Old ideas for the new year

A man arrived at work in Savannah one morning last week. He pulled into his parking space, gathered his briefcase and headed for the door of his building. He was dressed in “business casual” attire. Across the street, another man was staring at him in disbelief. He appeared truly confounded by what he was seeing. What caused his jaw to drop while witnessing this otherwise unremarkable event?

The man he was watching had ridden up on a bicycle.

The idea of using a bicycle to commute to work is hard for some folks to wrap their heads around. If a person commutes in professional clothing instead of cycling-specific garments that some associate with bicycles, additional puzzled looks can occur. Yet, bicycles have been part of the urban landscape longer than cars. In fact, bicyclists were early and effective advocates for paved roads before the reign of the automobile.

Bill Dawers has a keen understanding of how cities work and frequently uses his “City Talk” column in the Savannah Morning News to make a compelling case for the kind of urban density and arrangement that not only made communities livable in less energy intensive times, but also made them lively and literate. Here he is recounting a lecture he delivered at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home:

“From the Civil War to the advent of the automobile age, Savannah was the birthplace for an impressive string of figures who have impacted American culture. I would suggest that the dense and diverse Savannah of the past nurtured the kind of cognitive complexity that led children into richer lives as adults.”

And there’s more:

“It’s also worth noting that a denser city can also be a greener one. There could be fewer lawns to water, shorter distances for cars to drive, and greater opportunities for bicyclists and pedestrians.”

Dawers’ Savannah Morning News colleague Anne Hart was recently looking to the past as well, cataloging a list of household practices adopted by her conservative Republican mother, decades before such efforts became widely regarded as environmentally friendly:

“Being green isn’t about being trendy. You don’t have to drink only shade-grown, fair trade organic coffee and read by the light of beeswax candles. Mary Ann’s proof of that. Being green simply is about cutting back, reducing waste – which translates to saving money. Isn’t that what conservatives are supposed to be about?”

Back in November, the public radio program “RadioWest,” aired an interview with Alan Wesiman. The author of “The World Without Us” had some interesting advice for a caller:

“We have to go back to doing what our grandmothers did. When they went to the market, they didn’t get a plastic bag and put the cucumbers in it and another one for the onions and another one for the bananas and another one for the oranges. They brought a bag from home and they put everything together. Their flavors didn’t mix. There was no problem. And they took it home and dumped it out and brought the same bag back over and over again.”

While many are waiting for futuristic technological solutions to arrive on the scene and solve our problems, others find it instructive to look to the past for resources that can help us now. Sometimes old technology and ways of living are ideally suited for addressing modern problems.

Photo of a “traffic violator driving a 1900-vintage car being stopped by a policeman on a bicycle” from the National Archives and Records Administration.