Thank goodness this didn’t happen as the moving van was unloading our stuff. The move went relatively smoothly, and we’re unpacking our things in a much older and somewhat smaller house than we had in Northfield. We’re in the town of Collingswood, New Jersey. It’s on the PATCO train line, which I take into work. More on Collingswood and Philadelphia in future posts, I’m sure.

I hope to resume posting more regularly, now that the stress of moving is largely over. Still have a lot of unpacking to do, though.

We are sad about leaving our family and friends here in Minnesota but excited by new prospects and being back on the East Coast. Since my wife and I both lived in New Jersey before, we’ve spent time in Philadelphia in the past and like it. I will be working in downtown, or “Center City,” Philadelphia, so our options for places to live are many. We may choose to live in City Center, or we may choose a suburb that is on one of the many rail lines. We may buy or rent. We will have to sell our place here in Northfield.

My long absence form the blog is due to preoccupation with the tasks around my job search and the move that will result. My apologies.

“The war on muscular work has been a remarkable success,” Bouchard comments (p. 14). But that success comes at with significant costs. Here is an excerpt from Mr. Bouchard’s introduction:

Even though individuals bear responsibility for maintaing healthy weights, national surveys in developed countries and the compendium of data around the world by the International Obesity Task Force indicate that programs with a focus on individuals are not enough…. What is needed is a series of major policies aimed at transforming our environment and the way we live. Indeed, nothing short of a paradigm shift has any chance of success in the efforts to curtail the increase in the number of people who are chronically in positive energy balance. City planning, building codes, mass transit systems, car use, safe footpaths and cycling paths, pedestrian-only city centers, school schedules and programs, and the media are among the areas that will require transformations if we are to attenuate the impact of the current “obesogenic” environment.

The challenge is enormous. Evolution has endowed humans with complex regulatory systems of appetite and satiety as well as with physiological and metabolic characteristics determining basal metabolic rates and food- or cold-induced thermogenesis. The recent past in affluent societies reveals that these biological systems cannot cope well in an environment in which palatable foods are abundant and energy expenditure of activity is low. In particular, the lesson from the last decades is that it seems to be extremely difficult and perhaps impossible for a large fraction of sedentary individuals to regulate food and caloric intake to be in balance at low levels of daily energy expenditure. The energy expenditure from physical activity is thus too low for most people to be able to eat normally without having to be on caloric restriction diets from time to time or having to be constantly restraining their food intake. It has been estimated that the current deficit of energy expenditure from physical activity compared to that of the recent past ranges from about 300 to 800 kcal/day. If this range of estimates is close to the true values, it implies that adults would have to add one to three hours of brisk walking every day to their current daily regimen to be in energy balance at a normal body weight level. This is a major public health challenge indeed! (15-16)

Another essay in the book – “The Cost of Obesity and Sedentarism in the United States,” by Graham A. Colditz and Anna Mariani, addresses the tremendous health-related costs associated with lack of physical activity:

The sum of obesity (7% of health care costs) and of inactivity (2.4% of health care costs) is here used to estimate the total direct costs of inactivity. Overall, a minimum of 9.4% of all direct costs incurred in delivering health care in the U.S. is attributable to insufficient energy expenditure…. Note that these are conservative estimates. (60-61)

Note also that these latter numbers do not include indirect costs such as lowered worker productivity

Here, finally, are photos from Northfield’s Walk to School Day, October 8, 2009. The first features Austen Chytracek, who was the first walker I encountered at Woodley and Division Street early in the morning. He had walked from Greenvale Avenue on the other side of town, near where I live. The second photo shows the lack of crosswalk markings at the same intersection.

The third photo shows all the bikes parked at the Middle School and the fourth is a sidewalk scene near Greenvale Elementary. Notice how much space pedestrians can occupy, which makes it more apparent that they deserve to have the separate space that the sidewalk provides.

Here is our press release for this year:

Students at Northfield Middle School and the three public elementary schools will celebrate Walk to School Day again this year on Thursday, October 8.

It promises to be a fun event for many students who have a safe route available from their homes. Not only will they get to walk with their friends, but there will be prizes and recognition as well.

The event is part of the district’s Safe Routes to Schools program, which is designed to help students and communities gain the benefits from increased walking and biking. Those benefits include improved health, a stronger sense of community, and reduced traffic congestion and air pollution.

The event also helps to illustrate the benefits of “complete streets”–streets that are built to accommodate all users, including pedestrians, cyclists, and the handicapped. Unfortunately, all too often streets in our society are incomplete.

Students will receive maps of recommended routes, and adult volunteers will be stationed along the routes during the morning and afternoon travel times. A Northfield police officer will be located at the intersection of Jefferson Parkway and Division St./Highway 246 during both the Middle School and Bridgewater travel times. Bridgewater students who live east and northeast of the school are asked to ride the bus as usual due to concerns with that intersection.

Again this year Walk to School Day is funded through the Safe Routes to Schools grant that the school district and city won in 2008. The $30,000 grant includes money for “encouragement” programs such as Walk to School Day.

The grant has also funded an engineering study of walking and biking routes to the district’s K-8 schools. The study has been completed and will be released soon to the public.

The Northfield Safe Routes to Schools Task Force and Northfield Public Schools are organizing the local Walk to School Day in cooperation with the City of Northfield. Many schools around the world will be celebrating Walk to School Day a day earlier. Here in Northfield, the Safe Routes to Schools Task Force decided that the local school schedule makes October 8 a better day for the event.

Forty years ago nearly half of all kids walked or bicycled to school. Today less than fifteen percent get to school that way, and many are driven to school in motor vehicles. Public health experts believe that reductions in physical activity are partly to blame for dramatic increases in rates of diabetes and obesity in children.

Since 1997, communities around the U.S. have been celebrating Walk to School Day. Around the globe, International Walk to School Month brings together more than 40 countries in recognition of the common interest in walking to school.

In its twelfth year, U.S. participation reached a record high with more than 2,800 events from all fifty states and the District of Columbia registering in 2008. Many more communities held events but did not register. For more information visit the National Walk to School and International Walk to School web sites.

I’ve already noticed how easy it is to speak in ways that fall flat or don’t elicit much of a response. I can improve much in this area.

After a few months of unsuccessful job searching, I took some of Bolles’ advice to heart. He says that rather than spending all their time researching the market, networking, and applying for advertised jobs, people should look inward and do some self-examination to make sure they are finding the job that will make them happiest.

Bolles has some exercises that are designed to help with this self-assessment. The goal of these exercises is to come up with a one-page visual aid that is a guide to your ideal job. This is called the “The Flower,” because the diagram he’s created for it looks like a flower.

At the core of the flower are what Bolles calls “transferable skills.” These are the skills that you both enjoy and have experience using. His recommended method for identifying these skills is to write out seven stories about times when you accomplished something, overcame obstacles, and enjoyed yourself in the process. Once the skills are identified, he recommends making them more concrete by putting them in a sentence and adding adverbs and objects.

Below are the skill sentences that I came up with for myself; all follow the phrase “I’m good at….”

I’m good at

• researching complex topics thoroughly and finding useful information and solutions.
• reading a wide variety of sources and staying informed on the issues.
• writing effectively and eloquently for many different purposes.
• promoting new ideas in a way that will open up minds and bring down barriers between people.
• promoting change that will benefit communities.
• being physically active in ways that support my own health and vitality and inspire others

This list of skills has already helped me to focus my job search and think about what I most enjoy doing. Now we’ll see where it takes me. Next task: informational interviews with people working in careers and organizations that interest me.

If you have ideas for where I can put most or all of these skills to work, please leave a comment. Or if you know me and want to recommend changes and make other comments, please feel free to do so.

Ellis traces anti-government rhetoric back to Thomas Jefferson and pro-government rhetoric to Alexander Hamilton. He eventually makes the following vital points:

For much of our history, the Jeffersonian hostility to an energetic federal government served us well. But with the end of the frontier and the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the expanding role of government in protecting and assuring our “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” has become utterly essential. All the major problems now befuddling us — the destructive excesses of finance capitalism, a profit-based healthcare system, an increasingly contaminated atmosphere — are only soluble if we regard government as the chosen representative of our collective interests as a people and a nation.

I recommend reading Ellis’s piece in its entirety to get a better sense of his argument.

Over four years ago several of us Northfielders started working to make our area safer and more inviting for walking, biking, and otherwise getting around under our own power. In part we were building on others’ work, but in other ways we were breaking from the recent past—a past in which sidewalks often were not considered an important part of the street system and transportation plans made scant reference to nonmotorized modes of travel.

Since then, the collective efforts of the entire community—including elected leaders, city staff, interested citizens, and various boards, commissions, task forces, and community groups—have led to many improvements. Here are some examples:

• organization of the first Walk to School Day and a successful Safe Routes to Schools grant proposal, which funded, among other things, an engineering study of walking and biking routes to schools and training for a police officer and local citizens to become certified bicycle instructors

• pedestrian improvements such as a beautiful walkway along the river at 5th and Water Streets, a pedestrian wayfinding system downtown, new sidewalks in various locations, and additional time for the walk signals on Highway 3 at 2nd St. and 5th St.

• installation of more bicycle parking racks downtown and bike lanes on 5th Street

• construction of the Peggy Prowe Bridge over the Cannon River for the Mill Towns Trail

• and, most importantly, a new Comprehensive Plan, Transportation Plan, Parks Plan, and a draft Land Development Code that move us from a nearly total focus on motor vehicle transportation to a “complete streets” or multi-modal transportation outlook, including more options for mixed-use development

One group involved in these improvements, the Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation, on which I have served as chair, will conclude in August after two years of service, but there is more that we must do as a community to advance a full range of transportation options. Following are three things that I hope Northfield can accomplish soon:

• implementation of the walkways and bikeways in the Parks and Trails plan, starting with the lowest-cost component: the on-street bike lanes and bike routes.

• creation of a permanent Transportation Commission to assist the City Council and city staff. It would address all modes of transportation, motorized and nonmotorized (including transit) and would help Northfield compete for scarce transportation dollars and advance important projects such as improvements to Highway 19.

• finally, we simply need more people out there traveling under their own power. More people on foot, bikes, skateboards, and roller blades will make streets and walkways safer and more inviting for everyone.

At a time when we face the tremendous challenge of climate change and growing health problems due to obesity and diabetes, it’s more important than ever that we continue to provide active, low-polluting transportation options to our citizens. And in a time of economic hardship, we must enable people to travel by less expensive means.

Bill Ostrem is chair of the Northfield Area Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation