actions I’ll describe.

More soon!