A new survey finds that many people say they’ll cut down on holiday shopping this year because of high-energy costs. But even the researchers who conducted the survey are skeptical that will actually happen. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports:
Transcript
A new survey finds that many people say they’ll cut down on holiday
shopping this year because of high-energy costs, but even the researchers
who conducted the survey are skeptical that will actually happen. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports:
Consumers have told the Credit Union National Association for the past
six years that they planned to spend about the same or less during the
holiday season than they did the year before, but the association’s Chief
Economist Bill Hampel says spending has actually gone up each year.
“We typically go into holiday spending season saying I’m not going to do
what I did last year I’m going to restrain myself and then by end of
December we have this post holiday spending hangover saying whoops
we, our bills have run up we’ve spent more than we planned to.”
Hampel says this year, many people say high gas prices and heating bills
will curb their holiday spending. Still, Hampel says the economy would
benefit more if people spend what they can afford on gifts and cut down
on energy use. He says what we spend on presents goes into the
domestic economy, while energy spending typically goes to foreign
suppliers.
"Meter cruising" is when people drive repeatedly around the block to find an open curbside parking meter. A new book says that not only is meter cruising a waste of gas, but a symptom of a larger urban planning problem. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Finding a free parking space on the street is sometimes a big hassle. But cheap parking is beginning to be viewed as an environmental problem. A growing number of city planners say free parking isn’t really free. It just shifts the cost to taxpayers and society at large. In the first of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee has a report on this new view of the ongoing search for a parking space:
Transcript
Finding a free parking space on the street is sometimes a big hassle. But, cheap parking is beginning to be viewed as an environmental problem. A growing number of city planners say free parking isn’t really free. It just shifts the cost to taxpayers and society at large. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee has a report on this new view of the ongoing search for a parking space.
If you’ve ever played the board game Monopoly, you’ve probably crossed your fingers as you approached the spot called “free parking.” If your token lands there, it doesn’t cost you anything.
It’s free.
But a researcher says there’s really no such thing as “free parking,” at least not in the real world. UCLA Professor Donald Shoup has spent 20 years dispelling the myth that free parking is good for everyone.
In his latest book, titled The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup tries to show that empty cars are taking the public and the environment for a costly ride.
“Bad parking policies are connected to a lot of other problems we have in society, but people haven’t been able to trace them to parking, and I think I’ve tried to do that.”
Take one of the biggest traffic issues facing large cities: meter cruising. That’s when drivers circle a block again and again, waiting for a curb-side meter.
“The average time it took to find a parking space was about three minutes. That doesn’t seem like too much for an individual to spending hunting for a free parking space, but it adds up if everybody else does it.”
Shoup says meter cruising wastes millions of gallons of gas every year. It also creates a lot of traffic congestion and pollution. Meter cruising’s common to downtowns, but even neighborhood shopping areas face the cruising problem.
Here’s an example. Devon Avenue is a bustling commercial strip on Chicago’s far North Side. There are lots of Indo-Pakistani restaurants, Muslim book stores and Jewish bakeries there. On a typical Saturday, the area’s so popular that only a handful of parking meters stay open for more than a few minutes. And it’s no wonder. Parking at the meter only costs 25 cents per hour.
The situation’s made worse by neighborhood parking permits. That’s a policy that keeps nearby residential streets off-limits to shoppers and restaurant-goers. Walking down the sidewalk, Grace is toting several shopping bags that heave with fresh fruit and Indian condiments.
“I went on the side streets and found a place about six blocks away without a need for a permit and took it and walked in. It’s one of the first really beautiful days of spring, so it wasn’t a hardship.”
If it hadn’t been such a nice day, Grace might have been circling the nearby blocks, wasting gas, trying to find a space at a parking meter.
Local shop owners say too many customers don’t like the parking situation. So the store owners complain to the local alderman, Bernard Stone. Seated in his office, Alderman Stone says no politician can afford to ignore demand for cheap parking. So he’s come up with a solution.
Stone: “If you look over your head, you’ll see a drawing of a new garage that’s gonna be built at Devon and Rockwell.”
Allee: “When’s that gonna be up?”
Stone: “Well, it should be started very shortly, I’ve been working at it for ten years.”
Developers for that project promised to create 200 low-rate parking spaces. It’s a deal they’ve struck in exchange for free city-owned land where they want to build. But the expert on parking, Donald Shoup says as politically appealing as that type of solution is, it doesn’t work. It really doesn’t keep cruising in check.
His suggestion?
Well, he takes a page from both the free-marketeers and grassroots activists. First, he says raise the price for metered parking. A lot. He says how much takes a little calculating.
“We could call this the Goldilocks principle of curb parking prices. The price is too high if too many spaces are vacant and too low if no spaces are vacant. If about fifteen percent are vacant, the price is just right.”
Traffic engineers say keeping fifteen percent of spots open stops meter cruising. To save money, people leave their parking spots sooner and everyone can find new spots faster. Next, make higher parking prices politically attractive to shop owners by letting the neighborhoods keep the meter money. Critics say that’s a hard sell because many times, people worry the money will go to city hall instead.
But Shoup says it works. He points to some California towns, where the money goes to repair streets and even hire security guards. Professor Shoup’s supporters say he might be too optimistic about the prospects for change in our impulse to hunt for the closest, most perfect parking space.
Shoup says he wants to be remembered as the first who showed, unless you’re just playing games, there’s no such thing as free parking.
A new book says that much of the space covered by parking lots is only designed for use for the holiday rush, and is unused for the rest of the year. (Photo by Lars Sundström)
A growing number of city planners say we’re building more parking than we really need. They say the fact that nearly all parking is free, makes the situation worse. Their ideas are turning nearly fifty years of urban planning on its head. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee has this second report in a two-part series:
Transcript
A growing number of city planners say we’re building more parking than we really need. They say the fact that nearly all parking is free, makes the situation worse. Their ideas are turning nearly fifty years of urban planning on its head. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee has this report:
If you had to pay for a parking space, would you think twice before making a frivolous trip, say, to a convenience store for a candy bar?
City planning researcher Donald Shoup bets you would stay home if you had to pay, or maybe you’d walk instead. That’s a point he makes in his recent book, The High Cost of Free Parking. In it, he tries to show that free parking entices us to waste gas. He says paved lots also compete for better uses of land, like parks or housing. Shoup says the problem’s very real – but to see it, you need to step out of your automobile.
“Any view of suburbia from the air will show you a lot of parking lots and a lot of these parking lots will have empty parking spaces.”
I decided to take a look at what’s Shoup’s talking about in Lincolnwood Illinois, a Chicago suburb. I cheated by skipping the air fare, though. Some new Internet sites can provide satellite photos of your area. I joined two of Lincolnwood’s city planners, Tim Clarke and John Lebeque, in their office to get a birds-eye view of their home turf.
Clarke: “The plus is closer.”
Allee: “Right, and go ahead and see if you can find… There it is. Lincolnwood.”
Clarke: “Wow.”
Lebeque: “Whoa.”
Allee: “So find a retail strip.”
Turns out, Donald Shoup was right. Within a minute, we find a popular grocery store, with a huge parking lot. Tim Clarke recognizes it.
“It’s probably one-third filled. I’m not sure when this aerial was taken. I’ve never seen the parking lot full.”
So why should a busy store’s parking lot be two-thirds empty most of the time? Shoup says it’s the cities’ fault. Cities make the rules. They say how many spaces each new business, house, and apartment building must provide.
By his estimation, city government does a poor job at guessing how much parking we really need. Shoup says governments force businesses to provide enough spaces to meet peak demand, such as the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year.
“Everyone understands the advice, don’t build your church for Easter Sunday, but we build our parking for the week before Christmas.”
In other words, cities tell stores to build parking for the year’s busiest two weeks, even if most of the spaces are empty the rest of the time. He says, without city pressure, a lot of businesses would create smaller lots or they’d sell off parking space they don’t need.
Tim Clarke, the Lincolnwood planner, says suburbs do err on the side of too much parking, but they’re often planning for future growth. He gives an example of a small Lincolnwood dental practice that had 7 examination rooms, but only used three of them. The dentist wanted to build fewer parking spaces than the village required, because it was small and family-run.
“But one could imagine that that family at some time in life would sell that business and someone would come in and want to use all 6 or 7 examining rooms at one time.”
So city planners have to look at the long term use of a building.
Many of Lincolnwood’s largest retailers actually build more than they need to. Bob Johnson runs a Lowe’s Home Improvement store built in late 2003. He says stores like his don’t gamble with having too few spaces.
“I think customers are going to shop, again, where they feel most comfortable and what’s convenient for them. The key word there being convenience. If they’re inconvenienced, they might drive another couple blocks down the road.”
Shoup says that’s a calculation that businesses have to make. He says market forces can help decide how many spaces should be built, but government should not force retailers to have too many spaces. Nor should it force them to offer only free parking.
In fact, Professor Shoup says cities, especially suburban cities, could use land more efficiently if businesses controlled demand for parking like they control everything else: by setting the right price.
“I’m just saying that cities should not force anyone to provide more parking than drivers are willing to pay for.”
Killing our appetite for cheap, abundant parking could be difficult, but Shoup says pressure’s building for change. He says, as suburbs grow, space gets tight. And that raises prices for all land uses.
“I think most people now are focused on the high cost of housing. I think we’ve got our priorities wrong if housing is expensive and the parking is free.”
In his battle against too much parking, Shoup says the most effective weapon might be a little comparison shopping. Free parking might not seem so cheap once it’s compared to the cost of other needs.
Urban sprawl not only costs the environment, but taxpayers as well, according to a smart growth proponent. (Photo by Kevin Walsh)
A leader in the ‘Smart Growth’ movement is calling on local governments to think about all the hidden costs of encouraging sprawling housing developments. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
reports:
Transcript
A leader in the “Smart Growth” movement is calling on local governments to think about all the hidden costs of encouraging sprawling housing developments. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
The Executive Director of Smart Growth America says the way we build subdivisions costs other taxpayers money. Don Chen says houses on big lots mean longer streets, extra lengths of water and sewer pipes and other costs.
“You are also creating a very automobile dependent situation where people have to drive to get anywhere and as a result, all of the supportive shopping and different uses, destinations have to have large parking lots, you have to build more roads, wider roadways to accommodate that type of lifestyle.”
Chen says taxpayers who don’t live in the big new subdivisions still end up subsidizing some of the costs of the developments. That’s because the real estate taxes don’t pay for all of the subsequent road building. Developers say in many cases they don’t have a choice because local governments require the bigger lots.
Author Bob Lilienfeld suggests that we find ways to express our love for each other in less material ways. (Photo by Denise Docherty)
The message from advertisers this holiday season seems to be: buy more because you and your family deserve it. Retailers are hopeful we’ll all spend just a little bit more to make the holidays shiny and bright. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham went to the shopping mall with a guy who thinks we ought to scale back our spending during the
holidays:
Transcript
The message from advertisers this holiday season seems to be, buy more because you and your family deserve it. Retailers are hopeful we’ll all spend just a little bit more to make the holidays shiny and bright. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham went to the shopping mall with a guy who thinks we ought to scale back our spending during the holidays:
Bob Lilienfeld is one of the co-authors of a book called Use Less Stuff. As you might guess, he’s an advocate of using fewer resources, including buying less stuff during the holidays. We asked him to meet us at a big shopping mall to talk about why he thinks buying less means more.
Lilienfeld: “I want you to go back to when you were a kid. Think about the two or three things in your life, the things that you did that made you really happy. I guarantee none of those have to do with physical, material gifts. They have to do with time you spent with your family or things you did with your friend. But, it wasn’t the time you said ‘Oh, it was the year I got that train,’ or ‘the year I got those cuff links,’ or ‘when I got those earrings.’ That’s the principle difference. We’re trying so hard to be good and to let people know that we love them, but the things that we love about other people and that they love about us have nothing to do with material goods.”
Graham: “There’s a certain expection during the holidays, though, that we will get something nice for the people we love and here at this mall as we’re looking around, there are lots of enticements to fulfill that expectation.”
Lilienfeld: “That’s true, but we’ve been led to believe that more is better, and to a great extent more gifts is not better than fewer gifts. Quality and quantity are very different kinds of thoughts and we’ve been led to believe economically that quantity is more important. But, in reality it’s the qualitative aspects of life that we long remember and really are the ones we treasure.”
Graham: “Now from the news media, I get the impression that if I don’t do my part during the holidays in shopping, that it’s really going to hurt a lot of Americans, the American economy. $220-billion during the holiday season. It’s 25-percent of retailers’ business. So, if I don’t buy or if I scale back my buying, won’t I be hurting the economy?”
Lilienfeld: “It’s always been 25-percent of retailers’ business, even if you go back 30 or 40 years, and that’s probably not going to change. It comes down to your thinking through what’s good for you, what’s good for your family, what’s good for your friends and not worrying so much about what’s good for the economy and what’s good for big companies.”
Retailers are expecting sales to be better this year than last year. So, that simpler lifestyle that Lilienfeld is talking about is not widespread enough to have any real impact on the overall shopping season. But apparently the economy isn’t strong everywhere.
We talked to some shoppers about their holiday shopping plans and the idea of simplifying things. Many of them told us that the economy was forcing them to cut back on gift buying…
Shopper 1: “Well, because of my limited budget, I have to buy, like – I have a list – and I have to buy one at a time, so, being pretty poor is being pretty simple. I’m kind of already living that way.”
Shopper 2: “I don’t need to celebrate Christmas by buying people gifts. And I can give people gifts all year long. And I — Christmas is kind of sham-y to me.”
Shopper 3: “This year, yeah, my family is like, ‘Don’t get me anything.’ I’m going to do something, but hopefully it will be smaller and less expensive and all that.”
Shopper 4: “Well, I don’t feel compelled to buy something because an economist says it’s my part as an American. And I think people are going to get smarter and smarter about how they spend their money and the almighty dollar.”
With the constant messages on television, radio, the Internet and newspapers to spend, there’s a lot of persusive power by advertisers to buy now and think about the cost later.
Since Bob Lilienfeld is such an advocate of a simpler lifestyle, it makes you wonder about his own shopping habits.
Graham: “Do you ever find yourself in the shopping mall, buying stuff for the folks you have on your Christmas list or your holiday list?”
Lilienfeld: “All the time. But, what I try to do is two things. One is think about the fact that more isn’t necessarily better. But the other thing I really try and do is look for gifts that are what I call ‘experiential’ as opposed to material. Tickets. Things where people can go to plays or operas or ball games so that they have an experience. Same thing with travel. I mean, if I could give my father a gift or if I could help him afford to go somewhere, like to see me and the kids, that gift is probably worth a lot more to both of us than if I just gave him a couple of bottles of wine.”
And Lilienfeld says you don’t waste as much wrapping paper when you wrap up tickets.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
Lilies like these reside in the Reinstein Nature Preserve. Environmentalists worry about natural life in the preserve as the state of New York considers opening it up without restrictions.
Imagine a suburban, backyard wilderness where 200 year-old trees still stand. That’s exactly what you’ll find at the 300 acre Reinstein Nature Preserve. It meanders right through the heart of a bustling suburb. The preserve has been limited to small groups led by a nature guide. But there’s a new plan to give unrestricted access. Some environmentalists worry that would ruin the preserve. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak takes us to the woods – and to the debate:
Transcript
Imagine a suburban, backyard wilderness where 200 year-old trees still stand.
That’s exactly what you’ll find at the 300 acre Reinstein Nature preserve.
It meanders right through the heart of a bustling suburb. The preserve has been limited
to small groups led by a nature guide. But there’s a new plan to give unrestricted access.
Some environmentalists worry that would ruin the preserve. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Joyce Kryszak takes us to the woods – and to the debate:
A Great Blue Heron perches lazily in the distance above an expanse of pink water lilies.
At first Bob Reinstein doesn’t see the bird.
“I should’ve brought my field glasses.”
But then its giant wings spread wide, laboring to clear the water in this serene Monet-like setting.
“The lilies were a gift from two different environmental organizations…”
The man and the majestic heron both seem oblivious to the rush of cars and people just
beyond the edge of the woods. This is the Reinstein Nature Preserve. It’s framed on all sides
by a sprawling suburb of houses and shopping plazas in Western New York. Like his parents before
him, Bob Reinstein says he’s risked his life for nearly sixty years defending this scene; he guards it against trespassers – and sometimes trespassers with guns.
“Their lives were threatened several times, in fact, mine was also. I was unarmed at the time,
but he had pointed his shotgun at me and threatened to shoot. Realizing it was pointing at my face,
I stopped following him.”
But Reinstein never stopped trying to protect the nature preserve his father created half a century ago.
By the time he died in 1984, the elder Reinstein had dug nine ponds, planted thousands of trees,
rare ferns and flowers to compliment the ancient scene. The younger Reinstein says it’s like a
living museum.
“Where else can schoolchildren walk back through history a hundred and fifty years and see
samples of what existed then, that are still here today?”
Reinstein says his father bequeathed the preserve to the state to keep it from being trampled.
He stipulated that it must stay forever wild. People could visit, but only for educational
purposes. And only with a trained nature guide. That could all be changing. A proposal by the
State Department of Environmental Conservation would give the public unrestricted access.
Jane Wiercioch lives in the nearby suburb and loves visiting her backyard wilderness. But today
Weirchioch is handing out petitions here. She hopes to stop the DEC from opening the preserve. She
says it would leave the woods vulnerable.
“I know I came in here the other day for a walk around that lily loop with my great granddaughters
and, of course, they were chasing frogs. So, I’m with them, I’m yelling at them, ‘don’t do anything.’ But can you imagine having people just coming in here and doing what they want?”
State conservation officials say bringing in more people is the whole point. Meaghan Boice-Green
is a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. She says all
other department-run properties are open to the public. Boice-Green says unrestricted access would be good for both the public and for the agency.
“We’re not talking about property that hasn’t touched by the hand of man, and in order for us
to obtain the funding to do the habitat maintenance that’s going to be necessary to maintain
this manmade habitat, we have to provide some public access. We’re not going to be able to
access funds to support a property that the public isn’t allowed to access.”
But the state has never had any trouble finding money to maintain the preserve before.
And Boice-Green couldn’t offer specifics about any extra funding.
Terry Boyle has volunteered as a guide at the preserve for eight years. But he agrees the
preserve should be unrestricted. Boyle says visitors can’t have a truly natural experience
if someone’s watching their every move.
“A lot of those people who do want to come in, they want to take photographs, they want to sit
down and reflect for a little bit about what they’re looking at, and that kind of stuff. So,
they can’t go at their own leisurely pace with tour guides, because we have to push them through a little bit
faster.”
But the head of a local environmental group sees it differently. Larry Watson says if the
preserve is opened, there won’t be anything left to look at anyway. He believes the state is
just tired of policing the woods. But Watson says it was Dr. Reinstein’s wish that the
preserve be kept wild. And he should know. As a young boy sixty years ago, Watson spent many
long hours in the woods, helping Reinstein plant the saplings that now tower overhead.
“If they turn this into what they want to, it will be nothing more than a state park.
And we’d rather see it kept as an individual showpiece and a place New York state can be quite
proud of and show the rest of the country what can be done in the way of environmental
conservation.”
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation says it hasn’t made a final
decision. It will consider the wishes of those who want access to the preserve to remain
restricted. But many people are also demanding it be opened. Ultimately, the state says
it will likely let people come to the preserve whenever they want – and trust them
to be good caretakers.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Joyce Kryszak.
According to the USDA, the number of farmers’ markets in the United States has increased nearly 80 percent in the past decade, with roughly 3,100 in operation. Like many other Midwesterners, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Julia King buys much of her warm-weather produce from local growers. But King thinks those farmers grow something else that might be just as important as food:
Transcript
According to the USDA, the number of farmers’ markets in the United States has
increased nearly 80 percent in the past decade, with roughly 3,100 in operation. Like
many other Midwesterners, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Julia King buys
much of her warm-weather produce from local growers. But King thinks those farmers
grow something else that might be just as important as food…
Not long ago, my ten-year-old daughter gathered her allowance, dropped her coins into a
see-through, polka-dot plastic purse and journeyed with me to our local farmers’ market.
Inside the old warehouse-turned-emporium, we strolled up and down the aisles. She
sniffed bars of soap and fragrant candles, poked bags of cheese bread and gazed at
almond croissants. But it was a large butternut squash that finally caught her eye.
She smiled and pointed at the unusual treasure. The farmer behind the counter called out
a price and I watched from a distance as she dug into her little plastic purse, pulling out a
quarter here, a dime there. As she calculated the numbers, her smile faded; she was fifty
cents shy of the total.
“Oh, you go ahead and take it anyway,” he told her. “It’s a little bit old, really.”
She paused, uncertain. I stepped into view and offered a dollar to the farmer, but he
stood his ground. He wanted to sell the squash to my daughter for the price she could
afford. He said it was a fair exchange. We thanked him repeatedly and my daughter took
the big pear-shaped vegetable in her arms like it was a baby doll.
It was not the first time one of the market’s farmers had put kindness before cash. Shop
there long enough and someone is bound to say, “Oh, take two, they’re small” or “This
one’s a little bruised; I’ll throw it in for free.”
These aren’t “blue light specials” or “supersaver sales;” they’re gifts from people who
never tire of the magic that springs from the earth. In a year of Saturdays, I’ve been
invited to marvel at the shape of a carrot, to behold the size of a potato, to delight in the
beauty of a snapdragon.
In a nation of box stores and billionaire wannabes, a nation where “excess” is master, the
men and women who labor in the soil offer a glimpse of something different. It’s a
commerce measured not only by what they gain, but also by what they give.
John Greenleaf Whittier put it best in his poem, “Song of Harvest”:
Give fools their gold, and knaves their power;
Let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall;
Who sows a field, or trains a flower,
Or plants a tree, is more than all.
HOST TAG: Julia King lives and writes in Goshen, Indiana. She comes to us by way of
the Great Lakes Radio Consortium.
We’ve come a long way since Henry Ford’s black Model T. Cars of every shape, size – and color – now practically dominate American life. Which poses a problem – what to do with the cars once they’re piled high in junkyards. A recent public art project offered one passionate recycler a chance to reuse junked cars in his art. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak has this story of “Art on Wheels”:
Transcript
We’ve come a long way since Henry Ford’s black Model T. Cars of every shape, size – and color
– now practically dominate American life. Which poses a problem – what to do with the cars
once they’re piled high in junkyards. A recent public art project offered one passionate
recycler a chance to reuse junked cars in his art. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak has this story of “Art on Wheels”:
The American landscape is filled with automobiles. Lines of fancy molded steel are everywhere
– in parking lots and bumper to bumper along the highways. Or, as Canadian folk singer Bruce
Cockburn once observed, a kind of “sheet metal ballet.” But, sadly, when the dance finally ends,
there’s nothing left but junkyards of crushed steel. A recent community art project suggested that
re-use could be an answer to the old environmental debate of what to do with all the junk.
(sound of kids at the art show)
Dozens of artists were asked to come up with their own unique ways to re-use at least some of
that automotive scrap for the recent “Art on Wheels” Project. Art teacher Bruce Adams describes
what he and his high school students call the “Environmentally Friendly Car.”
“There’s a picket fence on each side. The front we call the front lawn, because the surface is a
big, grass lawn, with a bird house, so the birds can live there over the summer. Then the back of
it, we call the backyard, it’s a garden, it’s a got a pond, it’s got a stream running down to the pond
– it had fish living in there all summer.”
Adams says they built the car as sort of an ironic commentary on the whole American dream
thing. That’s what many of sculptures in the exhibit were designed to do – to make a statement.
Other sculptures, such as the cement truck chicken, were simply intended to be outlandish. But
for one of the exhibit artists, Doug McCullum, re-use isn’t a novelty. It’s a lifelong expression.
You might even say an obsession.
“My sister broke her femur…I made a lamp out of her steel leg splint. It was a little strange
thinking that, you know, this thing spent six months in my sister’s leg –
but she kind of enjoyed the lamp.”
McCullum is, well, shall we say, passionate about re-use? Okay, so you might even call him the
Dr. Frankenstein of the junkyard. His Gremlin car sculpture from the exhibit features some of
his junkyard creations. They’re popping out of the roof, the hood, the doors and the gas tank.
Come meet Scratch, Knock, Guzzle, and the rest of the Gremlins gang.
“The car is covered in a wide variety of monsters, all named after things that go wrong with your
car – henceforth the name Gremlins. They are all made out of various things like air compressor
tanks, and old recycled drive shafts, and snow blower hoods, and old air tanks.”
No, McCullum isn’t an auto mechanic, or a junk dealer. He’s an architect by trade, who likes to
create recycled art in his spare time. But McCullum doesn’t have to go far for re-use materials
when he begins a project. He just walks downstairs and scrounges around in his basement.
McCullum says he saves everything – and he’s especially partial to automobile salvage.
“I have so much steel, and so much stuff that I’ve recycled in my basement that it would take a
small crew to move that stuff out, and that’s just the way I create.”
McCullum says there are plenty of worn out or broken parts from his own cars down there. And
he’s never one to pass up somebody else’s cast off muffler or tire tread abandoned at the side of
the road. McCullum hauls it all home for his next project. And if he does run into roadblock
while creating? McCullum says he loves to go shopping – at the junkyard of course.
“It’s like shopping at the mall for me. I like climbing through the piles, and digging through
something, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. Like, oh… this could be a great head, and sit
that aside… I go looking for a part and I come out with like a couple hundred pounds worth of
steel. Like, yeahhhh, like there was a big sale at the mall and I’m coming out with the spoils of
my labor.”
But make no mistake, for McCullum re-use isn’t an idle past time, it’s a professional and personal
commitment. As both an artist and an architect he says he believes in the beauty and the
possibility of preserving everything. McCullum says things can and should last. He says it’s
purely a matter of vision.
“Basically, anything that is discarded can be re-used in a wide variety of ways, just people don’t
have the vision or that kind of mentality to really think in a different way. And that’s really what
this whole project is about – the Art on Wheels thing in general – you can re-use everything.”
(sound of kid yelling, “Look a bug car! There’s a bug on top!”)
MCullum says the unusual automobile inspired sculptures were fun to make – and to look at.
Mind you, he doesn’t expect to see gremlin cars or cement truck chickens roaring down the
highway anytime soon. But McCullum says hopefully the exhibit will help turn people on to the
possibilities of recycling.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Joyce Kryszak.
As businesses and governments struggle to find ways to revive the economy, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator James Howard Kunstler says that it’s time to re-scale the marketplace. And, ultimately, to re-think how we live and work:
Transcript
As businesses and governments struggle to find ways to revive the economy, Great Lakes
Radio Consortium commentator James Howard Kunstler says that it’s time to re-scale the
marketplace. And, ultimately, to re-think how we live and work:
Not long ago, The New York Times reported that car sales had fallen off 30 percent. The
paper commented that quote “strong auto sales this year have been a key contributor in
propping up consumer spending, which in turn has been the main impetus of economic
growth.”
Is that all our economy is about? Buying and selling cars? In a way, the answer is yes.
The U.S. economy is now based on the creation and maintenance of suburban sprawl and
all its furnishings and accessories.
What keeps the cycle going? The easiest credit the world has ever seen. Often to people
with poor records of repaying loans. What happens when the music stops, and the zero
percent “miracle loans” stop with it? What other economic activity is there in the United
States? We don’t make anything here anymore except movies, TV shows, and pop music,
and only a tiny percent of Americans can be in show biz.
We’ve outsourced the actual making of most mundane products to distant nations where
people work for peanuts. Everyday retail trade is conducted through so-called “efficient”
national chain stores. Behind this mask of efficiency, though, lies the wreckage of
America’s communities, and the complex, fine-grained networks of economic relations
that once supported them. In rural America, ruin and depression are rampant among
small farmers. Today, we subsist on Caesar salads which travel an average of 2,500
miles from field to table.
This a system primed for unwinding. We are fast becoming a nation reliant on everyone
but ourselves. More tragically, as it unwinds, we will be stuck with all the unsustainable
furnishings: the far-flung subdivisions of commodity housing; the redundant chain stores;
the countless miles of blacktop in need of continual repair; the gazillion cars that we can
no longer afford to replace. We’ll be stuck living in places that are not worth living in,
and not worth caring about, far from any food supplies, and with no networks of local
economic interdependency.
These are our prospects, and they can only be worsened by looming international military
mischief, Jihad, de-stabilized oil markets, and terrorism.
There’s really only one reasonable way out of this predicament: the re-scaling of
America. We face the enormous task of reconstructing local economic networks that add
up to real communities, which in turn add up to places worth caring about. It’s time to
re-size and downscale everything we do from farming to schooling to shopping. The
future is telling us very clearly that we have to start living locally, but we are not
listening, and we are not prepared.
James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere and other books. He
comes to us by way of the Great Lakes Radio Consortium.
Holiday season is in full swing. For most gift seekers that means crowded parking lots, long lines and hours at a mall, but Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator, Julia King, decided to avoid some of the mass production and commercialization of Christmas this year. Instead, she’ll get back to the “Holiday Spirit” by trying her hand at something a bit closer to home:
Transcript
Holiday Season is in full swing. For most gift seekers that means crowded parking lots, long
lines and hours at a mall. But Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator, Julia King, decided
to avoid some of the mass production and commercialization of Christmas this year. Instead,
she’ll get back to the “Holiday Spirit” by trying her hand at something a bit closer to home:
Now, I don’t like to brag, but can I just say that I MADE my holiday gifts this year? Let me tell
you the story of my apple butter.
In the fall, when other people were walking through crunchy leaves and carving pumpkins and
going on hayrides, I was riding my environmentally friendly bike to the local farmer’s market
where I bought many pounds of chemical-free Indiana apples and put them in my backpack and
then rode home with hard, yellow delicious apples digging into my spine and under my shoulder
blades. I had to do this many times because my family kept eating the apples. Like snacks,
instead of future gifts. So, I had to make a lot of bike rides with a lot of apples sticking into my
back.
Oh well, holiday spirit.
But I finally stockpile all the apples and the cider – oh yeah, the cider: I had to drive to the
farmers’ market twice in the rain to get fresh, un-pasteurized cider. Okay, so then I have
everything I need and I boil the cider until it reduces by half – which takes a couple of hours, then
I peel the apples (which doesn’t take as long but gives me a cramp in my right hand and makes
me wonder if I’m developing arthritis because I could be, you know; I’m not getting any
younger). Then I dump the apples into the reduced cider and boil and then simmer and then stir
and then boil and then simmer and then add secret, exotic spices (okay, cinnamon), and then boil
and stir and simmer for about thirty-nine days, during which time I can’t leave the house because
the stove is on, and fire safety requires that I stay. Finally, when all the moisture is gone, it’s time
to put the apple butter into jars and “process” it, which is the worst part because if you do it
wrong you could kill people. And that’s always especially sad at the holidays.
So, you have to wash and boil the jars, but NOT the lids with the rubber — because if you do, you
could kill people. You have to keep everything warm, and then you have to pour the apple butter
into the clean jars while it’s still boiling and then wipe the rim with a clean towel so that it seals
right and you don’t kill people.
Then you have to boil it in the closed jars for about fifteen minutes and then when it comes out
it’s supposed to make a sound as it cools and that should mean it’s safe.
And when it’s all done, you look around the kitchen and see dirty pots and pans and globs of
brown stuff all over your stove and yards of apple peels and there, in the midst of this chaos, sit
three little four-ounce jars of apple butter.
And then you go to the store the next day and see that it only costs a dollar-fifty! And you curse
capitalism. And now on top of making your friends and family play Russian roulette with
botulism, they have to sit through the story of how you made their apple butter.
Oh well, holiday spirit.
Julia King lives and writes in Goshen, Indiana. She comes to us by way of the Great Lakes Radio
Consortium.
