Published on June 16th, 2008
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Bicycling it isn’t always easy. Busy streets, honking horns, and inadequate city funding for bike lanes and paths can make bicycling an uphill battle. However, with green in the news, the economy in a slump, and summer on its way, it’s getting easier to find reasons why there are some 1.4 billion bicycles and only about 400 million cars in the world today.
This week, EcoWorldly authors from six continents contributed articles on bicycling in their country. With exerpts from those articles and others in the blogosphere, here are seventeen very good reasons to bicycle no matter where you live. Click the headings as you go to read more.
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Published on June 13th, 2008
Note: this article is part of this week’s EcoWorldly cycling series: Cycling and its importance in countries around the world.
What does it cost you to get to get around these days? How much was your fuel spend in May in the wake of the sky-high gas prices?
With global crude oil prices anywhere between US$ 120 and US$ 140 on an average week these days, it is highly likely that you are grimacing or gnashing your teeth each time you get to fill your tank at the pump.
But that is not all the gas costs you. It also depends with your choice. As more and more motorists around the world find ways to beat the high gas prices, quite a number are turning to ingenuity of the cheap, just to remain afloat in the bubbling sea of high oil prices.
In America, for instance, a friend tells me that a new craze (or is it culture) is slowly catching on - pedal power. The popularity of bicycles as gasoline prices hit the roof is on a remarkable rise in many US cities. Big automobile makers like General Motors seem to be seeing the light early enough and have announced plans to close several plants for manufacturing of their gluttony SUV models that still remain the darling of most Americans.
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Published on June 12th, 2008
Note: this article is part of this week’s EcoWorldly cycling series: Cycling and its importance in countries around the world.
The Internet search engine company Google, now a reputable green icon with its solar powered Mountainview headquarters, last year gave away bicycles to its staff in Europe, Asia and Africa as part of its efforts to reduce the impact of transportation on the environment.
Nearly 2,000 members of Google permanent staff benefited from this scheme that also provided free helmets emblazoned with the famous brand name.
The great bit about this stuff is that they had freedom to choose from a variety of trendy, sexy models from Raleigh, the German bike maker, and these included men’s and women’s hybrids, as well as a Google cruiser. Another sexy model, the Dahon Curve folding bike, was retailing at about US$ 280 in 2007.
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Published on June 9th, 2008
If you want a blissful sex life, don’t ride a bike. I am not a keen biking enthusiast, particularly of the black mamba or Indian type, those old type ugly contraptions that are the primary mode of transport in most parts of Africa, other than human feet.
While walking is good for health and the environment, when you do it for miles and miles on end with a heavy load on your back or head as most men, women and children do in Africa, a bicycle comes in handy for it is in black Africa what a camel is in Arabia or a Llama is in some parts of South America.
Those who can afford a taxi ride take not the yellow cabs you’ll find idling on any street corner in New York City but a boda boda, as they are known in East Africa, literally a bicycle taxi that would take you from one border to another.
But the bicycle taxi riders here have learned the hard way and have taken to heavy drinking of cheap, traditional brew to drown their troubles. Becoming sexually inactive or rather a man who cannot sexually perform is the worst thing that can ever happen to a man, especially if his wife starts looking for fun elsewhere, risking catching the HIV/ Aids virus in the process.
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Published on June 5th, 2008
Looking up ‘Kogelo village’ on the Kenya page of Google Search, you are bombarded by 6,540 results in just 0.04 seconds. Well, to start with, Kogelo village is where the remarkable story of Barack Obama begins.
Hours after the news of his clinching the Democratic Party presidential nomination over Hillary Rodham Clinton reached Kenya, I took the trouble to visit the cradle of an African immigrant whose son would be United States of America’s 44th president for one thing - to see the faces of the village elders here and the look in the eyes of Mama Sarah Obama, Barack’s step-grandmother, and try to describe what I’d see.
Well, a definite description of the pride, nobility, ecstasy, hope, jubilation, glory, humility and triumph that I saw in those faces and in the deep penetrating eyes of this charming 85 year old lady escapes me. But I saw a twinkling tear in Mama Sarah’s eye and I dropped a tear too.
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Published on June 4th, 2008
How far can one go for charity, especially the artistic types like those who design tees? Even if it is a worthy fund raising project for genocide victims in Darfur, Sudan or, say, a children’s global cancer awareness campaign?
Well, this question can better be answered when you consider that charity knows no copyright, especially when it involves a fashion icon like Louis Vuitton and one of the French fashion house’s creations.
For 26 year old Danish art student, Nadia Plesner, being slapped with a copyright infringement lawsuit demanding “$7,500 for each day she keeps selling the product, $7,500 for each day she displays Louis Vuitton’s cease-and-desist letter and $ 7,500 for each day she mentions the name ‘Louis Vuitton’ on her website” has never overridden a good cause and she is as defiant as ever.
Those sums and more - legal costs for the suit and another $15,000 for related “other expenses”. But what would Louis Vuitton do with the money if their lawsuit succeeds? Of two guesses, only one can suffice; either to fund further research for a hyped luxury product or give away to victims of the war in Darfur.
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Published on June 4th, 2008
Imagine an elderly man toiling under the hot sun to weed a crop of cotton in a remote African village. When the crop is harvested, a middleman appears in the name of free market trade and purchases it at a ridiculously low price.
Due to lack of information and access to markets, the poor farmer, like many others in his village, is left with little choice but to part with his crop.
Most likely, he will not be able to afford healthcare, or send his children to school, and all his sweat will go to fattening the purse of a huge conglomerate in the global north. The conglomerate will process the cotton (or whatever product it is) into a good that the poor farmer can only dream of purchasing.
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Published on June 2nd, 2008
To most African communities, facing the knife is akin to being a “real man”. Male circumcision is an important rite of passage that moves the young man that undergoes it a notch higher towards marriage and earns him a respectable position in society. But to a few African tribes, like the Zulu warrior nation in South Africa and the Luo in Kenya, male circumcision is not in the books. But this may soon change.
Recent extensive medical research and studies on the prevalence of HIV/Aids in Africa indicate that male circumcision could help reduce the spread of the disease on the continent and elsewhere. A massive roll out of free male circumcision programs in Swaziland, Rwanda, Zambia and Kenya is underway and experts hope results will reflect the 60% reduction in new infection rates documented in the studies.
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Published on May 30th, 2008
Local politics and pure malice can be enough to kill a noble project, but to have quite a respectable environmental action network like the Boulder, Colorado-based Global Response get enjoined in endless intrigues, extortion and tomfoolery that are threatening a $35 million organic farming project in Kenya is quite a story.
Expert findings, personal research and a discreet fact-finding visit to the Dominion Farms project in Siaya, a rural agricultural district, also homeland of Democratic presidential contender, Barack Obama’s father, is all it took to conclude that the letter-writing group partly funded by the New Earth Foundation may have made the goof of the decade.
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Published on May 27th, 2008
Kwabena Mensa, a small holder cocoa farmer in rural Ghana, readily testifies that the seasons have changed, and he no longer plants his crop in mid-year as he used to more than ten years ago.
He has also noticed that the weather is a little changed lately and harvesting is now delayed by a couple of months or so. Although he knows this can be attributed to climate change, he does not wholly understand why that is so.
Small holder farmers in Africa are already experiencing the impact of climate change. Weather patterns are changing, extreme weather events becoming more common, and ancient calendars for planting, weeding and harvesting are no longer valid. The threat of food shortages, crop failures, and growing deserts are real and immediate.
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