If you stopped by the GSU today you might have noticed BU Sustainability was celebrated the launch of their new website with cake, free mugs, and a Trek Hybrid bike giveaway from Landry’s. If you missed the giveaway, you can still enter the giveaway by signing up for the BU CarbonRally team.
You may have also noticed the awesome solar-panel equipped recumbent tricycle that one cyclist traveled across the country with. I didn’t get a chance to speak to the owner of the bike, but I’ll probably hunt him down at some point to talk about bike touring across the U.S., something I intend on doing in the future.
I must say I’m a huge fan of visual statistics, so I couldn’t help but notice how striking 5,500 tons of garbage would look like piled on marsh plaza:
or, being a huge science nerd, what a glorious light show you’d see from space if Marsh Plaza had 44 spotlights:
It was also great to see this sweet feature on Galen, one of our club’s co-founders, who still remains very dear to BU Bikes:
So far, the site not only looks great but offers some excellent resources and information on how to go about creating a more sustainable BU. And how will the website launch help create a more sustainable BU? The homepage stresses waste reduction, which is largely within the power of our aggregate individual behavior. And as an economist will tell you, the power of incentives is not to be underestimated, as incentives are what drives our behavior. If we’re really serious about becoming sustainable, we’ve got to start changing our behavior, just as the “It’s what you do” slogan on the Sustainability website implies. By showing everyone some solid numbers and displaying them in a way that’s easy for anyone to understand, and if enough people shift behaviors we could potentially see a dramatic shift in behavior. For instance, just over the course of last semester I had begun to notice more people carrying around those free BU Sustainability mugs on a daily basis, including myself. I will be interested to see what the correlation in the number of paper/plastic cups used on-campus over the next few years will be as I see more and more of those BU Sustainability mugs around. Biking makes the most sense in a city like Boston, and for a large group of people to be biking or walking instead of driving or taking a bus can make a difference.
Speaking of sustainability and powerful visual statistics, I’m reminded of two powerful demonstrations of sustainability in the urban setting. The first one is a photo I put together from PARK(ing) Day 2009, which BU Bikes organized right here on Comm. Ave last semester, where we gathered people and bikes together to transform a space normally occupied by empty cars:
The second is this photo along the same lines of space efficiency and urban sustainability, demonstrating the amount of space required to transport the same number of people by car, bus, or bicycle:
There’s no doubt in my mind that Sustainability will continue to be the hot topic it is now for ages to come. So I’ve showed you how bikes can take up much less space, but maybe you’re wondering the other ways in which biking is sustainable. For an answer to that I will direct you all to an excellent blog post featured on Bostonbiker last summer by Adam Pieniazek titled “Why I Bike,” who states simply that a bicycle is the “Giver of freedom, energy, and life.”
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