I literally live across the street from where I work, so I walk and have done so for the last 4 years. I do own a car and I do use it. When purchasing things like groceries, I admit to being lazy. Half a mile up hill with lots of food is just way too far for this middle aged old man.
Incidentally, one of the things which is central not only to the future of urban planning and self-sustaining communities, but is also important to me as a planner is the necessity to restore neighbourhood grocery shops — especially so in the last seventy years, in places where master-planned tract housing development, built discretely, intentionally, and distantly from clusters of commercial-only development, have left entire neighbourhoods as
food deserts.
As resident citizens age, the need for everyday goods and services to be located far closer to one's home increases substantially, even exponentially (if examining the question quantitatively). In having things closer to home (as in, a short walking distance or bicycling distance), it also has the positive side effect of resident citizens coming to know the faces and names of their neighbours even better — which over time strengthens community relationships as well as the very integrity and public health of the community.
Fact is, we all affect the environment and not in good ways either.
Completely. At this juncture, impact mitigation at all levels — individual, household, community, region, nation, global — is imperative if we hope to curtail our anthropogenic impact upon pretty much everything on this big blue marble.
Mining is tremendously destructive, formalin, and other chemicals we deal with are carcinogens, mutacides (SP), etc. Many of us are using a hybrid system for our pictures, etc.
Indeed. This returns to an imperative to examine the parasitic relationship between quarterly earnings for shareholders, the destructive practice of "planned obsolescence" in manufactured products which get churned out to urgently beat previous quarterly earnings, and how this alters our
waste hierarchy. (Mining as a primary economic driver is the precursor to the secondary economic driver of manufacturing, and the interrelationship is inextricable).
Unfortunately, to simply bring that up makes anyone whose savings is locked up in investment funds which need those earnings to perpetually grow can make for a lot of crankiness. The amount of crankiness is inversely related to the amount of social equity prevalent in our localities.
So lets just settle down and not have any name calling, please? It just makes the forums less enjoyable for everyone.
Agreed! I dislike coming onto here to read about photography-related stuff, only to find that my body is being called a "carcass" or that all of humanity is being called "man" (which is not shorthand for "human", though even it it were, it's still lazy and misogynistic) — as if moving my body solely by my own power is somehow a net negative to
anyone else or to the environment around me.
