Green cities and black styles

Immagine you live in a city where people can move easely with public transport that is cheap, convenient and efficient. At the same time, someone in the city thinks of openineg a new public service consistingn in sharing bycicles with citizens, for a minimal and testimonial amount of money. Joungster and in general most cictizens got crazy abou this idea, and they start to register to this service and to share bycicles. User conditions are easy and fair: no one can use the bycicle for longer than 30 minutes, because it’s thought to be used as a transport means not for rambling.

In one year the service has become so succesful that almost 100.000 people are using it and they’re sharing 6.000 bycicles in the city, available at 250 stattions spread over the city.

Where is the problem than? It is that among these 100.000 citizens not everyone understand that this is a public service where the responsible behaviour of each user means a guarantee for the efficience and quality of rhis service.

The problem is also that the organization that manages this service is completely unefficient. There exist some routes that are used every morning by thousands of users to move to their office (from the high part of the city to the city-center) that keep some stations without bycicles early in the morning, while stations at the city-center are full and users cannot deposit them.

All this happens in my city, Barcelona, but Mediterranean mood and lots of tolerance still make this service useful and highly used by citizens. This makes the city greener even if many people use this “black” and “dirty” style of behaving.

The Shock Doctrine

A friend noticed this morning through e-mail the next presentation of the book by Naomi Klein “The Shock Doctrine”. I was wondering if this was another book trying to create feirce among the readers, but after watching the short film by Alfonso Cuaron, I learned that this book is about a study done by Namoi Klein on the doctrine of some fair “thinkers” who use shock for their private and single interests and not for social welfare.

It especially impressed me the last words of the video where the author states:

INFORMATION is resistance to SHOCK. ARM YOURSELF.

Naomi Klein talks about different shocks in our recent history like September 11th, or Irak invasion, but also about the Maldives war, or the coup in Chile on September 11 1973. In these shocks there have been obviously winners and loosers. Loosers were always the majority, the crowd.

Naomi Klein is touring over the world to talk about her book. You can chek when she’ll be in your city at: http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi/tour-dates.

Thanks to Anna Soliguer for this information.

Nobel Peace Price and “climate change”

The Nobel Peace Prize has been often controverted and this year it may also be discussed. Some critics may consider that the ” … efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” as the reason given by the Nobel Foundation, is not an argument. As you may suppose, I will not share this opinon.

I agree that Nobel Peace Prize is strongly mediatic, though it helps to impact on conscience of the people and this year I believe it may help to spread over the world the importance of the effort done by Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in regard of one of the most important threats, if not the biggest, we have at the moment.

That the candidate of the labour party in the next Australian elections is taking the compromise to sign the Kyoto Protocol if his party wins, means that many politicians are far behind their responsibilities, and that the present prime minister has been looking to the wrong side while the effects of climate change have been devastating many of the natural resorts in Australia in the near past years.

I’m strongly concerned on the passive behaviour of many leaders and I also regret the littel compromise of those who still accepting the need to fight man-made climate change don’t show enough courage to foster decisions that really prevent climate disasters.

As I already have written in this blog, I do believe that the hardest and most effective efforts wil have to be taken by single individuals and their families: that’s “us”. I would go further and say that we all will have to suffer the inconveniences and assume the high costs of this campaign, and it will probably take long time to see any results. This is probably the reason why leaders don’t want to take these unpopular decisions. It probably will mean unemployment, increase of prices of cheap commodities, it will mean lots of forced changes in people’s mobility, and standards of life will have to change a lot, affecting the confort we are having today.

To know that people and organizations like Al Gore through actions like his video and book “an inconvenient truth” and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are pushing conscience of single people and of governments too to prepare the world to these changes is, at least, an argument to be optimistic.

Thanks, than to the initiative to award for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize the actions of these organizations.