Toban Black

Filling up landfills with materials that are ripped out of our common environment.

These cups are waste — regardless of whether the cups are left in the garbage cans.

That image is a close-up of part of this photo of a McDonald’s cup.

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In Sarnia, Ontario

One sad thing about this scene is that people are poisoned to produce the synthetic substances in that trash (like the plastic straws), which then are quickly disposed of. I mention that toxic production because Sarnia is Canada’s main chemical processing centre — in a very dirty rust belt region, where there are a lot of nasty petro-chemical industries.

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A car advertisement on the back of a local bus

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Andy Rowell on the Oil Change blog -
“Electric Vehicles May Increase CO2”
(I think it’s too much of a stretch to say that electric vehicles are “all the rage”; but some people definitely are looking toward them as ‘solutions.’)

Brad Aaron on the Streetsblog New York City site -
“Do Your Part: Buy an Audi, Drive Fast” (in October)
(Evidently the author is using the word “transit” to refer to mass transit — such as buses.)

Fred Pearce in The Guardian -
“BMW’s ActiveHybrid X6 Accelerates Nonsense About High-performance, Low-emission Cars” (in September)

Brad Aaron on the Streetsblog New York City site -
“Ad Nauseam: Toyota’s (Passive-Aggressive) Ransom Note to America” (in October)

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Here are some related posts on this blog -
http://tobanblack.net/blog/?tag=automobiles

That photo was taken last year in Toronto, Ontario, Canada –
well before the ‘garbage’ strike which is underway there right now.

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Christopher Hume (in this article) -

“At a time when a garbage strike has turned Toronto into a festering communal dumpsite, the connection between consumption and trash can be seen – and smelled – everywhere around us.”

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Waste in and around a bin which had been taped shut by the city government -

(From one of Matthew Blackett’s posts on the Spacing Toronto blog.)

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Mike Smith (in this article) -

The “strike opens our eyes to the awful levels of waste we produce.”

“They call it a work stoppage, but almost anyone can take it as an excuse to slow down and think.

At a local café, I drink coffee that’s arrived here in bean form from afar on a huge metal bird; I finish and put my cup in a bin, having no need ever to think of it again. It will simply… disappear.

Except, this time, it doesn’t. The cups, the wrappers, the refuse – the things we’ve been refusing to think about – sit there, reminding us that there are many wizards who work this magic for us, often behind the curtain of night. The breakdown of a machine proves the best way to observe how it works.”

“Even now, striking, garbage collectors are providing a sort of public service. As trash mounds grow in the rinks and pools of local parks, we are faced (nosed, specifically) with the reality of how much we throw away and the lives we lead in pursuit of the privilege to do so.”

“There’s a poetry to parks being chosen as dumps, a chance to see how connected things are.”

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(Photo by Andy_K)

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John Bennett (in this blog post) -
“How can simply placing our hands on the steering wheel impair our judgement, turn us against our fellow citizens and cause us to engage in risky behavior that we know will yield only small, fleeting rewards (if any).”

I’m going to start to explore those issues here –
without focusing so much on car equipment (such as steering wheels).

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Matt Richtel on the New York Times Gadgetwise blog -
“Driving While Texting Remains Popular — and Dangerous” (May 20th)

Brad Aaron on the New York Streetsblog -
“Ad Nauseam: Antisocial Thuggery From Pioneer”

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Tom Vanderbilt (in this blog post) -

“It’s almost as if there’s something about being inside a vehicle of any kind, removed from the normal pace and experience of walking — the only thing we were actually born to do, after all — that evokes its own special behaviors, its own convulsive social physics, and problems — traffic fatalities, it should be noted, were ranked as the leading cause of fatalities in London in the early 18th century.”

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The David Suzuki Foundation (on this page) -

“Although aviation is a relatively small industry, it has a disproportionately large impact on the climate system. It presently accounts for [approximately] 4-9% of the total climate change impact of human activity.”

“A special characteristic of aircraft emissions is that most of them are produced at cruising altitudes high in the atmosphere. Scientific studies have shown that these high-altitude emissions have a more harmful climate impact.”

Contrails, “the long plumes of exhaust that can be seen in the sky behind airplanes,” “trap heat that would otherwise escape from the earth, which contributes to global warming.”

“Right now there is no climate-friendly alternative to the kerosene fuel burned by airplanes, and there is no indication that solar or hydrogen-powered aircraft can be expected anytime soon. In terms of efficiency, it appears that improvements in current aircraft technology have nearly reached their limit.”

(There is additional information about these global warming impacts on that page.)

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Richard Heinberg on societal changes that he foresees in upcoming decades -

“Today businesspeople and middle-class vacationers regard air travel as a normal and affordable, if increasingly tedious, option for getting from anywhere to anywhere else in a few hours. But as fuel becomes scarce and costly, airlines will go bankrupt and consolidate; most planes will be grounded and mothballed; routes will be cut. Small cities will lose commercial service altogether. Whole terminals at larger airports will be closed permanently.

Air service will continue to connect large cities, but flights will be fewer and slower (speed reduces fuel efficiency), with every seat filled. And those flights will be much more expensive.

In short, we will be returning to the days of the Jet Set, when only the wealthy flew. People were simply less mobile in the 1950s than they are today. And the future will likewise be characterized by declining mobility. The implications are far-reaching and take a while to appreciate. Think of the impacts to tourism, (including all its subsidiary components such as the hotel industry and the car rental companies), universities, far-flung families, the entertainment industry, scientific research. . . . ”

(Those remarks are linked to the more in-depth energy analysis in Mr. Heinberg‘s books.)

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Exerpts from a piece that Anna Letitia Mumford wrote
for the blog fifty car pile-up -

“Contrast the reaction of the authorities to the blockage of vehicular traffic in the [major 1999] Seattle [protest] and [later] Iraq war protests to the typical police reaction when sidewalks are obstructed by construction or bikelanes are occupied by double-parked vehicles.

There is nothing inherent in the overwhelming primacy given to privately owned vehicles on our public streets. Rather it is the result the cumulative effect of less than a hundred years of … policy decision-making that has favored automobile owners.

Imagine in the next hundred years, the potential of our bicycle and pedestrian advocacy efforts to … [claim] our streets [while] re-engineering our communities to make car ownership less convenient.

One way to create these changes is to physically occupy the contested space.”

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On a suburban street in London, Ontario, Canada

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Ben Fried at Streetsblog -
“Streetfilms: New Yorkers Walk and Ride for Safer Streets”

Brad Aaron at Streetsblog -
“Memorializing Pedestrian Victims in Portugal”

Brad Aaron at Streetsblog -
“Safety in Numbers” (October, 2008)

Monika Warzecha at the Spacing Toronto blog -
“Think of the children” (November, 2008)
“In the district of Greenwich in London, England, a lot of the speed limit signs in residential areas have pictures beneath them drawn by children.” …

Ben Fried at Streetsblog -
“Horns, What Are They Good For?” (November, 2008)

Fast car culture

Cars and speed are the common denominators here

The “Full Throttle” advertising reinforces other fast culture culture (that is, other promises of fast car driving),
which this promotional message also is based on, to an extent.

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For months, that “Full Throttle” drink advertising has been in a ‘variety’ store window here in London, Ontario, Canada.

That store is beside a busy street here in London.
In the above photo you can see the reflection of a car which was being driven by at the time.

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About a week earlier, the driver of this Doritos truck left it idling along the side of the road
outside of the same ‘variety’ store -

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Automobiles, junk food, and advertising
are major common threads between these “Full Throttle” and Doritos truck photos.

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By Stephanie McMillan

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Here are some other posts about transportation issues -
http://tobanblack.net/blog/?tag=transportation

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Of course, car drivers don’t alway ‘veg out’ (in one way or another) after they reach their destinations,
but some sort of zombie-like relaxation often is what people are rushing towards, isn’t it?

In fact, aren’t people more apt to want to tune out like that after rushing around in cars?

(This isn’t to say that people can’t think and watch TV at the same time, however.  And it’s over the top to say that people who do rush toward some form of passive relaxation are headed “to nowhere.”)

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There are more related posts here -
http://tobanblack.net/blog/?tag=urban-sprawl

A credit card design

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Danny Schechter at Common Dreams -
“The Next Bubble Is on the Way: Credit Card Debt” (August 11th)

Selected exerpts -

“Few are paying attention to the next bubble expected to burst: credit cards. You would never know it by watching … slick VISA card ads.”

“The coupling of home equity debt and credit card debt has gone hand in glove for years. The homeowners at risk can no longer use their homes as ATM machines, thanks to their prior re-financings and equity loans, often used in the past to pay off their credit cards. Indeed, homeowners cashed out $1.2 trillion from their home equity from 2002 to 2007 to pay down credit card debts and to cover other costs of living, according to the public policy research organization Demos.

To compound the problem, fewer people are paying their credit card bills on time. And, to flip the old paradigm, more are using high-interest credit card cash to pay at least part of their mortgages instead of the other way around.”

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Credit cards generally are used to gain quick, short-lived relief from poverty, and/or to bring in a spurt of consumer ‘goods’ –
but often without nearly enough concern about future consequences (which may entail escalating poverty because of mounting consumer debts). The future thus often is sacrificed for immediate consumption — sometimes out of desperation, when poverty is a factor.

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