The Daily Sun had a in the paper today. A heated, yet thoughtful discussion on this can be found in the comments of my last post.

I think I was a bit harsh at first and Cody helped me realize that I might have gone into the event with the wrong expectations. Here is a section from the paper that helps me illustrate why I was a little disappointed.

Enthusiastic applause met most of his hot topics:

On being Native American: “Denial is a ceremony for Indians,” he said.

Being famous: “You know, in the book world, I’m Brad Pitt. In the rest of the world, I’m Ernest Borgnine.”

Homophobia: “It kills me when Indian men are homophobic; like we’re not the most androgynous men on the planet!”

Gay marriage: “I’m for gay marriage; I want them to share in the suffering.”

Knowledge and wisdom: “You got nothing. You don’t know anything. The world is epic, and you don’t know anything.”

On politics: “I’ve never experienced more pure joy in my life than when Cheney was in that wheelchair.”

On the audience: “I offended at least 10 percent of you tonight, and I was tame!”

On the quote about Cheney, what does that comment have to do with politics? Is this really what passes for political commentary? He talked about deeply moving, engaging, political topics all night, but he didn’t do anything with them. It was, perhaps, wrong of me to expect him to hit on the “where do we go from here” topic. I was just disappointed (not offended). I left feeling entertained and I was just hoping for something more.

AND, his fee for speaking at NAU? $17,500! WTF?? I know Terry Tempest Williams did not cost that much. When I heard Toni Morrison speak at Purdue, her fee was also much less. When I brought Derrick Jensen to NAU in the spring of 2007, his fee was $3,000 with university support and if I were organizing the event with no help from the university, it would have been $1,500. We could fight over who is a better speaker or a bigger name, but that’s a gross amount of money for a two hour comedy routine.

I ended up scoring a ticket to see Sherman Alexie speak last night. It was much different than I thought it would be. I’m familiar with his work so I was expecting his sense of humor, but I wasn’t expecting the whole thing to be stand-up comedy.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the show (I’m settling on calling it a show – because it wasn’t a “reading” and it certainly wasn’t a “lecture”). I laughed throughout the whole thing along with the sold out audience. Afterall, there aren’t many famous native people so he had 500 years of stereotypes to draw from. It wasn’t until the Q and A at the end that I was a little turned off. Then I dropped into the bathroom on the way out, contemplating the long line to get my copy of Reservation Blues signed, where I spoke with a Navajo guy who was really offended by Alexie. We both shared a few examples of things Alexie said or did that were problematic to us. I left with a sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing, not really thrilled about waiting in line to get my book signed (plus, on the way to the theater before the show I was on my bike and a rock was thrown up into my eye and it was incredibly uncomfortable through the whole show).

I don’t know why this guy, an older Navajo man, chose to talk to me, a skinny white guy who just happened to be peeing at the same time as him. I got the impression that he was very frustrated and just wanted to get his thoughts off his chest. I just happened to be there. I’m glad I was.

What makes Alexie such an engaging speaker is his ability to be very comedic about deeply personal and political issues, but at the same time, he can get completely serious in an instant. Yet his seriousness didn’t last much longer than that instant, and I found myself wanting more. Maybe 20 or 30 percent of the audience was native. I was just expecting a little more substance, a bit more direction. The man in the bathroom told me that if he could ask Alexie one question it would be, “how much do you know about your heritage?” He concluded his own statement saying, “he’d probably just turn it into a joke.”

I have no doubt Alexie knows a lot about where he came from, but to him, it seems to be all in the past. Though I laughed throughout the whole show, this guy’s perspective really got me thinking. He said, while it’s easy for him to joke around about poverty, alcoholism, government food, and under funded Native Health Services from his childhood, he escaped and got rich and the problems on the res are still very real to us.

I was bothered during the Q and A because he made fun of anyone who asked anything and turned each question into an opportunity to be funny. The way in which some people asked questions did invite jokes, though – like the guy who yelled out the rhetorical question, “Do you support the protection of sacred sites?” Of course he does. But his answer was troubling and showed that he is a bit out of touch with the politics of this area.

He said that to him, if there is a fire in his house, there is nothing sacred to him in the house but his family. He said with all the talk of sacred sites, it’s hard to know “where it’s okay to step.” Here is what really got me: he looked at someone in the audience and said, “if I had the choice to put nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain or save your life, I will choose you. It’s called Humanism. Look it up.”

That’s when I put my coat on and made my way to the door. I brought that up to the Navajo man in the bathroom. “In many places on the res, there is uranium contamination in the water people drink. Doesn’t he know this is killing people right now?” I told him I was aware of that issue and that if they put waste in Yucca Mountain, the consequences could be irreversibly deadly to generations of people. It’s all well and good to be a “humanist,” and bring up fictional scenarios that will never happen: one life against dumping nuclear waste. But the truth is, because of uranium contamination, people, those he tries to identify with, are dealing with slow cancerous deaths because of the desecration of native land. It’s is an issue that is deeper and more emotional to the people that live on the res than he seems to realize.

Alexie has a unique perspective, having grown up on the res, made it out, and now lives successfully in Seattle. He has a beautiful way with words and his growing body of work is really important. His talk did not provide a lot of direction for those less fortunate though. Not everyone can escape the res on writing scholarships after all. At times, it seemed like he was rubbing his success in everyone’s face. The underlying message to be successful did not point to fighting for human rights or working to improve conditions on the res, but simply to escape. I just wished he would have said something radical, something that could inspire people toward political action of any kind.

On the other hand, as one of the only famous voices for Native people, maybe – myself included – we just expect too much from him. The whole thing gave me a lot to think about and that is never a bad thing.

Biotechnology companies are keeping university scientists from fully researching the effectiveness and environmental impact of the industry’s genetically modified crops, according to an unusual complaint issued by a group of those scientists.

“No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions,” the scientists wrote in a statement submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency. The E.P.A. is seeking public comments for scientific meetings it will hold next week on biotech crops.

It’s as if the biotech companies are saying, “hey, we’re saving the world, and feeding the starving. No follow up questions or concerns please.” Monsanto should be an action verb. As in, we have been Monsantoed or they will continue to Monsanto us. So the question is, how to we “monsanto” Monsanto?

Tucson Bike Lawyer has some great commentary regarding an article on the physics behind the trouble cyclists have with stop signs. Here is a bit from the original article and some commentary from TBL below…and comments from me below that.

Bicyclists can work only so hard. The average commuting rider is unlikely to produce more than 100 watts of propulsion power, or about what it takes to power a re a d i n g lamp. At 100 watts, the average cyclist can travel about 12.5 miles per hour on the level. When necessary, a serious cyclist can generate far more power than that (up to perhaps 500 watts for a racing cyclist, equivalent to the amount used by a stove burner on low). But even if a commuter cyclist could produce more than a 100 watts, she is unlikely to do so because this would force her to sweat heavily, which is a problem for any cyclist without a place to shower at work.

With only 100 watts’ worth (compared to 100,000 watts generated by a 150-horsepower car engine), bicyclists must husband their power. Accelerating from stops is strenuous, particularly since most cyclists feel a compulsion to regain their former speed quickly. They also have to pedal hard to get the bike moving forward fast enough to avoid falling down while rapidly upshifting to get back up to speed.

For example, on a street with a stop sign every 300 feet, calculations predict that the average speed of a 150-pound rider putting out 100 watts of power will diminish by about forty percent. If the bicyclist wants to maintain her average speed of 12.5 mph while still coming to a complete stop at each sign, she has to increase her output power to almost 500 watts. This is well beyond the ability of all but the most fit cyclists.

We decided to test these calculations on an officially designated bike route in Berkeley, California Street. The street is about 2.25 miles long and nearly flat (average grade 0.5 percent). Traffic is very light, which is nice for cyclists. But California Street has 21 stop signs and a traffic light. More than two-thirds of the route’s 31 intersections require a stop—that’s one every 530 feet. A parallel route, Sacramento Street, runs one block west of California Street. Sacramento has four lanes of traffic and can be very busy, especially during rush hours. With cars parked along both sides of the street, Sacramento has little room for cyclists. But it has only eight traffic lights along the section parallel to California’s bike route, and no stop signs. Since, on average, only half the lights will be red, there ’s only one stop every 2,800 feet.

One of us (Joel Fajans) found that keeping exertion constant1, he could ride on Sacramento at an average speed of 14.2 miles per hour without straining. At the same level of exertion, his speed fell to 10.9 mph on California if he stopped completely at every sign. Thus Sacramento was about 30 percent faster than California. By increasing his exertion to a fairly high level, his average speeds increased to 19 mph on Sacramento and 13.7 mph on California, so Sacramento was then 39 percent faster. While a drop of a few miles per hour may not seem like much to a car driver, think of it this way: the equivalent in a car would be a drop from 60 to 45 mph. Because the extra effort required on California is so frustrating, both physically and psychologically, many cyclists prefer Sacramento to California, despite safety concerns. They ride California, the official bike route, only when traffic on Sacramento gets too scary.

These problems are compounded at uphill intersections. Even grades too small to be noticed by car drivers and pedestrians slow cyclists substantially. For example, a rise of just three feet in a hundred will cut the speed of a 150-pound, 100-watt cyclist in half. The extra force required to attain a stable speed quickly on a grade after stopping at a stop sign is particularly grating.

TBL’s comments:

Exactly! Other things to keep in mind:

1. Bicyclists tend to enter every intersection with caution, whether they have a stop sign or not, because cars often do not see us. We slow down, and sometimes stop, far more often than cars do at intersections where we already have the right of way. We are far more alert than drivers (see No. 2).

2. Bicyclists have tremendous built-in incentives to be cautious at intersections. We won’t suffer a fender-bender if hit–we will very possibly die or be severely injured.

3. Bicyclists can see and hear far better than drivers because we don’t have blind spots and we are not encased in glass and steel. Also, simply being on the bicycle, out in the open air exercising our bodies makes us more alert and more mentally present in our surroundings.

4. A bicyclist’s eyes and ears are some of the first things to enter an intersection. A driver may not be able to see an intersection clearly until the front of his vehicle is six or eight feet into the intersection. In such a case, by the time a driver can see, he is already risking getting hit.

5. A driver is constrained by the road and by the size of his vehicle as to where he can be when he approaches an intersection. A cyclist can maneuver her bicycle sideways in the lane to see more clearly and hear more clearly, often long before she reaches the intersection.

6. As the above article points out, stops signs are a tremendous disincentive to cyclists, causing them to choose dangerous arterials that only disrupt drivers more and endanger the bicyclists.

7. The rear-view mirror and two front corner blind-spots in every car are in precisely the worst place for determining whether an intersection is safe to drive through. This alone argues strongly for making otherwise safe intersections require a stop for a car. But bicycles do not have these problems.

We all know that some bicyclists, usually young, inexperienced ones, sometimes fly through stop signs. The proposed law does not legalize that behavior. It requires bicyclists to enter intersections with appropriate caution.

What the proposed law does is recognize that there are important, fundamental, physical differences between a bicycle and a car, and some of our traffic laws need to accommodate and recognize those differences. Some already do, of course — bicycles are not required to have brake lights or turn signals, for example, even though some marginal increase in safety would probably accrue if they were. Bicyclists in Arizona also cannot lawfully be ticketed for driving too slowly, as cars can. Bicyclists are allowed to ride on the shoulder, but cars are not.

We already have different laws for bikes and cars where it makes sense to do so. If we want to encourage people to ride bikes, and if we want to encourage them to ride in safe places, then Rep. Patterson is right: this is a “fair, common-sense bill.”

This isn’t about preferencial treatment for cyclists, it’s about fair, safe accomodation for a growing number of people taking to the street on two wheels. For cyclists, I’ve always thought stop signs should be regarded as yield signs and stop lights should be treated as stop signs. Until the laws are changed, it’s best to look behind for cops before doing anything currently illegal. As more people ride, the laws will change.

The best thing any cyclist can do to remain safe is to pretend you’re invisible. Cars can’t and won’t see you. Don’t assume they do. It is very easy to shoot through traffic like a ghost.

A panel of federal judges on Friday ruled in favor of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in a controversial mountaintop removal mining case. The ruling will permit mining companies to conduct devastating mountaintop removal coal mining operations without acting to minimize stream destruction or conducting adequate environmental reviews.

As a result, Appalachia could now be facing up to 90 new mountaintop removal coal mining operations, which would destroy huge swaths of the Appalachian Mountains.

“Today the coal industry — aided by the Bush administration’s legacy — is allowing our water to be poisoned,” said Judy Bonds of Coal River Mountain Watch. “Tomorrow it will be the East Coast’s water supply as the mining discharges will reach downstream water sources.”

Mountaintop removal mining is a destructive form of coal mining that has already buried more than 1,200 miles of streams and threatens to destroy 1.4 million acres of land by 2020. The mining poisons drinking water, lays waste to wildlife habitat, increases the risk of flooding and wipes out entire communities.

Read more here

Also, read the top 5 myths about coal.