7/7/07: The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook

2:52 PM EDT on July 7, 2007

The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook is the official
companion volume to today's Live Earth concerts, 24 hours of nonstop
concerts broadcast from around the world on 7/7/07. It's a fun little book, meant to connect with a younger audience via tongue-in-cheek suggestions, practical advice, factual information, and imaginative, bluesky solutions for climate change.

Each of the book's 77 articles is presented as a brief instruction or command. I contributed a few pieces that Streetsblog readers might appreciate. They were: Ride a Bike, Decongest Downtown, Ride the Train and Fly Right (which, more accurately would have been titled "Fly Less," but that's not very snappy). It was a fun project and, I think, a great opportunity to inject some of the progressive ideas that we talk about here on Streetsblog into the mainstream.

The book was edited by Duncan Bock and produced on a ridiculously short timeline by Melcher Media. Charles Komanoff also helped to research and fact check some of the book's carbon emission calculations.

Here is the Ride a Bike chapter...

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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