We Lost Another One – Why Women Abandon Cycling

From a great collection of women on bikes

Recently, I was chatting over coffee with a young woman about cycling in Boulder. We were talking about the various trails around town, our commutes, and our fear of getting our bikes stolen from downtown.  She went onto to describe a new fear she was experiencing; she was becoming more nervous about riding in town due to the increase in the number of aggressive riders. Cycling, for her, was simply not fun anymore. Sadly, I understood what she was saying.  Although Boulder is probably one of the most cycling-friendly places in the U.S. (and yes, I have lived elsewhere, namely San Antonio & Austin, which when I left were probably ranked 150 and 151 respectively out of a group of 151 friendliest places to ride a bike), it’s also packed. Whether you are riding, driving or walking in town, Boulder is a busy little town. I don’t think Boulder has an inordinate number of aggressive drivers. I just think the chance of a cyclist and a driver having a negative encounter is probably a little greater simply due to the number of people getting around using lots of different forms of transportation (i.e skate boarding, roller-blading, etc).

Later, what concerned me more than my friend’s fear was that she was considering giving up commuting by bike. And that’s when I realized this is how it begins. Young women, who may have been commuting for some time,  weary of the conditions of the road, the interactions with drivers and begin to abandon cycling. It’s not just that there is one less commuter on the road but what that change in perception means for her and our community over the long term. If people, especially women, begin to abandon cycling as an option for getting around then our hopes for more significant transportation changes will be an even greater struggle.

This point was further expanded on in a great article titled, Women in Cycling: Why We Matter,  written by Sarai Snyder over at GirlBikeLove. I recommend checking it out because if you are interested in seeing cycling expand in our communities then it’s critical to have women’s continued involvement and support. Can you imagine how much further along cycling adoption and commuting support there would be if more women were involved? I think we’ll move the needle that much more quickly if both men and women are part of the solution.

Boulder Cup – Cyclecross racing comes to Valmont Park

The gals ran up these faster than I could ride down

I couldn’t figure out where the noise was coming from as I sat in the office on an early Sunday morning. It sounded close enough to be the neighbors but more substantial. It wasn’t  until my husband woke up and reminded me of the Cyclecross event down the road from us that I finally connected the booming voice to the Boulder Cup cyclecross race.

We arrived for the women’s elite event at 2:40, which Katie Compton appeared to conquer with ease. She finished with about a 30 second cushion. I admit that I know next to nothing about cyclecross racing but I do know it is an amazing spectator sport. The course was tight and allowed a number of opportunities to watch the racers fly or flounder (in the sand) around the circuit. Watching the athletes quickly dismount and charge up the stairs was simply inspiring. I almost dashed home so I could ride like I was being chased to the nearest coffee shop.

Valmont Bike Park is fantastic and the setting itself, with the Flatirons soaring in the distance, made the event feel really epic. The whole park was brimming with athletes, participants, vendors (cyclecross audiences like both wine and BEER!) and a great vibe. I don’t know how many more events are scheduled but I’ll definitely get back to watch; I do know the park is currently closed for maintenance. The recent snow storm and racing has done a number on the track. In the meantime, enjoy these photos:

Commuting by Bike – When Does a Trend Go Mainstream

Momentum Magazine was on it, as was Copenhagenize, who wrote a great article on it and the PathLessTraveled, each sounding the alarm about GM’s tone-deaf ad trying to persuade an already in-debt audience (students) to get further into debt and out of shape by buying car to save face. Here’s the ad:

Outdated and I'm not talking about the bike

There’s been so many great responses to the ad and even Giant got into the act with a super ad in response that I don’t think I have anything to add. Well, maybe just one question. What do GM and (and now) Zipcar know about the emerging commuter culture that has them on the defense like this? Are they responding to a shift in the market or just trying to appeal to the next generation of car owners? If you believe in the product marketing maxim that if you get them early, you get them for life then maybe it’s the latter. But maybe, just maybe we are beginning to see a shift from perceiving commuters as outliers and recognizing the real health and financial benefits of cycling over driving. Perhaps the misconception of a sweat-drenched, hemp-wearing, Huffy-riding commuter on their way to work at a co-op is changing to be one of everyday folks: office workers, parents, kids, educators, students, etc using a cleaner, cheaper, healthier way to get around. I’m not suggesting that cars will be replaced by bikes anytime soon but it’s refreshing to see that an alternative way of getting around is being perceived as less alternative.

Does Sustainability Need Better PR

I was reading a blog post by Gini Dietrich (ginidietrich) over at Spin Sucks called Public Relations for Sharks. It’s about misplaced fear; people are more likely to die of obesity than from a shark attack. Yet the perceived threat of being eaten by a shark far outweighs any concern about the influence of weight on our health. Gini suggested that sharks need better PR and I would suggest that Sustainability does, as well.

We can’t go back and reframe how the ideas around sustainability and climate change reached the general public. Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” brought home for many of us the human impact on the planet in a way I, at least,  had not experienced before. But because of the messenger, the message immediately became politicized and the insights from movie were overshadowed by political discourse.  Since then we have been inundated with facts, videos, and news feed of the changing climate and its impact on our lives, communities, health, food, etc  yet the argument has not shifted.

We need a new narrative.  But one that maybe does not try and address the full story of climate change. Perhaps, it is a series of stories that presents ideas and solutions in a manageable and digestible manner that gives people a reason to believe, change and have hope that their changes do make a difference.  I think convincing people that their actions make a difference is critical and probably the biggest thing that is missing from the sustainability discussion.

It seems most discussions around sustainability or green are simply too large: BP oil spill, droughts in Texas, that it’s hard to connect our day-to-day behavior with events that seem large and complicated. Maybe it’s taking a step back and tying choices and behaviors directly to the health and wellness of individuals and communities.

It’s hard. I don’t always see the line that is drawn through our systems that impacts and influences our world. Talking about the health of the Amazon doesn’t give me enough to go on to change what I buy, from whom, or when.  But I do know that clean air is healthier, safe food is critical and people need healthy environment to live and work. And that might be the story that needs to be told.

And this maybe where social media can help craft that story. I was shopping around for some new underwear and happened to notice an article on Pact, a maker of responsibly manufactured underwear. I can’t remember where I read about them but I noticed that a friend of mine had liked them on Facebook, so I read more about them and how they sourced and designed their products. I liked their story “Change starts with your underwear and PACT is here to prove it.” I gave them a try because I felt like by doing something as boring as buying underwear my choice was making a difference by supporting a company that is doing business in a sustainable way. The way you choose to make a difference may be different.

The important point is to create new stories about sustainability that changes people’s perception of sustainability from one of austerity and shortages to one of abundance and hope.

Summer Sustainability Intership – What I learned Part 1

Gallows Humor

Summer is winding down. Kids are back in school, the sunflowers are toppling over, their bright, little yellow heads are balding, and the temps are cooler in the morning when I take the furs out for their walk.

My two-month summer sustainability internship ended on the 20th of this month so it seems like a good time to review what I’ve learned. This may take several posts for me to capture everything because there’s so much change going on in this field at the moment.

The Polar Bears are %$#@ed but How am I Looking?

There seems to be a real shift in how sustainability is framed; it’s less about conservation and a save the earth mentality and more about focusing first on the health and well-being of ourselves and our communities and then addressing the benefit to the environment. The recent effort by Mayor Bloomberg to support the Sierra’s Club Beyond Coal is a good example.  Bloomberg’s focus is on improving the health of Americans by supporting campaigns that seek to shut down polluting coal plants.   The emphasis is on human wellness, then the environment. Perhaps, this is a shift that has to happen. Maybe images of scorched earth, polar bears trapped on small pieces of ice or of devastating flooding aren’t personally accessible enough to get any of us to understand how immense climate change is. So, we have to reduce the conversation to ideas that we can comprehend, like helping to reduce asthma by closing polluting plants.

CSR & Business Data

Another recurring theme I noticed was the emphasis on measuring and reporting. I suspect that we are very much in the first iteration of how water, waste, GHGs, etc. are measured but what I think is more interesting is that 1) companies are beginning to monitor the resources they use 2) might this be a way to assign a real value to currently undervalued resources. Do I see companies being required to submit a CSR in the U.S? Unlikely. But do I see elements of CSR thinking integrating within a companies P&L or as a variable in their current exposure to risk and opportunity? Yes. And that’s a good thing.  Thinking about sustainability separately from day-to-day business operations is one of the reasons adoption of greener business practices starts and falters, it’s perceived to be a separate consideration from the factual, hard-nosed thinking of running a business. Until the two are combined, and the value and risks associated with a resource-dependent business are realized, then businesses and consumers will continue to perceive a disconnect.

Those are the two big ideas that surfaced to the fore today from my internship. My next segment will probably be on the intersection of technology and sustainability. In the meantime, I’m still looking for Boulder commuters.

A month off but not really

A splendid way to spend a Thursday evening

I took a month off from this blog but I’ve been busy and just couldn’t seem to keep it altogether. But I’ve got some great news!! I have an internship with a sustainability company here in Boulder, Colorado. It’s a startup; the founders and other members of the team have a tremendous amount of experience and I am excited to be working with such a talented group. I’m already getting stuck into some projects and am thrilled.

So, yes, I’ve neglected this blog but in the meantime, I’ve been guest writing for the CORE blog, gotten an internship, contributed an occasional post to 303cycling and been helping out with this year’s TEDxBoulder.(If you’re interested in volunteering for this year’s event, drop me a line @rideboulderco)

An Update on my Homegrown MBA in Sustainability

I think it’s been a couple of months since my last update on my homegrown MBA in Sustainability.  I was trying to think where to start and thought it might be more honest to start with where the wheels have come off and then end on a high note.

Wheels Off

• GRI Test Case. I haven’t been able to find a willing participant in a GRI project. Granted, I’ve only reached out to a couple of places and both were small companies but I think that may show that (a) it’s a serious undertaking to begin the GRI process (b) it sounds good in theory but the practical implication are a bit fuzzy, like what’s the return on their time, investment etc. I’ve heard more than once that implementing GRI reporting is no small task and that often the first year is often spent just identifying indicators to track and assembling the appropriate records. Perhaps, a prep-GRI phase needs to be defined, so that undertaking a methodology like this is more manageable and efficiencies can be realized at various points in the process. Or maybe GRI needs to be folded into existing business processes so it’s not yet another methodology to introduce to the organization with much initial support and fanfare only to peter out with time.
• Stats. I’ve taken both books down, quickly scanned them and then found something, anything, else to do.
• Networking. I took a bit of a break from the grin and grip circuit. I firmly believe that sometimes you need a bit of down time to come up with new material or your just rehashing the same anecdotes to the same audience. Who’s going to pay for that?
• Victory Garden. (this doesn’t really have anything to do with sustainability directly but it’s another flop) My victory garden looks disheveled and pitiful. I planted them during a severely fluctuating spring in Boulder, where 84 degree temps have seared their tender leaves or watch their yellowed leaves float atop rain puddles. And then the final injustice was watching my big galuf of a cattle dog, Tex, stomp on them as he ran inside to avoid getting wet in the rain.

Wheels ON

• Books. I’m still reading tons. I picked up Getting Green Done by Auden Schendler. I heard him speak most recently at the Sustainablity Opportunities Summit in Denver. I’m about half-way through and so far I like the pragmatic perspective of the book.
• Volunteering. I’m going to begin writing blog posts for CORE (Connected Organizations for a Responsible Economy) and becoming more involved with that organization, helping them to promote the good work they are doing.
• Technology. I’ve actually been doing some social media/seo/web metrics analysis work of the online presence of a couple of sustainability companies. This has been a great experience and I have learned a lot about the challenges facing sustainability companies as they begin to adopt some of these tools.

Technology is the key to Sustainability

I feel very fortunate to be working the social media analytics field at the moment because I very much believe that the tools and technology that are allowing us to share our opinions on Levi’s and Survivor will one day be used to share vital information on water usage and sustainable business practices. The real goal will be making sustainability topics as interesting and as captivating to share and discuss as Levi’s or Survivor. I think this may be the bigger obstacle, creating engaging content that is less about drowning polar bears and more about recognizing the value of our natural environment and using technology to celebrate and protect it. Cuz if the alarmist-type of marketing really worked, we would have solved climate change a long time ago. I’m not claiming to know how to change our perception of sustainability as less ascetic and more about bounty but I’m certain we can all come up with something.

What’s Next – My Sustainability Journey

Now what? I feel a little like I am spinning my wheels: one step on the banana peel forward and an uncontrolled slide back. But I knew it wasn’t going to be easy and I do feel like I’m learning something with every interaction or project.  I’ve got some ideas that are percolating in my head but have not quite brewed yet. And I have a few more books on my list to read: Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, Ray C. Anderson and
Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs.
So, that’s the update. Thanks for reading!

Does sustainability mean moving to the city?

View of an amazing city!

I’m headed to NYC to visit fam in the next few weeks and am so excited!! I love visiting Manhattan, there’s so much to see, eat, do and watch that by the time I leave I am utterly spent, have grit in my eyes, and am wired on sensory overload. It’s a great place but I often wonder about an common line of thinking that suggest we all need to move to cities, live more densely and therefore use less. But I don’t know that having everyone live in one of these big cities is the answer to our fuel, consumption and sustainability issues. After visiting New York city a couple of times, I wonder if they have the resources to upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate a whole slew of new people. Does their infrastructure serve their current residents?

Sometimes, it seems like we are looking for a silver bullet to our

I'd eat my own head

environmental issues. If we just all move to the city and turn our roof tops into gardens, we’ll curb CO2. If we can just launch some sort of weird hook into the atmosphere we can begin collecting CO2.

Instead of trying to solve the whole nasty hair ball, why can’t we consider addressing specific issues at a time, like where people live? Why can’t the amazing technologies available to us today be used to enable people to work remotely, from wherever they want, whenever they need to. The potential of technologies like skype, twitter, jive, etc. etc has to be beyond simply marketing more stuff, right? It seems like cities might save money from not having to care for as many traffic accidents, manage the run-off from vehicles, not to mention the amazing loss of productivity and time sitting in traffic all day.

So, I love New York but not sure how much more high-density it could really be.

Sustainability Opportunity Summit – Denver’s Green Scene

Monday morning early, very early, saw me on the road with a friend driving down to the Denver Marriott for the Sustainability Opportunity Summit. I had never been to the Summit before and I certainly hadn’t been on Hwy 36 that early in a long time. Unfortunately, driving away from Boulder you don’t get the inspiring view of the Flatirons to ease your morning wake-up. Instead,  you see  the big boxes looming large, then whizzing by:  Cosco, Whole Foods, Oracle, Wings and the Flatirons mall.

We arrived at the Marriott Denver City Center, a pretty nice hotel that for some reason has created a subterranean environment for its conference rooms that only a relation of Gollum could truly love. You took two sets of stairs to descend into the conference area, which was wide open and forked to a couple of sets of conference rooms, where the different talks were presented and lunch was served.

The introduction and welcome talk were given by Pete Dignan and Paul Jerde. The keynote given by Auden Schendler was entertaining and introduced some real successes and failures in implementing sustainability projects. Most of the speakers had books they were promoting, including the lunchtime speaker Hunter Lovins.

The meat of the conference – the breakout sessions – were actually quite good. Each one had a panel of experts speaking to a common theme; there was time for introduction and the rest was devoted to Q&A.

In the morning, I attended:
Going Deeper. Panelists from successful large corporations along the Front Range discussed their business cases for sustainability and what it has meant to each company.

and

Riding the Sustainability Life Cycle – Winning the Yellow Jersey. Tools Track 3: Life Cycle Tools – Their Variety and Use. Starting with an overview of tools available in the market today, this session will focus on the “tools of the trade” used by Life Cycle practitioners and deliver an understanding of their strengths and limitations, how they fit into the overall scope of supply chain management, and when to apply them.

and

BREAKOUT SESSION 4: Business + Sustainability – When 1+1 = 3 Strategy Track 4: Using a Systems Thinking Approach to Integrate Sustainability. More than simply looking at discrete processes, such as energy efficiency or water conservation, in this session you will hear first-hand stories from diverse industries about how they embed sustainability in the culture and context for doing good business. These companies are, in their own unique ways, a bit further along in the sustainability journey than most.

There was ample time to visit the Expo center, where there were some great companies showcasing their sustainability products and efforts. And it was refreshing to wander around a bit, taking a break from the “Grin and Grip” circuit if only for a few minutes.

What were the key ideas I learned:

• The sustainability group (at least in Denver/Boulder) is large enough for new ideas and people to feel welcome but small enough that you could quickly learn who people were.
• Implementing sustainable business practices is still relatively new, so there’s lots to learn and there’s no single path.
• Sustainability is still angling a bit for legitimacy and validity in the business world; we’re still using burning landscapes and drowning polar bears to advance the conversation. (This doesn’t work because if it did we probably wouldn’t be in this position. ).
• There’s less talk about us vs them and the single-minded focus on only using renewables; there was candid discussion around coal and nuclear power.
• Lots of talk about standards: GRI, ISOS, EPA, etc I like this. You need a baseline, no matter how flawed, to know where you are and where you are going.
• I understood the Sustainability and Summit parts of the title but not the Opportunity, which may be a character flaw on my part.

On the whole, I enjoyed the conference. It might be interesting to one day attend a conference where you take a current issue and allows the attendees to apply some of the methodologies and tools discussed. I’m not suggesting they’ll solve the problem but what an interesting concept to have a group like that look at transportation issues or clean water availability.

Toughest Hard Time – A Book Review and a Knock Upside the Head

I’ve had to take some time off from this blog because I’ve been recovering from the Boulder Lurgy. This has been a humdinger of a cold, which saddled me with both a congested head and chest. I really thought I was walking around with cement in my head and lungs and although my voice still sounds like I smoke a pack-a-day followed by a chaser of whiskey in the evening I am feeling better. Marginally. At least until I try and complete one of the work-outs at CrossFit Roots then it all goes to hell.

But my hard time pales, quivers and becomes transparent when placed next to the events described in “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl“. It’s hard to read this story and come to terms with the fact that these events happened relatively recently, that there are still areas of the Plains states where the earth has not yet recovered and that the severity and level of destruction was man-made. I don’t know how someone could finish this type of book and not accept that humans can change the environment irrevocably. I find it harder to believe that politicians from states with this history could be so resistant to the ideas and impact of climate change. The effects of human behavior on the land still leaves a mark in some areas of the High Plains; the land has never recovered.

A couple of ideas stayed with me:

• A huge percentage of Oklahoma’s residents were on some sort of social welfare program during the height of the depression because the land was so scarred it could no longer provide subsistence living to those that farmed it.
• The topsoil found in the Plains states had taken 1000s of years to develop and we removed 80 million tons of it in two decades.
• Each state’s soil had a unique color as it blew all over the country.
• Dust traveled from the High Plains to the East Coast and 200 miles off-shore to coat a naval ship with fine silt.
• Removing the native grasses plus aggressive farming destroyed the soil and the land. The High Plains were never meant for farming; grazing of animals but not farming.
• Elderly and children suffered the most, many dying of dust pneumonia.

Can you imagine having so much dust in your lungs you basically are drowning in silt? I walked around congested, breathing in relatively healthy air, and found the going rough. The dust blew in from every crevice of a house; it was everywhere, covered everything and people breathed it in all day and all night.

The book folds in stories of real families desperately trying to survive, and the descriptions of what a dust storm looked like and how they destroyed homes, crops and killed entire communities. Amazing and poignant read, which had me thinking, but hoping to the contrary, that we were headed in a very similar direction.