Though the day is beautiful, the news is not: a poor economy, a deflating housing market, and wrenching changes forced by high fuel prices. Add to that this background noise: a lack of action by our leaders on the most important issues (federal debt, health care, climate change, etc.) and a feeling that the United States has passed the peak of its power and is in decline.

However, I’m taking some small actions today that buoy my spirits. They involve my energy-efficient strategy to keep the house cool in hot weather. They aren’t perfect and they won’t work for everyone or every situation, but they generally work for us. Here are the steps I take:

• Open the windows at night to let cool air in
• Close the windows during the day when the outside temperature is higher than the indoor temperature
• Close basement air vents, open air vents elsewhere in house
• Keep the dehumidifier in the basement running
• Turn on the furnace fan to circulate air through the house
• Use other fans as necessary

This strategy moves cooler air in the basement and ground level up to the top floor. The other day it kept our house at 80 degrees or cooler on a 95-degree day.

It’s a bit like a thrifty groundsource cooling solution: naturally cool air in the basement helps to cool the rest of the house. It may also work to some extent in houses without basements.

It may work better in our house than in others, because we share walls with neighboring townhouses. But still, I think it can help many people to minimize their air conditioner use.

How wonderful it is with summer at its height. The sun is out today, the purple blooms of our clematis are brilliant, and memories of a beautiful drive through the countryside of western Wisconsin on Sunday and Monday are still strong in my mind.

Our short trip took us only 100 miles or so from our home in Minnesota to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the largest city in western Wisconsin. We approached from the west, on scenic roads. Well, nearly every road is scenic in this beautiful area. Our route took us through Red Wing, Minnesota, to Highway 63, then Highway 72 and County Road C to Eau Claire. It’s a beautiful route through farming country and forest-covered hills, passing through the towns of Ellsworth, Rock Elm, Elmwood, Downsville, and Dunn. It includes some very hilly, thickly forested country - an area that was not covered by the most recent glaciers, and terrain that most people probably do not associate with the Midwest.

Two Minnesota organizations have released an important document, the Statewide Conservation and Preservation Plan. Created by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR), the new plan makes policy and research recommendations that are intended to preserve the state’s natural resources in the face of increasing demands and impacts from our society, including climate change. Carbon emission reductions are one of the important goals of the plan.

I haven’t yet had time to do more than a cursory reading of the report’s executive summary and its transportation chapter. Here are a few excerpts from the executive summary:

The Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) funded a unique partnership among the University of Minnesota and the consulting firms of Bonestroo and CR Planning to evaluate the state’s natural resources, identify key issues affecting those resources, and make recommendations for improving and protecting them. More than 125 experts, including University scientists and public and private natural resource planners and professionals, participated in the 18- month effort. …

The key issues for which recommendations are made in this report are:
• Land and water habitat fragmentation, degradation, loss, and conversion
• Land-use practices
• Transportation
• Energy production and use, and mercury as a toxic contaminant related to energy production

Here are the three recommendations from the Transportation chapter:

• Transportation Recommendation 1: Align transportation planning across state agencies and integrate transportation project development and review across state, regional, metropolitan and county/local transportation, land use and conservation programs.
• Transportation Recommendation 2: Reduce per capita vehicle miles of travel (VMT) through compact mixed-use development and multi- and intermodal transportation systems.
• Transportation Recommendation 3: Develop and implement sustainable transportation research, design, planning, and construction practices, regulations, and competitive incentive funding that minimize impacts on natural resources, especially habitat fragmentation and non-point source water pollution.

The report clearly deserves closer reading and the attention of state leaders. Note especially the involvement of leading state scientists and planners.

For more information, see the official press release and a Star Tribune article.

A friend recently loaned me the spring 2008 issue of Yes!, a magazine dedicated to “Building a Just and Sustainable World.” This was a “Climate Solutions Special Issue” with one of my heroes, Bill McKibben, on the cover.

I haven’t yet read the entire section on climate solutions, but I did read its commentary on transportation, by Guy Dauncey. He proposes a future in which 5 percent of the United States’ surface transportation needs are met by walking, 10 percent by biking, 20 percent by transit, 5 percent by teleworking and teleconferencing, 5 percent by trains (presumably longer-distance), 5 percent by ridesharing, and the rest by personal motor vehicles.

What caught my attention more, however, was the magazine’s “The Page That Counts” section, one of those lists of facts that many magazines publish. For this issue, it begins with these three facts:

Amount of its roads budget that Copenhagen devotes to services and infrastructure for cyclists: 1/3 [1]

Amount of money that a community gains for every mile biked instead of driven: 50 cents [2]

Benefit to Norwegian society for each physically inactive citizen who chooses to bike or walk to work: $4,500 - $5,900 [3]

The quoted facts speak to the generally unrecognized benefits of walking and biking. I was especially drawn to the latter two, because they could capture the attention of elected officials, government staff, and other leaders.

Here are the sources for those facts:

1. “Livable Copenhagen: The Design of a Bicycle City,” Alyse Nelson, Center for Public Space Research, Copenhagen, 2007. http://www.sightline.org/research/sprawl/res_pubs/Livable_Copenhagen_reduced.pdf
   This is a 7mb pdf file and will take a while to load depending on your internet connection.
2. “Quantifying the Benefits of Non-Motorized Transportation for Achieving Mobility Management Objectives,” Todd Litman, Victoria Transport Policy Institute, November 30, 2004. http://www.vtpi.org/nmt-tdm.pdf
3. “Walking- and cycling track networks in Norwegian cities: Cost-benefit analyses including health effects and external costs of road traffic,” Kjartan Sælensminde, Instituute of Transport Economics, 2002. http://www.vti.se/nordic/2-02mapp/cycle.htm

I hope to dig further into these sources and have already glanced at the second one, by Todd Litman, which is quite impressive.

For three of the last four years I’ve spent time during the summer working at my former employer, Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. I still do freelance work for ETS’s Test of English as a Foreign Language, and my stints back at the mother ship help to keep me “calibrated,” as they say.

Although I spent most of my time working, I did enjoy my trip. The area from Princeton west to the Delaware River Valley is a wonderful part of the country, and summer is a nice time to be there. This is a place that has managed to retain some of its rural character, even though it sits in the most densely populated state in the country.

How did they do that? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that some of it came through open space initiatives that involved land purchases by government; private trusts and zoning ordinances probably played a role as well.

I stayed in Princeton, not far from the university, and was rather awestruck at the building they’ve done on campus in the last several years, most of it on the southern edge, including Whitman College (named for Meg Whitman of eBay fame). This is what money will do for you.

During my trip, the high price of fuel was on people’s minds. I got a feel for high gas prices when I filled up my rental car near the Philadelphia airport and paid $4.13 a gallon. Perhaps prices will come down, but with higher demand around the world it feels as though we are crossing some kind of historic watershed and moving into unfamiliar territory, to use a geographic metaphor.

Now it is good to be back home in Minnesota. Our baby boy is six months old now and can sit up on his own - though he is still prone to toppling over. He is cuter than ever, of course. And I’ve been getting lots of hugs from our daughter, who says she missed me a lot. It is nice to have been missed, and better to be home.

I recently traveled for work to the East Coast, flying the thousand miles from Minneapolis to Philadelphia, then driving to the Princeton, New Jersey, area. I lived in Princeton or its environs for eight years, first in grad school and later working there and marrying my wife, and I’ve returned there several times since then. So it’s familiar turf for me.

My first stop after leaving the airport was South Philly, just south of downtown. I was happy to find it’s much the same since I first visited 20 years ago.

If you appreciate the urban Northeast or are interested in experiencing it, this is one place to get a feel for its teeming streets. And what streets! I approached the area from the south, first driving up South 10th Street, then 9th Street. On 10th Street I saw tiny, tiny one-level brick houses, and on 9th Street I made my way through a narrow one-way corridor, cars parked on both sides of the street in front of small row houses, apartment buildings, shops, and restaurants. To my eyes, accustomed to a small town in the Midwest, the density of the place, especially its buildings, was remarkable. The people, meanwhile, were out on the sidewalks or their front steps and porches, enjoying the evening air and the sights and sounds of the neighborhood.

I made my way north to the Italian Market, an Old World-style area of shops and sidewalk stalls that was featured in scenes from the movie Rocky. South Philly is still largely Italian, though today it increasingly includes Hispanics and Asians.

I stopped at Geno’s, famous for its cheese steaks and cheese fries, and ordered “one American with” - a steak sandwich with American cheese and onions. Though busy and vital, Geno’s seemed to be desperately trying to hold the area’s diversity at bay. It proclaimed its patriotism and nativism through displays of the American flag and signs proclaiming the necessity of speaking English. Just as prevalent were pictures of local police officers, nearly all of them white.

Meanwhile, across the street, Asian and Hispanic youth played basketball and seemed uninterested in the greasy fare that I was consuming. The future is ours, they implied with their quick movements and bouncy steps.

I was left wondering what would come of this tension of cultures, what would happen to Geno’s and the descendants of the Italians, to the newer kids jumping for the rim on the other side of the street. Some kind of truce, I hope, some kind of kind of blend that is born of acceptance.

While any hope for a federal response to climate change this year died today in the U.S. Senate, I’m at least somewhat encouraged by the fact that my wife has located another resource that catalogs the many claims made by climate change skeptics and offers responses to each. It’s in Grist, the environmental news and commentary web site that’s based in Seattle, and it’s titled “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.” I don’t know what you’re community is like, but mine has plenty of skeptics, and I need all the help I can get.

I’m not a regular reader of Grist, though my wife is. They take a lighter approach to environmental issues - lighter than yours truly, for example. I like their slogan: “Grist: it’s gloom and doom with a sense of humor. So laugh now — or the planet gets it.”

See also their commentary on the carbon footprint of biking versus driving, in which they run some of the numbers and, as commonsense would indicate, find that biking comes out ahead.

There was recently an interesting discussion on Locally Grown Northfield about bike-sharing programs. It coincided with some recent news on such programs: the roll-out of Washington, D.C.’s SmartBike DC program and the announcement that bicycles would be made available to the public at the Democratic and Republican political conventions, with the latter being nearby in St. Paul later this summer.

The discussion and the news prompted me to e-mail Paul DeMaio of MetroBike in Washington, DC. Paul provides consulting services related to bike sharing. I asked him whether a town such as Northfield, Minnesota (population 18,000) could attract one of the providers of the high-tech bicycle-sharing programs, such as Clear Channel Outdoor’s SmartBike program or JCDecaux’s Cyclocity program.

He said that a town the size of Northfield probably wouldn’t be able to attract those larger firms, given the costs of setting up such a service. But he did mention the possibility of a private service called Nextbike, which operates in Germany and New Zealand. He also thought that a non-profit model, with the cooperation of the colleges, city, and local businesses might work. He gave Toronto Bikeshare as an example, though after doing some research I found that program has been canceled. Perhaps another model is the Humana Freewheelin’ program that is being used at the political conventions. Some of those bikes will remain in the Twin Cities, so we can monitor how things proceed there.

Perhaps someone here might explore the option of the Nextbike model as a business opportunity. Their web site and a video describe how it works: users find a Nextbike, call a number and receive a code that they can use to unlock a bike, then they pay a fee for rental.

One advantage of a bike-sharing program is that people who drive in from surrounding areas could use these bikes while they’re in town. Others may like the fact that they don’t have to worry about maintaining and storing a bike.

In any case, the possibilities are intriguing, and I look forward to seeing what the future brings.

We’re in the process of doing some updating and overhauling of Northern Letter. Most of the work is being done by web designer Michael Blaha of Organic Arts, who now hails from Taos, New Mexico.

This is still an ongoing process, but it will most likely include the following:

• transferring the web hosting to Dreamhost
• updating WordPress and its plug-ins
• adding the capability to subscribe to comments via email
• improving the backup functions
• incorporating Google Analytics for site stats
• adding “Now Reading” to the sidebar, which links to Amazon.com
• adding a Paypal “donate” button

The latter two options, along with the existing Google ads, may provide some revenue for this site, though I expect any proceeds will remain small. As an “Amazon Associate,” I would receive a small percentage of the sale of books bought through the links to Amazon.

It occurs to me that selling books through Amazon is not exactly a way to support my local economy (unless the author lives here). I wonder if there is a way I could advertise the books for sale at a local bookstore?

In any case, I appreciate the skill of Michael Blaha in making all this happen. With his help, this site is improving. If you have other ideas, just let me know.

My wife’s grandfather, Ralph Adams, died at the end of last month. On May 3rd we attended his funeral in Sun City West, Arizona.

I never knew Ralph when he was in good health and at the height, or near the height, of his powers. I’ve been told that he had Shy-Drager syndrome, more recently known as multiple system atrophy - a degenerative neurological disorder similar to Parkinson’s Disease. Formerly the life of the party, his illness made him quiet. I could only imagine his former self.

I learned of one touching moment from Ralph’s last year of life. Greatly debilitated by his disease, one of his daughters was attending to him one day when he said to her, “Is there anything I can do to make this easier for you?” It was a sign of his attention to others, even when he was suffering greatly himself.

Ralph was one of eight children from a remarkable Kansas farm family. From humble beginnings in the small town of Clay Center, Kansas, Ralph and his seven brothers and sisters went on to success in all corners of this country as doctors, business people, homemakers, and engineers. Ralph became a chemical engineer and an expert on asphalt, eventually rising to a high position at the Mobil Oil Corporation in its New York City headquarters.

Ralph and his wife Neva eventually retired to Sun City West, where he had more time to pursue his passion for playing bridge. Ralph was highly involved in community work his entire life, serving for a time as a city council member in Missouri and devoting time to Kiwanis and other organizations. He was instrumental in establishing Shepherd of the Hills United Methodist Church in Sun City West. See also Ralph’s obituary from the Daily News-Sun.

We are saddened by Ralph’s passing. Another member of a remarkable generation is gone, and we seek to build on what Ralph and others have given us.