May » 2009 » Pemba Serves

Photos: Mountain Hardwear Spring 2009 Sales Meeting

An Ode to Friday

There’s nothing like Friday…

Some Fridays, when Janice is in a particularly chipper mood, she is known to do the “LEKI dance.”

But as they say, “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.” Or in today’s case, my birthday plant. You see, we were enjoying the helicopter toys Mr. Canoelover gave us, when I sent one a little too hard, a little to close to my poor Aloe vera, slicing off at least four of its leaves. We keep finding pieces scattered around the office… Lesson learned.

Short Lessons Said Aloud, Part One

"If a bear walks into your tent, punch it in the nose."

Outdoors, you learn things sometimes. Even if you can’t put these lessons into words, they stick with you. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned by being outdoors, in no particular order, without a lot of detail:

“If a bear walks into your tent, punch it in the nose.” – Okay, I didn’t actually punch the bear. I hit it with my shoe. (Yep, on the nose…It’s a long story.) The bottom line is that if the thing you fear most comes suddenly and uncomfortably close to you, just do what comes naturally, next. It will probably turn out okay.

“If you are struck at by a rattlesnake, be sure to check whether or not you were bitten.” – This seems self-evident, but it warrants emphasis. I was struck at by a rattler, and – somehow convinced that my non-existent, cat-like reflexes had saved me – I didn’t check for a bite. (Weird, huh?) Fortunately, that snakebite was dry. It could’ve been bad.

“Just suck it up and do the dirty work.” – I’ve mucked out flooded corrals, climbed into pit latrines with waders on, and been up to my elbows (and deeper) in offal of all sorts. Sometimes you’ve just got to do it. It never stinks as badly as you thought it would, and – anyway – you get used to it. You’ll clean up okay, even if you have to wait awhile.

“Don’t be afraid to ask for a cuddle, and a foot massage.” – Hypothermic and nearing frostbite, I finally admitted to my climbing partner that I might be in trouble. He dug us in, threw me into the hole, and climbed in next to me. He then warmed my bare feet against his belly. Okay, it was a little awkward, but this might be the only reason why today I still have ten toes like everybody else. Ask for help when you need it.

“Sometimes horrible things happen, so live through them, thankfully.” – There’s such a sudden shift between a great day climbing, and the worst (or last) day you’ve ever had. Gravity, water, momentum, and weather are intrinsically violent forces of nature. I’ve fallen into crevasses, been caught in avalanches, and was somehow leaning one way when leaning another way might’ve ended badly. (Read: “Cut in half by a giant rock.”) Frankly, I’m here now because I have been lucky. I’m thankful for this. Every day, count the blessing of being alive. It could be different.

“Don’t sleep in your car in a vacant lot in the red-light district, you might get mugged by prostitutes.” Oh, dang, would you look at that we’re out of time! Sorry, but this story will have to wait for another day…

This Made Our Day

We get letters, and some are better than others. This one made our day. It comes to us from Lindy Speizer-Smith, who recently left LEKI to spend more time with her family.

We’re gonna miss her.

Ecocities: Cities Can Save the Earth

(originally posted at the Urban Wilderness Institute)

Could it be that the root causes of our environmental crises are linked to the biggest things we build – cities?

So argues Richard Register, founder of SF Bay Area’s Urban Ecology, author of Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature, and activist urban planner, writing in a recent Foreign Policy in Focus brief. Our automobile dependence has many direct ecological and social costs, but the most insidious consequence is how cars have reshaped our cities over the last 100 years. Register writes: “Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit.”

The challenges are significant, but Register has reason for optimism:

We can change our cities. In fact, our cities have already changed. Portland has frequent transit that’s free in the downtown area, and has designated a “urban growth boundary” to limit the expansion of the city’s urban area and preserve nearby farmland and other open spaces and a thriving and very dense new residential and “mixed-use” center in the Pearl District. The rooftops in Tel Aviv, Israel and dozens of Chinese cities sparkle with solar hot-water panels. Copenhagen’s pedestrian street, the Støget, has been growing steadily since 1962 and now stretches more than two miles.

But we can do more, much more, to redesign our cities for pedestrians and bicyclists, taking up very small areas of land in more compact development. Taller buildings with rooftop gardens and solar greenhouses can be linked by pedestrian connections between rooftops and terraces above ground level, making city centers intimately accessible to people on foot. As we add population and ecological architecture in pedestrian/transit centers, we can gradually eliminate the unsustainable suburbs.

We’ll need to start rebuilding our cities to incorporate Register’s ecocity concepts – pedestrian/transit-oriented infrastructure, replacing sprawl development with nature/agriculture, and integrating renewable energy systems – if we are to meet the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and dwindling (cheap) fossil fuels. Rethinking our cities as places that both humans and non-human nature can call home is a place to start; cities that are friendly for pedestrians and cyclists are likely to welcome trees, restored streams, and urban wildlife as well.

Read the whole article at Foreign Policy in Focus, and learn more about the ecocity at Ecocity Builders.