Travels in the Riel World

Do you enjoy living someplace that is walkable? It’s important if you like to walk to restaurants and shops, if you harbor a desire to walk to work, or even if you just enjoy walking for fitness.

The act of walking may also be helpful in much bigger ways. Paul Krugman has a column in today’s New York Times about the environmental and economic benefits of walking and of taking public transit, given fast-rising gas prices. He reported on the topic from Berlin, and had this to say:

Any serious reduction in American driving will require … changing how and where many of us live.  To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

Now, of course, some U.S. cities are actually friendly to pedestrians. But which ones? Lucky for us, Prevention magazine has already done a study on this and ranked the best cities in the country (and in each state) based on which were the most walkable. 

In all, Prevention ranked 500 cities. Of these, the top five were Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York City, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. These just edged out San Francisco, Boston, Honolulu and a few other urban areas for the top spots. Other major cities that scored well include Philadelphia (15), Seattle (23), Denver (24), Portland, Oregon (27) and Austin, Texas (29).

As the U.S. presidential contest degenerates into a series of Saturday Night Live skits and arguments over who is more capable of answering a non-existent red phone in the Oval Office, it’s becoming apparent that any serious talk of issues has been postponed, at best, for the time being. Which is unfortunate, since numerous important topics deserve to be discussed and debated.

The NY Times last Sunday ran an interesting op-ed feature in which it asked eight recent candidates for president to write about one issue they would still be discussing if they were still in the race. One of the more intriguing responses came from Chris Dodd on the country’s lack of investment in infrastructure. Here is some of what he wrote:

On Aug. 1, the bridge carrying Interstate 35W over the Mississippi River buckled and broke. Thirteen people were killed. More than 100 were injured.

Afterward, we learned the frightening facts: 160,570 of our bridges are in just as dangerous a shape; a third of our roads are in poor or mediocre condition; some of our biggest cities depend on water and sewage systems over a century old.

With every bursting pipe, potholed road and derailed train, the conclusion became inescapable: America’s backbone is decaying.

Dodd then wrote about his proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank that ”would unite the public and private sectors to complete large-scale works. Funds would go to the most qualified projects, not those with the most political clout.”

And, really, if we’re honest, it’s not just a matter of repairing roads, bridges and sewage systems. At some point, the U.S. has to modernize its infrastructure, both for environmental and productivity reasons. Thomas Geoghegan just wrote about this for The American Prospect, bemoaning the clogged highways and antiquated public transit systems that plague much of the country.

The point is we’re trapped. We can’t move…Compare the U.S. to the European Union. Over there, thanks to Eurostar (the high-speed rail system), easy transit to the airports, and Ryanair, Europeans have more geographic mobility than we do. Eurostar is more important to European unity than adopting a new EU constitution…

It’s easier to get from Dublin to Madrid, where Irish kids commute to do start ups. Over there, from Paris to Brussels, I puff along on air. Over here, on our dilapidated rails, I have to jolt along, in effect, by stage coach. It seems obvious that we should invest in high speed rail and mass transit, but we don’t…

Here’s the 2005 U.S. infrastructure report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers: aviation D+, bridges C, drinking water D-, rails C-, roads D, school buildings D.

Infrastructure is not a sexy issue, by any means, which is why it doesn’t get discussed much in political campaigns. But that doesn’t make it unimportant. After all, as Steve Clemons recently noted:

There are a lot of reasons Rome fell, but one of the biggies is that Rome overspent on its military and the maintenance of empire and underinvested in its core, which slowly rotted.

Here’s a report that should give many of us pause. The Southwestern United States could lose two of its largest sources of water within the next two decades.

Climate change and a growing demand for water could drain two of the nation’s largest manmade reservoirs within 13 years, depriving several Southwestern states of key water sources, scientists warn.

Researchers at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography said Wednesday that there’s a 50 percent chance that lakes Mead and Powell will dry up by 2021, and a 10 percent chance the lakes will run out of usable water by 2013.

“We were surprised that it was so soon,” said climate scientist David Pierce, co-author of the institution’s study that detailed the findings…

Lake Mead, on the Arizona-Nevada border and the West’s largest storage reservoir, and Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, have been hit hard by a regional drought and are half full…Researchers said that if Lake Mead water levels drop below 1,000 feet, Nevada would lose access to all its river allocation, Arizona would lose much of the water that flows through the Central Arizona Project Canal.

It’s a lofty goal, but Rwanda has begun taking steps that it hopes will lead the country to become a high tech hub for Africa — the “Singapore of Africa,” as some have suggested. The Christian Science Monitor has the story.

Sometime in the next two years, nearly every school in Rwanda from distant mountain villages to swelling urban areas will be hooked up to the Internet. And it won’t be some crummy dial-up service. It will be high-speed broadband, carried by fiber-optic cables.

The fact that Rwanda is closing in on this goal without having the massive oil wealth of Angola or Sudan, the diamonds of Congo or South Africa, or even the copper of nearby Zambia is a testimony to the power of imagination. And Rwanda imagines that one day, it will be the information technology center of Africa.

“In 2000, we decided to transform the country from agricultural subsistence to a knowledge-based economy,” says Albert Butare, Rwanda’s minister of state for energy and communications. With two fiber-optic rings around Kigali, and cable being laid across the country, Rwanda is well on its way to being wired. “Once we’ve reached the towns of each sector, it’s like you’ve covered the whole country. In another two years, we should be there.”

Rwanda’ goals have attracted both support and criticism.

Government officials and business leaders see high-tech as the best way to lift one of the world’s least-developed countries into a better position to compete globally. Local human rights activists fret that Rwanda’s money could be better spent on things like drinking water and electricity.

Countries like Rwanda, which rank among the world’s least developed countries (LDCs), don’t easily become high-tech hubs. Sixty percent of Rwandans live below the poverty line, defined by the UN as an income of less than a dollar a day. According to a 2005 study by the Australian National University, LDCs make up 10 percent of the world’s population and represent only 0.13 percent of the world’s Internet users.

Yet, there are hopeful signs. Nearly 70 percent of Rwanda’s adults can read and write. This fact, combined with Rwanda’s dense population, almost all of whom speak the same language, Kinyarwanda, make the country a much better place for establishing an Internet hub than Rwanda’s resource-rich, ethnically diverse, and less-educated neighbors.

Like, um, light. I was struck by this Associated Press story about students in the African nation of Guinea who spend their evenings in the airport parking lot so they can study under the street lamps there.

The sun has set in one of the world’s poorest nations and as the floodlights come on at G’bessi International Airport, the parking lot begins filling with children.

The long stretch of pavement has the feel of a hushed library, each student sitting quietly, some moving their lips as their eyes traverse their notes.

It’s exam season in Guinea, ranked 160th out of 177 countries on the United Nations’ development index, and schoolchildren flock to the airport every night because it’s among the only places where they can count on finding the lights on.

Groups of elementary and high school students begin heading to the airport at dusk, hoping to reserve a coveted spot under the oval light cast by one of a dozen lampposts in the parking lot. Some come from over an hour’s walk away…

Only about a fifth of Guinea’s 10 million people have access to electricity. Even those that do experience frequent power cuts. With few families able to afford generators, students long ago discovered the airport…

The students at the airport consider themselves lucky. Those living farther away study at gas stations and come home smelling of gasoline. Others sit on the curbs outside the homes of affluent families, picking up the crumbs of light falling out of their illuminated living rooms.

The topic has been debated for years, and Jason Pontin recently joined the debate with a NY Times article. Pontin wrote about his thoughts while in Tanzania at the Technology, Entertainment and Design Global 2007 conference.

…the conference’s organizer, Chris Anderson…described his purposes as frankly promotional. Too often, he said, the only images of Africa that Westerners see are of drought, famine, disease and civil war. By contrast, TED Global 2007 would present an Africa that was newly entrepreneurial, increasingly wealthy and tech savvy, and largely politically stable.

“It’s a story,” Mr. Anderson said, “that is unfolding across the continent, and it’s a story that’s not well known outside of Africa.”

But beyond this Panglossian message, however much a corrective to the common images of African misery and however flattering to the pride of TED’s African attendees, was something that everyone at the conference knew (and which I saw every morning on my runs). Whether measured by per capita income or by the gross domestic product of its nations, Africa is the poorest place on earth. The question that the conference was really exploring was this: How can we make every African family richer?

At TED Global 2007, I witnessed one small skirmish in a larger ideological conflict between those who believe that Africa needs more and better international aid, and those who think entrepreneurialism and technology will lift the continent out of poverty and thus reduce its miseries.

Predictably, TED’s attendees and speakers were spellbound by technology and entrepreneurialism and, at the same time, distrustful of international aid.

Pontin concludes, though, that the reality is that Africa needs both aid and trade, at least in the immediate future.

In truth, Africa will need both investment in entrepreneurialism and aid, intelligently directed toward education, health and food.

Herman Chinery-Hesse, the founder of Softtribe, a software development company in Ghana, expressed this thought more personally than I could. “I think this choice between aid and entrepreneurship is false,” he told TED’s attendees. “If we wait for trade, it will take generations, and people need help now. On the other hand, only entrepreneurship can make us rich.”

The Inca Empire of South America was known for a few of its architectural achievements, as well as for a remarkable system of roads and bridges that enabled fairly quick communication among communities that were scattered throughout the rugged terrain of the Andes Mountains.

The NY Times just ran an interesting article that combined a bit of culture and science when it provided an overview of the Inca transportation system, and particularly the suspension bridges that were built across canyons. These bridges were made from natural rope fibers.

Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail.

Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.

So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man’s torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century…

The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.

The Peruvians apparently invented their fiber bridges independently of outside influences, Dr. Ochsendorf said, but these bridges were neither the first of their kind in the world nor the inspiration for the modern suspension bridge.

I was intrigued to see two related opinion columns recently that each discussed creative, business-oriented solutions to poverty in developing countries.

The first was written by Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times, who devoted a piece to microfinancing, the practice of providing small loans to budding entrepreneurs, a concept that was developed by the Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Through Kiva.org, Kristof was himself able to make $25 loans to individuals in Afghanistan and the Dominican Republic, money that enabled those individuals to build their businesses. He wrote:

Small loans to entrepreneurs are now widely recognized as an important tool against poverty. … A young American couple, Matthew and Jessica Flannery, founded Kiva after they worked in Africa and realized that a major impediment to economic development was the unavailability of credit at any reasonable cost.

”I believe the real solutions to poverty alleviation hinge on bringing capitalism and business to areas where there wasn’t business or where it wasn’t efficient,” Mr. Flannery said. He added: ”This doesn’t have to be charity. You can partner with someone who’s halfway around the world.”

The second column, by Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, centered on an interview with microfinancing guru Yunus, who now says the next step is to create a generation of “social businesses.” He described this as businesses that “do good” and are “designed not to lose money.”

”There is only one type of business in the whole theory of capitalism: business to make money,” Yunus responded. ”There should be another kind of business incorporated into the theory of capitalism: business to do good to people. I call them “social businesses,” he added.

Anticipating my next question — how do we convince business people to create ‘’social businesses”? — Yunus argued that many business people have a natural desire to help the poor, but just don’t have the vehicle to do it.

‘If we had this structural theory that there is a profit-maximizing business, and social businesses, some people would say, `I’ll do both. I’ll make money, and I will do social business,’ ” Yunus said.

‘You will say: `Are people crazy like that?’ People are crazy anyway, because people give charity. If people give away their own money, social business with money is much easier,” he continued.

Within the next two years, apparently, a majority of the world’s population will live in cities for the first time in human history.  According to experts quoted in this story in the Christian Science Monitor, much of this urban growth is being driven by cities in Africa and Asia.  And, not surprisingly, the rise of these cities is posing tremendous social and environmental challenges.

Among the major challenges are the mundane features of daily living: clean water and air, sanitary waste facilities, the cost of food, and the availability of shelter and transportation. …

Of the 3 billion people who live in cities today, about 1 billion are in slums without clean water, adequate toilet facilities, or durable housing. Some 1.6 million urban dwellers - many if not most of them children - die each year due to causes associated with the lack of clean water and sanitation.

There are also natural risks to consider.

Eight of the 10 most populous cities are on or near earthquake faults. Some two-thirds of the cities projected to exceed 8 million residents by 2015 are in coastal areas where sea levels may rise as a result of climate change.

Experts say there is also good news, in that some cities recognize the challenges and are pursuing innovative strategies to deal with energy, transportation and economic issues.  Nevertheless, the growth of some of these urban areas is breathtaking.  According to the article, within ten years “there are likely to be 59 African cities with populations between 1 million and 5 million, 65 such cities in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 253 in Asia.”

The headlines came yesterday regarding Warren Buffet’s $31 billion gift to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  It’s an astounding donation that will reverberate decades into the future.  Primarily, of course, it will significantly impact the reach of the Gates Foundation in its global health initiatives, which are dedicated to fighting malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS and numerous other diseases worldwide.

Beyond the headlines, though, are a few other intriguing story lines.  One of these topics was explored today by the Christian Science Monitor.  It centers not only on the work being done by the Gates Foundation, but the way in which the culture of philanthropy may be changing.

…what’s most remarkable is not just how much the world’s two richest men are giving to charity, it’s how they hope to do it. … he sees the Gates Foundation as part of a larger trend toward a more entrepreneurial style of philanthropy. … ”venture philanthropy” involves partnering with government and other charitable groups. Money is contingent on hitting bench marks. … (There) is the intense desire to not waste money and to use partnership rather than paternalism.

Meanwhile, buried at the end of a NY Times story is a particularly strong statement by Buffet on the tradition of meritocracy in the U.S.

Mr. Buffett was scathing yesterday in describing his feelings about estate taxes, which the Bush administration is trying to kill. The ability of rich men to pass on “dynastic wealth” to their grandchildren is offensive to the American tradition of meritocracy, he said.

He gets particularly upset at his country club, he said, hearing members complain about welfare mothers getting food stamps “while they are trying to leave their children a more-than-lifetime-supply of food stamps and are substituting a trust officer for a welfare officer.”

It’s an intriguing cultural question that has often been lost in the tax debate, as U.S. society was founded as a reaction to aristocracy and has always been admiring of the self-made individual.  Buffet’s view seems to be that wealth, once made, should benefit society and that each generation should earn at least some of its own way.  It’s a view in line with a long American tradition that favors both charitable giving and self reliance.

Just some interesting food for thought that goes beyond the global health implications of the new Gates-Buffet partnership.

The 2006 Gates Award for Global Health will be awarded to the Carter Center.  The $1 million award from the Gates Foundation “honors extraordinary efforts to improve health in developing countries.”  The Carter Center was selected by a panel of international health officials for the honor.  According to the announcement:

The Carter Center Guinea Worm Eradication Program, has helped to reduce cases of the disease from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986 to just 10,674 in 2005. Guinea worm is expected to become the second disease, after smallpox, to be eradicated worldwide, and the Center also expects to eliminate river blindness in the Americas by 2010…

“Before The Carter Center began its work, diseases like Guinea worm and river blindness were seen as intractable - a fact of life in the world’s poorest countries,” said Dr. Nils Daulaire, President and CEO of the Global Health Council. ”The Carter Center has turned conventional wisdom on its head.”

Former President Bill Clinton has outlined goals and progress of the Clinton Global Initiative, which will hold its second annual conference in September.  For more information on the initiative, you can go here.  Or, check out a news report from last year’s gathering of 800 world leaders.