Page 24 - Sonoma County Gazette - January 2020

CYCLING = JOY, Erica's Story
By Erica, SCBC member
After many variations of love affairs with cycling, I found a new partner this year thanks to the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition (SCBC). A little bit about my background, and then I’ll introduce you to my new riding partner.
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I started cycling in college as a means to get around town and avoid parking my car. After moving to Sonoma County in my twenties I took up road racing. I had my first kid in my thirties, and clearly remember my “last” ride, wondering if I’d ever be able to bike again.
January’s a time for new beginnings, and we need them!
There’s so much mom guilt that comes along with taking time out for yourself on the bike. I’m the best at self-care of any mom I know, and I still feel guilty every time I throw my leg over the saddle for a ride without the kids.
I came home motivated to bike everywhere again because it brought me
so much joy. I got out our trailer and hooked it up to my bike and started commuting across town with my son in it. It was awesome! But when I tried to put my daughter in with him, they’d fight as it just wasn’t big enough for the two of them.
Last month, I had to write about some pretty grim news. There’ll be more like it as the climate crisis accelerates, but I want to shine some rays of light and hope this month.
As I write this, it’s December, a season for hope, and there’s a lot to hope about for those of us who care about the climate crisis, even while there’s much that may seem hopeless.
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something crazy like 6,000 commuting rain, snow or miles per day round trip. miles in 3 days around
Locally we’ve many youth activists, too, including Eleanor Jaffe and Annabelle Lampson from Youth vs. Apocalypse, whom I wrote about earlier this year, and Connor DeVane, an organizer with the Sunrise Movement.
In 2016, Connor hiked the Continental Divide Trail from Canada to Mexico, interviewing people working towards a more livable future whose stories
can inspire us to take local action in building a future not shaped by climate disruptions. Learn more at www.hikethedivide.com/.
COP 25, the UN Climate Summit was a failure, but...
I took a trip
to New York in February to visit my best friend from college, Aviva, who has never owned a car. She bikes miles a year, shine twenty We rode 130 town in minus
Greta Thunberg is the youngest ever named Time’s Person of the Year.
For all her work in motivating millions of people to care about and strike
for the climate, Time named Greta their person of the year. She stressed that she wasn’t alone and talked about other youth leaders, many of whom are indigenous people, including 15-year-old Autumn Peltier, a Canadian First Nations fighter for water conservation; 17-year-old Helena Gualinga, from the Ecuadorian Amazon, who’s been fighting for climate issues her whole life; and several youth leaders in Africa, especially in Uganda where 22-year- old Vanessa Nakate has been striking daily, holding a sign reading, “Green Love, Green Peace; Beat Plastic, Polythene [sic]s, Pollution; Climate Strike Now.”
20 degree weather. It was just us and the delivery guys on bikes. No big deal for Aviva, just a way of life - but it was a total game changer for me.
Although COP 25 ended in failure, unable to reach an agreement that would limit global warming to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, youth activists, led by Greta Thunberg, who sailed across the Atlantic two times in zero emissions’ craft, turned out 500,000 strong to tell the adults at the conference they had to do more—much more!
On a whim, I remembered the bicycle lending library at SCBC.
Governments in the European Union, Australia, Canada, and the US
were condemned for a deal requiring far less action than needed to avert catastrophic climate change. Indigenous leaders and environmentalists blasted the UN for marginalizing non-governmental and social movement groups
at the climate summit while welcoming polluters, many of whom sponsored COP 25.
They put a cargo bike together for me, including all the add-on’s like a child seat and monkey bars. We tried it out and quickly decided that this was going to be our new way of life -- I wanted to have our own cargo bike. The intimacy of having the kids close was so much better than the trailer.
Million Roofs Initiative reaches its goal. Begun by then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (who incidentally supplied Greta Thunberg with an EV while she was in North America) in 2006, this initiative helped create the largest and most successful rooftop solar market in the world; the solar workforce is now larger than the five largest California utility companies combined. It’s still growing—this year the first 12 days of December saw more solar units sold than all of 2016.
We got our new bike around the beginning of the school year and I haven’t done school drop off by car since! We skip the car drop-off line; we love
our intimate time together, with my son behind me and my daughter in the front of me; we get fresh air, we’ve seen tons of wildlife, observed creek flow variations, and we say hello to regulars. We get to experience so much joy.
With energy savings, Tesla’s solar roofs will cost less than any other roof.
We’ve had our share of flats (winter riding does suck), but we learn resilience and it’s so So SO worth it! It adds only a small amount of transit time to our day, but it’s so much greater quality time. A huge shout out of gratitude to SCBC for having the bicycle lending library.
The roofs will be guaranteed for life and guaranteed to generate power for at least 25 years, when the components may need some repairs.
Check it out, it might just change your life!
Divestment: Goldman Sachs, UC, Ireland join 1100 other institutions. One of the world’s largest investment banks just declared it won’t fund any new arctic oil explorations. It’s also ending investment in thermal and mountain- top removal coal mines and coal-fired projects anywhere in the world. UC’s divestment—largest ever of any public university—includes its $13.4 billion endowments and $80 billion pension fund.
PLANET cont’d on page 25
---Erica, SCBC member
The Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition is a local nonprofit working to promote bicycling in Sonoma County through education and advocacy. To find out more – and to make a tax-deductible contribution to support their work – visit www.bikesonoma.org.
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