Road Madness

Promoting bicycle riding as an alternative to cars seems a good thing, right? The fewer cars we have on the roads, the less wear and tear on the roads, and the less need for widening them in the future.

There is a great informational video from the McHenry County Bicycle Advocates about the need to include bicycle lanes when planning to expand local road like Rakow Road!

If you have driven on Rakow, you know that it is a major east-west route in one of the most congested parts of the county, allowing people to drive from Randall Road to Route 31 as an alternative to Route 14.

Currently, Rakow can also be used for bicycle commuting because there is a sizable shoulder. However, plans to widen the road would mean that the shoulder would be eliminated, and bicycle commuting would be effectively eliminated as well.

The last reason I heard for this change was "cost." It costs more to include a bicycle lane, both in terms of design and pavement installation, because it means there is additional pavement to allow for both bicycles and cars to use the road safely.

Now, what if there were some highway funds that could be moved from a different project in the county and used for this one?

I know just the project: the proposed Alden Road widening project in Hartland and Alden Townships. The County Highway Department wants to add 8 foot shoulders the length of Alden Road because of safety concerns, and that will cost millions of dollars.

Alden Road does not have a lot of traffic - I've driven it several different times of day and days of the week recently just to see, and I can say that traffic is sparse. The impact of the widening would be huge, however. Landowners along the road have flagged trees and structures that would be affected by the increased shoulders -- it looks like at least 100 trees, a barn and portions of a couple of houses would be destroyed to add a wider shoulder to this rural road.

Alden Road also does not really provide an important travel alternative in this largely rural portion of the county, as Rakow does in a congested area. Nor does Alden Road make sense as a commuter bicycle route, as Rakow does... In terms of priorities, where would those road construction dollars best be spent?

So, here's a thought: why not reduce the speed limit on Alden Road to 45 miles per hour to improve safety, skip the expensive engineering and widening, and shift the Alden Road funds to the bicycle lane on Rakow Road? It would save lots of trees, a couple of houses and a barn, and would ensure that commuters can opt for riding their bicycles instead of driving their cars in a densely developed area of the county.

The MCBA website has more information, including a petition asking the county to include a bicycle lane on Rakow Road. Also, the Alden Road Alliance webiste has more information on the proposed Alden Road project.

A Cure for Affluenza?

I don't often venture into the realm of economics, but after hearing Gus Speth, Dean of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale University, I had to reconsider my aversion to the Dismal Science.

I heard Dean Speth in an interview with Kai Ryssdal on NPR's Marketplace today while I was driving home from an early dinner out with my husband, Tom.

The interview blew me away! Speth was talking about how perhaps the current economic crisis might just prompt a reordering of priorities in our "shop til you drop" society. One of the tenets of modern economic theory is that the only way to grow an economy is to consume. So how would our economy grow without all the consumption of stuff it depended upon until the crash?

To quote Speth: "Depends on what you consume, doesn't it? There are lots of things in our society that we need to grow. We need to grow health care, we need to grow education, we need to grow infrastructure, we need to grow an entirely new energy system. But what we probably don't need to grow is the volume of our stuff. We now have . . . the square-footage of the self-storage industry in the United States would now cover all of San Francisco and the entire island of Manhattan combined."

Think about that - it isn't that we stop all consumption*, it's a matter of changing where those consumer dollars are spent. We don't need to build & buy more stuff - we need to build better stuff and better systems that serve the needs of all our residents in the long run.

Speth cited studies about personal happiness that have found -- consistently -- that more stuff does not make us more happy - in fact, the more materialistic people are, the LESS happy they become. Quoting Speth: "In our country, in the United Kingdom, in Japan, GDP per capita has gone up and up and up but the level of life satisfaction has been stable. And what really makes people happy is warm, close, personal relationships. And giving, rather than getting."

Think about the things that make you happy. Quality, not quantity. Not more friends, but closer friends. Deciding to help someone else, not waiting to see what he can do for you.

But won't we be in trouble if we don't get back to the way things were a couple of years ago? Speth's answer, with my highlights:

"Well, we might not grow as fast. And I personally think that there are diminishing returns to growth. There are diminishing returns to affluence. And when you get a country that's as rich as ours, it really becomes a matter of spending what we have wisely. And all of my adult life I've heard people say, "You know, we need to keep growing or we'll face the distribution issue in our society. And we kept growing and distribution of income and resources and assets got worse. So, I think it's time to worry about some of these other things, and not so much about just growing the aggregate economy. And gives us the time to do things in life that really matter. We're rich enough for that now."

I heard that and I wanted to cry. I believe him - it isn't like we are a poor country -- even during a deep recession, many people are still driving alone in their SUVs, paying nearly $3 a gallon for gas.

Perhaps the reason the interview struck me so profoundly, is because Tom & I had just attended a brief Rally in front of State Rep Jack Franks' office, trying to raise awareness of the need to figure out how to fund services for our society's most vulnerable - people with mental illness and developmental disabilities.

That is the target group today -- yesterday it was natural resources -- tomorrow it might be health care, or clean air... Everything is up for grabs.




*For a primer on the deadend of our "build, buy, toss" consumerism, take a gander at Annie Leonard's Story of Stuff. It's a 20 minute animation that walks you through American consumerism. And the bottom line is this: we have had an unsustainable system that values style over substance and quantity over quality. Where obsolescence is built into consumer products --meaning that things are DESIGNED to break, and to cost more to repair than to replace, SO there is a built in incentive to throw things away and buy new things.

Does your water taste salty?

In McHenry County, virtually all of the water people use in our day to day lives comes from the ground - groundwater.

An important thing to remember about groundwater is that once pollutants make their way into the water that is underground, it is very difficult and expensive to remove.

A "contaminant" of growing concern in local groundwater supplies is chloride - an element that is being introduced to the groundwater through septic systems that are connected to homes with water softeners and also road salt.

The salt that is commonly used in water softeners to remove hardness from household water is Sodium Chloride (NaCl). The water "softening" process results in the release of high levels of sodium and chloride ions into the septic system where they quickly pass into the drain field and down into the groundwater.

The standard for chloride in drinking water is 250 milligrams per liter (mg/L). This is the level at which the water will taste salty to most people. Less chloride than that and people tend not to notice it.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), standards for chloride in drinking water are merely guidelines since chloride does not pose a health risk - at least not at levels low enough that we cannot taste it.

We've all heard advice to limit salt intake to help stay healthy, right? It's linked to high blood pressure and thereby an increased risk of heart disease. For humans, the primary source of salt (sodium chloride: NaCl) is the diet.

But, there are members of our community who "taste" chloride at a level of less than 100 mg/L, and whose well-being is profoundly affected in even these small amounts. The level of sodium found in McHenry County groundwater (in the Boone Creek watershed) is already 80 mg/L AND RISING!

A study documenting the dramatic increases in chloride levels in even rural areas of the northeastern US provides a lot of good information about the ecological impact of increasing salinity. The impacts include:

- altered natural community composition (many plants and animals cannot tolerate the higher chloride levels, so are replaced by those that can)

- changes in plant and animal reproduction and mortality (some plants and animals stop reproducing, and others die)

- changes in the structure of microbial communities.

This last one may seem trivial, but those microbes are critical to the soil food web that so much of life depends upon. Consider that oak growing in your yard - if the water table becomes salty, the beneficial fungi and microbes that the trees roots depend upon to feed the tree can die, and then the tree won't be far behind.