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an idea long in coming…

The sweet success of the Durham Bike Co-op’s grand opening just proves that Durham’s bike community is begging for this sort of space. Nearly one hundred people stopped by today’s festivities, most of whom just wanted to find out more about the Co-op itself.

In addition to those with checks in hand, who knew before arriving that they want to be members, curious folks dropped in, supporters rode up from Raleigh (a 27 mile trek) having made reservations on the Amtrak for the route back home, and civic-minded neighbors dropped off donations (parts, whole bikes, and cash). Reporters and photographers from the News and Observer, the Durham News, the Herald Sun, and the Duke Chronicle all stopped by.

Click either picture for more photos from today’s event.


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See also sleepyneko’s flickr page on the Bike Co-op.

WRAL: Cyclist and His Doctor Have Heart for Cross-Country Ride


WRAL: Mother Searches for Hit-And-Run Driver Who Injured Son


Durham Bike Co-op opens this Sunday

small jpeg DBClogo.jpegPress Release
New Release Date: immediately (distribute widely)

Durham Bike Co-op opens its doors 1pm Sunday, March 25th

DURHAM — This Sunday, March 25th, the Durham Bicycle Co-op opens its doors at 1pm. The Durham Bike Co-op (DBC) is a collective bicycle workspace that seeks to act as a hub for positive community development and interaction through bicycle skills-sharing. The DBC is member-driven, member-funded, and most importantly, fun! Membership dues shall be set on a sliding scale available to participants of all income levels.

Aside from the pleasure of riding bicycles, members of the DBC believe that bikes are a vital vehicle for sociality and movement and that they offer a real alternative to the automobile.

The Durham Bike Co-op is located at 723 N. Mangum St., which is located in Durham’s historic Little Five Points neighborhood.

From 1-3pm on Sunday, Co-op members will be hosting an open house. A grill-your-own potluck will take place on site, behind the Co-op’s workspace. From 3-5pm, test your balance and agility in a game of bike polo and other activities. And from 5-6pm, cyclists will share a downtown cruiser ride.

Co-op membership is open to any Durham community member who is interested in joining. Membership is mutually beneficial to the member-owner and the Co-op; new membership helps the co-op to offer more services within the community, while co-op members gain access to the collective workspace, tools, skills and activities otherwise unavailable in Durham.

Membership forms will be available at the Co-op on Sunday and are also available for download from the Co-op’s website; http://www.durhambikecoop.org.

Schedule of events
SUNDAY, MARCH 25 - Grand Opening
1:00 - 3:00pm Open House & Potluck Grill-out (bring your own burger)
3:00 - 5:00pm Bike Polo & Other Activities
5:00 - 6:00pm Downtown Durham Cruiser Ride

For more information about the Durham Bike Co-op, visit their website, www.durhambikecoop.org

is Durham endangered?

Our relationship to built space is not something we often explore, and yet these spaces define for us the world of our daily lives. Authors like Wordsworth and Thoreau write about the wonders and mysteries of the world revealed to them simply through careful observation of their environments. The observant way of moving through the world revealed, for the romantic and the transcendentalist, an overlooked simplicity of everyday life.

Being observant in this way has value intrinsically in that it is a way to feel more connected to the place you occupy and a way to recognize the importance of that connection. Often, as in the case of Wordsworth and Thoreau or even contemporaries such as Ron Rash or Edward Hoagland, those who know something about this connection experience it in wilderness — standing on a mountain top after a day’s hike or standing on the edge of a river or lake. The unique foil that wilderness poses to the human-built environment is arguably the basis of most environmental ethics, from Aldo Leopold’s land ethic to Edward Abbey’s monkeywrench defense to Deep Ecology. In each of these versions of environmental ethics, the bottom line human/wilderness relationship is one where we ought to preserve wilderness.

But basing an environmental ethic on juxtaposing wilderness and urban areas leaves those of us who live in cities without any sense of ownership over our environmental responsibilities. “The State of World Population 1999,” a report issued by the United Nations Population Fund, documents the trends of increasing urbanization. One-third of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 1960. By 1999, that percentage had increased to 47 percent. The report predicts 61 percent of the world’s population will be city dwellers by 2030. “The State of World Population 1999” offers this prediction about urbanization:

the ecological and sociological “footprint” of cities has spread over ever-wider areas, creating an urban-rural continuum of communities that share some aspects of each lifestyle. Fewer and fewer places on the planet are unaffected by the dynamics of cities.

Basing environmental ethics on wilderness preservation alone is a luxury we can no longer afford.

There are other models, however, for an urban environmental ethic. It took a while, but the Sierra Club finally gets it. It released a white paper endorsing more density in urban growth. The US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) awards for sustainable architecture reasonably acknowledge the fact that environmentally friendly building design contributes to far fewer resources consumed for every person who lives and works in those structures. To get a sense of what’s required by LEED certification, read the article in this week’s Independent on a proposed building in Chapel Hill that, if built, will be North Carolina’s first LEED Gold standard building. Apart from urban planning, Michael Pollan’s works can be thought of as an attempt to design an environmental ethic that’s based on agriculture instead of on wilderness. His theory of co-evolution (developed in Botany of Desire) and the agro-industrial food policies he calls into question in The Omnivore’s Dilemma both serve as models of how to think responsibly about the environment and be a city dweller.

Durham has its own theorist on urban environmentalism, and his focus, like most enviro-ethics theorists, is on preservation. Only this time, Gary Kueber is trying to preserve buildings. Preservation and sustainable urban design go hand in hand, argues Kueber.

Endangered Durham, Kueber’s medium for developing his preservationist ethic, is a website dedicated to showing what happens to a city when poor planning decisions dominate its development culture. Probably the most striking feature of his project are the before and after photographs. Using historical photography from archives, libraries, universities, and books, he identifies areas of Durham that have changed significantly — and identifiably — over the years. As you can imagine, much of the time this change is not for the good.

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The pictures above are from a recent post on 118 Main St and its various facades over the last century: circa the 1920s, the 1960s, and today.

A good example of the kind of relevance his site has is his collection of posts on DOT’s woeful redevelopment plans for Alston Avenue. He’s done a great job articulating just what’s wrong with DOT’s current way of thinking. See http://endangereddurham.blogspot.com/search/label/Alston%20Ave. for more. These posts speak to his concern that sustainable design is about more than just preserving buildings. “An equal part of my intent is that what we build new,” — whether roads or buildings — he says, “is human-scale - respecting the lessons of how we used to build cities for pedestrians and integrating knowledge of our impact on the natural environment.”

His breadth of familiarity with historical documents and evident depth of thought on urban design would lead you to believe he is a life-long urban planner. Not the case, however. Originally trained in Internal Medicine, he practiced primary care in Durham for four years — right up until he decided that his “hobby” of historic preservation was more important to him. “ So I gave up medicine, went back to school to get a Master’s in Public Health, and a Master’s in Urban Planning. I’m finishing up the latter this May,” he says.

Kueber grew up in New Orleans. Like many of us who live in historic cities, he took the beautiful architecture for granted. It was only after college at Duke, medical school back in New Orleans, then moving back to Durham for a second time that he got involved with efforts to save historic properties. He worked with and eventually chaired the Endangered Properties Program with Preservation Durham.

He started the Endangered Durham website when he realized that “Durham had lost so much historic architecture, and the majority of folks who live in Durham weren’t aware of it.” Creating a publicly accessible tool for researching Durham’s landscape and architectural history, he thought, could strengthen preservation efforts. He describes an often-repeated pattern of development thinking “when someone would propose a teardown, there was no context – people would see it as ‘well, that building is pretty far gone’ instead of ‘we’ve lost hundreds and hundreds of buildings – we really need to go above-and-beyond to keep what we still have.’ Along with that, I saw that the same ethos that led to the loss of so much architecture was still around.”

While Endangered Durham’s posts are tagged by property types and streets, Kueber’s concerns also fall into themes — loss of greenspace or demolition by neglect, for example. He confesses that site organization is one of the biggest challenges he faces.

“I would like it to exist in perpetuity as a community resource where people can look up a site and the history of that building/buildings that came before. The tags are a mixed bag, and they include both themes and locations. They could really be overwhelming, because I see the creation of a healthy, vibrant community as the whole, and these landscape pieces as parts of that whole.”

Some areas of town are more threatened than others. “I think East Durham – more than just the traditional east Durham, which centers over on Driver St., but everything east of Roxboro and also the Little Five Points Area by Mangum/Cleveland/Corporation,” currently faces more difficult planning decisions.

He adds,

“To a lesser extent St. Theresa (Southside) and West End. These areas of town have persistent economic disinvestment and difficult to change social forces that mire people in poverty and crime. And to a large extent, those problems are bigger than Durham. But people need help and want change in their neighborhoods, because they need a better life. Unfortunately, old buildings play a pretty small role in the creation or maintenance of those problems, but they become symbolic of decay. I often joke with people that the reason buildings (and trees) get knocked down is because they are the only parts of the neighborhood than can’t run away when the bulldozers come. It’s something tangible for politicians to point to as an accomplishment. Unfortunately, there is no good evidence out there that demolition helps neighborhoods, and some evidence that it exacerbates neighborhood social conditions.”

A rare honor for bloggers is to meet in person the strangers who read and enjoy their sites. But Kueber was in attendance at the grand opening of the Bull City Headquarters, a mixed-use community center that local artists have opened up in Little Five Points. During the organizers’ speeches about the Headquarters’ mission, they indicated that one reason for locating in LFP was based on what they had read about the area on the Endangered Durham website. Kueber says, “that went beyond my best hopes for what the site could do — inspire others to community action in neighborhoods other than their own, to see all of Durham as their city.”

coming soon…

sign.jpg Help the Durham Bike Co-op get off the ground.

Find out more about it and join the efforts at DurhamBikeCoOp.org

nice wheels

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Industries of Cruelty

Less than a week after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals employees in North Carolina faced charges of cruelty for performing anesthetized euthanasia on unwanted animals, then tossing them in dumpsters, the state’s council of commissioners had to vote on whether North Carolina’s method for disposing of unwanted citizens is properly antiseptic. While PETA’s employees were cleared of cruel and unusual behavior, it’s not clear whether the State’s death penalty will be.

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Photo courtesy of the Socialist Party of North Carolina

For a state that condones such agricultural practices as crating pigs during breeding, forced insemination of dairy cattle to keep them lactating and debeaking chickens to bring charges of cruelty against PETA rings hollow. Nonetheless, the case focused unusual attention on an organization that sees itself as the champion of animal rights. While democratic governments ought to be the champions of their citizens’ right, the charges against the State of North Carolina aren’t flavored with the same twist of irony. Perhaps that’s because the State government has demonstrated its investment in cruelty, to both animals and people.

The singularity of the human species is ingrained in our minds from birth. One thing on which creationists and scientists can agree is that in the chain of being there is nothing else like us. Whether we descended from apes or gods, we’re special. Because of the implicit self-importance in that claim (that we, humans, are either the pinnacle of evolution or the chosen few), there is room in human consciousness (and conscience) for hierarchy. The room for hierarchy among species is what makes room for hierarchies within human society.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We could interpret our uniqueness as just a collection of attributes which says nothing about our relationship to other species. Or, if we are the pinnacle of evolution, we might see our place in the chain of being as benevolent care-takers of the earth. Instead, we interpret our phylogenetic achievements as the basis of a ranking system where we come out on top. We see ourselves as masters with dominion over all other species. Instead, we are superior, and our superiority justifies the degree to which we discount the interests of non-human animals.

The stratification of species with which we’re so comfortable creates room in our consciousness for treating people disparately based on their behavior. If people behave a certain way, if they violate norms or act objectionably, then those people forfeit their place in the chain of being, leaving them worthy only of the respect due to lesser animals.

Murder is unacceptable, whether it is carried out by an individual or the state. In either case, murders are often derivative of human imperfection. We refuse to accept that frustration, helplessness, panic, and other common feelings sometimes precipitate the most egregious interpersonal violence. And we refuse to admit that the death penalty is merely a legitimized form of retribution. Instead we say that the state is balancing the scales of justice while the incarcerated murderer is a deviant whose aberrant conduct is less than human. The state relies on its claim to superiority, which in this context is called authority, to distinguish its acts of killing as legitimate. Murderers are worthy only of our disrespect, marginalization, and dismissal. Since murderers have acted like animals, so the thinking goes, we can treat them like animals — locked in pens, waiting for slaughter.

Every way that the criminal justice system is unethical is mirrored in our industrial agricultural practices. Prisons are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated people whose executions are often botched. Factory farms are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated animals whose slaughters are often botched.

Some will resist the comparison between the prison industrial complex and the agro-industrial complex, but rejecting the comparison is premised on unfamiliarity with one or both of the industries. That we allow ourselves to be unfamiliar with our past and present industries of cruelty characterizes the limits of our compassion.

We would rather not know how hamburger is made, so not many of us visit factory farms. We would rather not know that we, a civilized people, have a death penalty, so we hold our executions at night and bury them deep in the bowels of labyrinthine cinder block structures.

Some say it’s time to move on and bury our sullied past in the wake of our progress. But the wake of progress smells more like diesel fumes in the wake of inmate transfer buses and is as blinding as the wake of feathers swirling behind poultry trucks.

The change has to begin somewhere. It’s exciting to see Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation spend time on bestseller lists. Perhaps these books can change our conception of food, challenge some of the policies that make factory farming profitable, or turn some hearts. They won’t do it alone, however. Our investments in cruelty are too tangled for any meaningful change to result from tackling symptoms instead of causes. We have to see that we will never treat cattle or hogs or chickens any better until we see that there’s something objectionable about the way we imprison people.

As these ideas percolate, perhaps we will be as discomforted by our habit or throwing away people and non-domestic animals as we were by PETA employees throwing away dogs and cats.

This piece originally appeared at OpEdNews.com and was published as an Op-Ed in the Herald Sun under the title “Institutionalizing Cruelty to Animals.”

lamentable signage

Saturday was busy on the Tobacco Trail. Riding the length of the trail, I passed probably more than 75 people. It almost felt crowded at times. (And it looks like rollerblading is making a comeback.) While riding, friends and I noticed these two instances of confusing signage. Since photo-documentation has a track record of getting the most attention from the City, here goes…

At the northern terminus of the trail (Mile-Marker 0) is a sign stating the rules of the trail (foreground) and a kiosk (background) with some history about American Tobacco. While the hours of trail use were extended (from “dawn to dusk”) to 5Am to 10PM, and this change is clearly noted in the large letters below the original sign, the “dawn to dusk” language still appears in the original — which is the sign titled “Durham Open Space and Trails.”
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att_cornwallis.jpgThe more significant problem is at the intersection of Cornwallis Rd and the American Tobacco Trail. Here, cars turning onto Cornwallis from Fayetteville St (map here) are presented with three signs in a row, each before the trail crossing. First, is a sign indicating there is a bike lane ahead, which there is. The bike lane begins just after you cross the Trail. The second sign sets the speed limit at 45 mph. And the third, merely feet from the Trail’s crossing, is North Carolina’s “bike crossing” sign.
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Why not move the 45mph sign to the other side of the trail? Why not sequence the signs so that drivers are encouraged to drive 45mph only after they have passed the bike/ped path intersection?

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