Jun
5
Hillside Landfill
Filed Under Green Initiatives
Anyone live in Hillside? Smell the delightful odors of decomposing trash? Well not for much longer. Hillside landfill is in the process of closing once and for all. And, they say, they’re ahead of schedule.
But just how do you close a landfill? I’m on it. More to come.
Jun
5
Right now the abandoned elevated rail line along Bloomingdale Ave. in northwest Chicago is frequented by restless teenagers and the occasional transient. But there’s a plan to transform the deteriorating tracks into a 3-mile paved bike trail with benches, lighting, and fencing. Check out the story and slideshow I did on it here.
I walked along the trail with Mike Scheitler, who lives nearby it. We climbed up over the bridge on Ashland and Bloomingdale Avenue and strolled for a couple of hours. I was shocked by what he told me.
He said that a year ago, the abandoned railroad was over run with trees and wild grasses. It was a real jungle, he said. To be walking down it, knowing you hadn’t left Chicago– it was like falling down the rabbit hole, he said.
But all that was left for us on that day was stubby grasses and occasionally a tangle of skinny, dead tree branches.
We walked a little ways in silence, the two of us. Me, asking myself, is this a place I’d want to come back to, by myself, to feel at peace and get lost in my own thoughts?
No, I thought. It’s depressing. Gloomy. Even in daylight.
The wonderland Mike described to me was gone.
And the way bureaucrats move, the park won’t be a reality for another ten years. I got that from Brian Steele, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation.
So who cut down the trees and wild grasses?
I tried contacting Canadian Pacific Railroad to see if they come through to raze it once a year or something. But the trees Mike described to me, they couldn’t have been less than decades old.
The federal Surface Transportation Board has to decide the railroad is truly abandoned before consenting to the city’s acquisition of the property. But what more obvious way to show it has been abandoned than to have the roots of ancient trees intertwined with the old wooden tracks?
And if Canadian Pacific didn’t cut the trees, who did? Even taking my little walk on it was trespassing. I had no right to be there, nor does anyone else. And who would go to the expense of having those trees and foliage cleared if they don’t even have a stake in the property?
If you know anything, write me.
Jun
5
I went to an event May 7 at Union Station. It was called “Downstate Illinois Day.” Basically, it was a lot of booths set up by tourist agencies representing cities around Illinois, encouraging people to travel by rail.
Because gas prices keep rising. And the tourism industry knows that can’t be good.
But I made a few calls to different tourist agencies, and they say they haven’t seen a surge in tourists as a result of Downstate Illinois Day and other promotional events. Amtrak, however, says that ridership has never been better.
Jun
5
Love the lawn you got
Filed Under Green Events
There’s a new exhibit at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum called Lawn Nation. It explores the obsession we Americans have with lawns and offers some startling facts about lawn care’s potential impact on the environment.
Two artists from Chicago got together to build a wall out of empty plastic water bottles. It took them a month, but they glued 1700 of them together.
It represents the equivalent of 250 gallons of water—what the average American uses for a lawn sprinkler system in one hour.
But who actually waters their lawn for an hour? Turns out, more people than I thought. I went around my neighborhood, conducting some casual interviews. My next door neighbor says he waters the grass outside his house every morning, letting the hose run for a good thirty or forty minutes.
And they’re paying people in Las Vegas $1 per square foot of grass they rip out of their lawn and replace with turf. With water shortages growing, this summer’s not gonna be pretty.
So if you had to choose between your lawn and a swimming pool, what would you pick?
Here’s a link to my article that I wrote on it for my journalism class.
Jun
5
Who buys blue bags?
Filed Under Green Initiatives
I’ve been doing a little research on how Chicago recycles. Blue bags are on their way out, and no one seems to mind.
I didn’t live in Chicago back when the blue bags were the way it worked. Can someone tell me please, did you go out and pay money for these blue bags? And did you take them home and fill them up with your recyclables? And at the end of the week, did you throw those blue bags in the big trash bin together with all your other trash for the Streets and San to collect? Did you like the system? Did you believe those little plastic bottles and newspapers would one day fulfill their destiny as material cruising down a conveyor belt at some distant recycling plant?
In this article published in the Chicago Reader in July of 2006, Mick Dumke writes about the political favors that went into the development of the blue bags recycling program, the complete lack of accountability and the city’s lame attempts to inflate its sad recycling numbers.
Now, the city’s announced it’s going to expand the Blue Cart Recycling pilot program to encompass 600,000 homes in Chicago by 2011. Who thinks it’s going to work better! Raise your hand!
Seriously. I need to do more research. And I don’t think Streets and San appreciate it.
Whoever would have thought the simple goodness of recycling could be twisted into such a complex vortex where transparency is sucked out of sight.
Jun
4
R. Kelly and the environment
Filed Under Misc
When I told a friend I had a blog about environmental issues, I was given the “raised eyebrows.”
It must be hard to relate that to headline news, my friend said.
Actually– I told her– there’s nothing that doesn’t relate to the environment.
Really, my friend said.
That’s right, I said.
OK then. R. Kelly– possibly the most-read story in Chicago right now, my friend said. Relate it to that.
So here is my challenge to YOU: take the words from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and put them to the music of R. Kelly’s The Closet.
E-mail me your audio or video files, and I will post the best ones.
E-mail: j-dominick@northwestern.edu
Jun
4
Close call with a CTA bus
Filed Under Cycling
Pedaling down Southport the other day, the sideview mirror of a CTA bus nearly took my head off. Not cool. I console myself with the thought that these drivers are professionals. They’ve been at it 25, 30 years. They know what they’re doing. When they mean to give you a foot, they give you 12 inches.
But then I learned on Dec. 31, a 59-year-old woman was removing her bicycle from the rack in front of the 152 when the bus accelerated and proceeded to run her over. She was dragged 80 feet before the driver realized his mistake.
She was dead, of course.
The whole thing was captured on a surveillance tape. My faith in CTA bus drivers was severely shaken after reading about it in the Chicagoist today. You can watch the ABC news story about it here.
I also did a video story for my reporting class where I interview a couple of bikers. One takes his bike on the bus all the time, the other says no way, people get killed doing that.
From now on, no more “bus drivers know what they’re doing.”
Sometimes, they don’t.
For all you riders, be careful out there.
Jun
4
How many media hours have been devoted to Rev. Michael Pfleger and Rev. Jeremiah Wright? They are turning the spotlight to race. And when it finally manages to escape to a new topic, another fiery serman surfaces that puts it right back there again.
And it’s true, race will matter.
But it will no longer be a fight for fair hiring practices, or receiving fair home or business loans. It won’t even be about poverty– it will be about survival in a world where resources have never been scarcer.
I’m talking about global warming. You know the saying…the first wars were fought over land, the current wars are fought over oil. But the wars of the future, they will be fought over water.
We are getting to that point– the “africanization” of southern Europe that is transforming olive groves into desert…hurricanes and floods that are leaving in their wake homeless, migratory masses…
…and people will band together. By family, by race, by country, and my prediction is that the harder it is to come by what you need, the tighter the group you will be willing to share with.
And that’s when were going to see racial tensions on a new scale.
So instead of preaching about black vs. white, Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger should re-focus their efforts to unite people in confronting global warming.
If they want controversial, you can’t get more controversial than that.
Nature doesn’t care what color your skin is.
Jun
4
Not to be an alarmist, but I came across something today. Some will find it thought-provoking, others will think it’s just silly.
Here’s a guy who scribbles down his dreams. The difference between him and everyone else is that his dreams usually come true, and with startling accuracy.
Check out what he dreamt in February 2006 —
He scribbled down the words “global warming”, “runaway melting”…
Doesn’t matter if you buy into psychic abilities or not. The questions he raises remain…
In regard to global warming, are we past the point of no return?
If we were, would we know it?
If we knew it, would we admit it?
Jun
3
Critical Mass: Friday, May 30
Filed Under Cycling
Okay so I’m late, I’m late! But I rode in Critical Mass last Friday, and I still want to tell you about it.
After riding in the somber Ride of Silence a couple of weeks ago (please see my previous post) I was really looking forward to some jubilation. And it didn’t disappoint.
Somehow I got separated with about 100 other bikers from the Critical Mass for the first hour of the ride. It was great because our smaller mass broke off and biked east of Daley Plaza to Michigan Avenue. And biking along Michigan Avenue with an army of other bikers is unbelievable. For a brief moment, you can ride in the loop with no worry that your head will be snapped off by a CTA bus mirror or that you’ll get sideswiped by an over zealous taxi driver.
Although after an our I got to despairing that we’d ever find the rest of the mass again. Our string of hundred bicycles was getting more and more broken– cars were gunning intersections to avoid having to wait for all of us to pass, and the mass effect was diminishing. Those at the front of the pack wanted to catch up to the bigger mass of several hundred bicyclists– maybe even a thousand. But their hurry was making the number of stragglers in our group rise, leaving even more holes in our parade through the city.
There was a lot of cell phones being tugged out of pockets and cyclists riding with one hand as they called their buddies in the larger pack. Rumors circulated as to where the bigger mass was right now.
North on Halsted! Five more blocks!
West on Beldon! Keep going to Clark!
Critical Mass is generally a slow affair, where even the most out-of-shape biker doesn’t lose his or her breath. But catching up with the larger mass gripped our smaller group like a fever, and we pedaled furiously to catch up.
Soon we saw people hanging outside of their houses urging us on. “Just a few more blocks!” They’d shout. “Were they just here?” We’d shout back. “Keep going! You’re going the right way!” They’d assure us. “Thank You! Happy Friday!” Several people would shout back as we sped on.
At last we caught up with the rest of the pack. And it was nice, gliding along the streets, admiring the elaborate costumes some bikers were wearing. There was one couple celebrating their wedding anniversary, the woman decked out in a bridal grown, the man dressed in a tux, both holding champagne glasses filled with yellow jell-o. Two other girls had on renaissance dresses, the skirt tucked into black shorts in the back to avoid getting tangled with the wheels and gears.
Then the mass came to a stop. An SUV, stopped at a stop sign, had accelerated slowly into three bicyclists, apparently. From what I could gather– and the reports may have been wrong or exaggerated– but from the crowd of bikers gathered around the stopped SUV, I was told that the SUV had seen the bikers, didn’t think it was right for the bikers to stop up traffic flow, felt it was his turn, and so had driven on, playing a game of chicken, in effect, with the bikers, who refused to give way. Three bikes had been struck by the car, although it was going very slowly, and one bike had been run over by the front tires of the SUV. One bicyclist was shouting and arguing with the driver, who had stepped out of his vehicle and was making a call on his cell phone. Many bikers who arrived late to the scene were taunting the driver with words like “Yeah you’d better call a lawyer!” But the driver looked, to me, like he was keeping his cool, considering hundreds of bikers were swarming around and him cursing at him gleefully.
Maybe my characterization of the scene is too sympathetic to the driver. But I heard some comments that made me wonder whether some bikers weren’t delighted at this bit of drama. The bicyclists who had been struck by the car, and whose bikes were probably badly damaged, however, no doubt did not find anything exciting about the situation.
In my opinion, the reason bikers get so testy when they have a close call with a car is that the driver shows a complete carelessness for human life. In so many instances, cars that pass too closely to me when I’m biking in the city could have killed me. And for what? So they can go 30 mph instead of 25? So they can beat that light? So they can get to dinner 5 minutes faster? It’s a recklessness founded on a belief in their own infallibility to calculate your next move and how much space they have. Of course it’s not malicious. Drivers don’t cut it close because it gives them an adrenaline rush or because they want to make a political statement about how bikers shouldn’t be on the road. They cut it close because they think they won’t hit you. And occassionally, they miscalculate. And it’s this carelessness that makes bikers so upset. You could have killed me! It’s the thought that their life and health could be taken away so carelessly, I think, that really makes their blood boil.
But that was the only drama. We got through the rest of the ride just fine. I peeled off at Lawrence and Broadway, after a good bit of bloo-halooing, which always leaves you with a good high. It’s a feeling of victory and togetherness that you might get at moments when your team scores and the whole stadium cheers as one.
So, the next critical mass is June 27. Who’s coming?
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