planted city

A quote from the Forbes article, ‘Pedaling to Prosperity: Biking Saves U.S. Riders Billions A Year’.

Related:

~ Bicycling Magazine’s new ranking of ‘America’s Top 50 Bike-Friendly Cities’.

(Photo credit: Bicycling Magazine)

Amazing: ‘Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes’

From BBC 4 via YouTube:

Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.

Above is response given by biologist Walter Reid to the following question:

Given the current state of the world and of ecosystem services, what changes are most critical in order to move toward a sustainable and desirable future for humanity?

(Source: Solutions Journal; Graphic credit: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment via US E.P.A.)

Beyond Growth: ‘Gross Domestic Happiness’

From TVO:

The British government measures progress not just by how the economy is growing, but also by the quality of life of its citizens. The United States is following the UK’s lead and looking at how it can incorporate wellbeing into its census data. The move is based on the idea that on its own, GDP is an incomplete measure of a country’s success. Can you judge success by economic growth alone? Will measuring happiness help government make better policy?

From the Globe & Mail:

The richest of the rich have gained more ground in Canada, and are now making 189 times the average Canadian wage, according to a new report.

The 100 highest paid chief executives whose companies are listed on the S&P/TSX composite index made an average of $8.38-million in 2010, according to figures pulled from circulars by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a left-leaning think-tank.

That’s 189 times higher than the $44,366 an average Canadian made working full time in 2010, the report says.

And it’s a 27 per cent raise from the $6.6-million average compensation for the top 100 CEOs in 2009, the report says.

Regular Canadians, on the other hand, have seen their wages stagnate over the past few years. In 2010, after adjusting for inflation, average wages actually fell.

“The gap between Canada’s CEO elite 100 and the rest of us is growing at a fast and steady pace, with no signs of letting up,” says economist Hugh Mackenzie, who authored the report.

“The extraordinarily high pay of chief executive officers is more than a curiosity. It actually is a reflection of a troubling redistribution of society’s resources in Canada and the United States, and in most of Western Europe,” he said in an interview.

He points out that in 1998, the top 100 CEOs were paid 105 times the average wage. Since then, the ratio has generally climbed up.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Happy New Year Tumblr Folk! Here’s hoping your 2012 is full of creativity, opportunity, empathy and resilience.

(Photo: Morning dew at Spanish Banks in Vancouver, Canada. You can check out more of my pics over at Flickr.)

‘How 2011 Became a ‘Mind-Boggling’ Year of Extreme Weather’

From PBS via Climate Progress:

From snowstorms to floods and tornadoes, severe weather wreaked havoc across the United States this year, with 2011 marking far more extreme weather events than a typical year. Hari Sreenivasan discusses the science behind this year of extreme weather with NOAA’s Kathryn Sullivan and Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters.

Chris Martenson on ‘Why he thinks that the coming 20 years are going to look completely unlike the last 20 years’

From YouTube:

In this video Chris Martenson, economic analyst at chrismartenson.com and author of ‘The Crash Course’, explains why he thinks that the coming 20 years are going to look completely unlike the last 20 years. In his presentation he focuses on the so-called three “Es”: Economy, Energy and Environment. He argues that at this point in time it is no longer possible to view either one of those topics separately from one another.

You can find more of Martenson’s work here, here and here.

Writer George Packer in his Foreign Affairs essay, ‘The Broken Contract’, where he argues that “inequality is the ill that underlies all the others.”

Infographic: ‘A Food System Under Strain’

From the New York Times:

The United Nations recently projected that global population would hit 10 billion by the end of the century, 3 billion more than today. Coupled with the demand for diets richer in protein, the projections mean that food production may need to double by later in the century.

Unlike in the past, that demand must somehow be met on a planet where little new land is available for farming, where water supplies are tightening, where the temperature is rising, where the weather has become erratic and where the food system is already showing serious signs of instability.

“We’ve doubled the world’s food production several times before in history, and now we have to do it one more time,” said Jonathan A. Foley, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. “The last doubling is the hardest. It is possible, but it’s not going to be easy.”

(Infographic credit: New York Times)