Car Free Journey

By Steve Atlas

York County, Maine: Use the Trolley Instead Of Your Car

When vacationers travel to southern Maine's ocean beaches, most people sigh and join the traffic lines and congestion. They assume anyone visiting Maine needs a car. However, that doesn't need to be true. Take AMTRAK's Downeaster train, from Boston (North Station) or Portland, Maine, to Wells.

At the Wells (Maine) station, get off the train and transfer to the Shoreline Explorer's Shoreline Trolley (Route 4). The Shoreline Explorer is a network of four summer trolley routes (three are private operators), and three shuttle buses that serve five beach communities in York County. Because many beaches and hotels are located near a trolley stop, you don't need a car to enjoy a vacation here.

Photo credit the Greater York Region Chamber of Commerce.

Getting To York County Without a Car  

From Logan Airport in Boston, take the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority)'s Blue line subway marked Bowdoin to State Street. Transfer at State Street to the Orange Line marked Oak Grove. Get off at North Station where you will board Amtrak's Downeaster Train. going to Portland. Get off at Wells.

If you are coming to Boston by train (either AMTRAK or MBTA commuter train), get off at Back Bay Station. Then take the Orange line marked Oak Grove. Follow the directions given in the last paragraph.

You can also begin your vacation in Portland, Maine. From Portland Maine's Airport, take Metro Transit route 5 to the Portland Transportation Center, located at 100 Thompson's Point Road.  

Get on the Downeaster and take it to Wells. Amtrak's Downeaster has five trains every day between Boston and Portland, ME. Take the train to Wells, ME ($19 one-way from Boston, or $11 from Portland). The Shoreline Trolley stops at the station.

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View from Fort Leme, Rio de Janeiro

(June 14 through June 17, the "World Congress of ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability" and June 18 through 23 the "United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development" organized by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) and associated events hosted by many others.)

First, the bad and the ugly...

You have undoubtedly heard by now another major UN conference bit the dust, this one on sustainable development in the gorgeous, even extravagantly beautiful natural setting of Rio de Janeiro. Stewards and stewardesses on airplanes radiating outward from Rio around June 24 must have noticed an unusual scattering of glum faces.

Among the representatives of cities and city issues, however, we did alright. Ecocity Builders I think I can say with some assurance provided among the brightest contributions and this time - we were at Rio in 1992 with both booth and a few talks - for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. I was also at the Stockholm UN environmental conference back in 1972 - I seem to be stuck on giving the UN a chance. In Rio again a week ago, we figured in, in shall we say, a medium major way that could lead to major positive advances. Kirstin Miller, our Executive Director had grabbed the UN conference bull by the horns and managed, in ten months ranging from Oakland to New York to Bonn, Germany to Nairobi, Kenya to work us and our issues, especially our International Ecocity Framework and Standards, into several different venues, workshops and tours, some fairly influential. Meantime inter-national progress continued de-progressing.  

Now the question is, can we strengthen our side, the positive side, the side where cities take the initiative and influence the nation states which are doing all they can to ignore the world's largest environmental and development - read "sustainability" - problems? A few positive ideas emerged from the conference. First though the broad strokes which most conscientious environmentalists and sustainability advocates see as more than a little discouraging. Then a few details, from my ecocity/ecotropolis/bioregional point of view of course, some of which amount to promising new ideas.  

Crimes of state

Leida Rijnhout of the Northern Alliance for Sustainability out of Brussels, Belgium representing the "Organized Partners of the Major Groups" of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) at the Rio+20 Summit identified several glaring omissions in the outcomes of the official deliberations of nation states.

She started out like this: "It feels amazing to be sitting in this room among all the world leaders, and feeling all this power around me that can shape the world. We all know the threat that is facing us, and I do not need to repeat the urgency. Science is very clear. If we do not change in the coming five to ten years the way our societies function, we will be threatening the survival of future generations and all other species on the planet."

And what did she say the representatives of nations had done in Rio?

1.) Failed completely to mention planetary boundaries, tipping points or the Earth's carrying capacity as if nothing was learned from the continually advancing science of ecology since before Earth Day 1970, 2.) silently continued the subsidy in 100s of billions of dollars to the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable industry in the world whose main products' byproducts are throwing off the planet's atmosphere and climate balances, 3.) failed to give a clear mandate to even start negotiating an agreement to stop the Wild West abuse of the high seas, 4.) failed to address women's reproductive health issues, 5.) missed opportunities to start new global treaties on civil society participation and sustainability reporting, 6.) didn't make a peep about armed conflicts, the war budgets and arms trade around the world, and, 7.) omitted reference to nuclear energy - particularly noteworthy after the Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan during and following the Sendai/Fukushima Tsunami of March 11, 2011. And much more.

George Monbiot, author of "Heat - How to Stop the Planet from Burning," copyright 2006, eloquent as usual, speaking through the publishing auspices of the Guardian in the UK added these points noting in particular the role of the United States in "savaging" the Earth summit's draft declaration. "The word 'equitable', the US insists, must be cleansed from the text," Monbiot notes. "So must any mention of the right to food, water, health, the rule of law, gender equality and women's empowerment. So must a clear target of preventing two degrees of global warming. So must a commitment to change 'unsustainable consumption patterns' and to decouple economic growth from the use of natural resources."

That's what he wrote looking at the draft outcomes document going into Rio + 20 Conference. After the conference on June 25, he wrote, again in the Guardian, an article titled "After Rio we know. Governments have given up on the planet."

"It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations - the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia - could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue 'sustained growth', the primary cause of the biosphere's losses... governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it." He adds, "The declaration is remarkable for its absence of figures, dates and targets. It is as stuffed with meaningless platitudes as an advertisement for payday loans, but without the necessary menace. There is nothing to work with here, no programme, no sense of urgency or call for concrete action beyond the inadequate measures already agreed in previous flaccid declarations. Its tone and contents would be better suited to a retirement homily than a response to an escalating complex global crisis."

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POSTCARD FROM RIO

Ecocity Builders' Rio+20 Bid for Sustainable City Systems & Measures 

By Rick Smith, Ecocity Builders, IEFS Core Advisor Professor at Wayne State University

Rick Smith

In 2008 in San Francisco at the Ecocity Summit, attendees urged Ecocity Builders to launch a program to create an Ecocity labeling system for cities. After all, anyone could claim that they were an Ecocity and not have to justify the label. Well meaning developers build green buildings in locations that have a bioregion that cannot support a major city. Until that point, Ecocity Builders focused on design, advocacy and demonstration projects. After almost three years of incubation with a set of core advisors, the International Ecocity Framework and Standards was launched at the 2011 Montreal Ecocity Summit. This new framework proposed 15 Ecocity Conditions that include the Bio-physical, Socio-Cultural and Ecological Imperatives.  

Ecocity Builders has partnered with the British Columbia Institute for Technology (BCIT), the William and Helen Mazer Foundation, ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability and China to move the IEFS forward. The next step will be joining Early Partner Cities to crowdsource and Beta test the standards.

The excitement of the IEFS launch helped bring Ecocity Builders into the Major Groups process for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, otherwise known as Rio+20. For 10 months, Executive Director Kirstin Miller flew back and forth to New York to help negotiate the zero draft of the cities portion of the outcome document. While this conference was not set up to have a treaty as an outcome, the consensus document for the conference was anticipated to be a firm global policy framework to encourage voluntary commitments among member states and civil society.  

Although the cities section placed an emphasis on cities as a solution to sustainability, the document did not contain any language to encourage an IEFS. However, the Government of Brazil provided one bright opportunity unprecedented in United Nations conferences. They created a social media site for conference participation and invited the world to join. Global citizens were asked to crowdsource ideas and vote on the best ones. Ecocity Builders convened a meeting with other city NGOs and came up with a proposal to promote global standards of sustainability for cities. Two weeks before the conference, this proposal was selected to be in the top ten that went to the world for a vote. When we arrived in Rio, the Government of Brazil scheduled a panel discussion for these recommendations on Monday, June 18th. The world would pick one of the top ten by an internet vote, the attendees of the conference would pick one and the expert panel on cites would come up with a third recommendations. For about a week, we had no idea if our proposal would go forward or exactly how this would work.  

There were three rounds of voting. In the first round of voting, our proposal came in 6th. The winner was "to use waste as a source of energy". While biomass has a role on a small scale, it is not always the most efficient use of resources because some biomass has embedded energy that can be recycled for other purposes.  

The panelists had a similar reaction to the world vote on solid waste for energy. Indeed, informal waste pickers staged a bit of a protest in the audience when it was time for questions and answers. Millions of people make a living in recycling industries. If we simply burned our trash, it would put these families out of business.  

Mayor Jaime Lerner made a good pitch for standards as did Mr. Oded Grajew, President Emeritus of the Ethos Institute. However, when it came time for the Sustainability Director of one of those "self-proclaimed" ecocities to speak, she said, "We do not need sustainability standards for cities because every city is different. If you want to see a sustainable city, come to ours."  

In the next round, the audience voted for "Plan in advance for sustainability and quality of life in cities." While it was not our proposal, it was not anything to disagree with. However, when the panel deliberated for the final round, Janice Perlman said, "You know, we are all of one mind here at the table, let's integrate some of the comments." The moderator proposed this text and it was adopted by the panel:

Each head of state should identify a sustainable city to develop a network for knowledge sharing and innovation. Governments should channel resources to develop people-centered sustainable cities with timed and measurable goals, in such way that empowers local communities, promotes equality and accountability.

This recommendation, in a nutshell, is the essence of our proposal plus engagement with Early Partner Cites, or something very much like it. This directive will be annexed into the official Rio+20 Outcome document.  

Measuring sustainability was very much a theme in other parts of the conference. Business will further advance the Global Reporting Initiative. The consensus document embraced the concept of the Sustainable Development Goals that will replace the Millennium Development Goals after 2015. Kirstin Miller observed the tail end of the SDG negotiations. She observed that the diplomats scratched their heads and didn't know what to say and called out for the experts to guide them on developing SDGs. We will do just that and we are not alone. ISO will also be engaging with sustainability measures for cites. And UN Advisor Jeff Sachs remarked at a panel for youth, "The Sustainable Development Goals will work because they are not a treaty. The three treaties from Rio 92 were excellent and never implemented but created a cottage industry for lawyers. The MDGs work because no country wants to be seen as being worse off than others."  

Ecocity Builders will be moving forward with the IEFS to encourage each city to race to stay within the earth's carrying capacity.