LA riding and other readings

Here’s some stuff I’ve been checking out in the internerd.

Gary, who rode Feel My Legs this year, writes about Priuses and psuedo-environmentalism. There’s a cool chart to calculate your MPG’s by bike. Remember, it’s high, but not infinite. And Joe Linton, who I ran into on the LA River trail on my way back from Echo Mountain the other day, recently wrote about the Not A Cornfield park and potential bikeway connections to the Arroyo-Seco. We are so close here in LA to having an awesome bike city. So close. This stuff gets me excited.

I was also doing some research on diet and climate impact and came across this amazing journal article (Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States) where the authors conclude that eating a local omnivorous diet has more impact on the environment than a vegetarian diet regardless of distance the food has traveled. It’s unfortunate that the majority of localvores still insist on eating meat. It’s a lot like driving a prius. Even the United Nations has come around: Livestock a Major Threat to the Environment. The pdf for the report, Livestock’s Long Shadow is here (pdf!).

BSNYC/RTMS sums it up succinctly in this post:

The people “going green” these days are the same people who did graffiti or experimented with homosexuality at their liberal arts college–they enjoy flirting with a lifestyle they don’t understand in an environment where it’s looked upon favorably, but as soon as it becomes difficult, unsafe or embarrassing they conveniently abandon it. Fortunately for them, you don’t have to give up your car to “go green.” Instead, you just need to buy a new one with marginally better gas mileage.