Archive for the 'in the media' Category

Andrew Bird

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on May 6, 2007
in in the media
. 0 Comments

I’ve been waiting for a reason to spread the good word of Andrew Bird on here for a while. Now, Grist has given me a chance!

Bird is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians of all time. His albums have gone from dark jazz to 50s doo-wop to atmospheric folk and everything in between. I first saw him perform a free show outside Boston’s Faneuil Hall back in 2001, and have been hooked ever since. Turns out, according to Grist, the violinist-guitarist-whistler-glockenspieler is also pretty green.

Bird tours in a biodiesel bus, bikes around his bike-unfriendly hometown in Illinois, and has stripped-down backstage requests.

Oh, and in case I haven’t mentioned it enough, he’s also a kick-ass musician.

Read the full article at Grist, then go see Bird in concert. He’s got a few more dates in the States before heading to Europe. Or at the least, pick up his new album. Or any album, really.

Whatever You Think

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on April 27, 2007
in climbing and in the media
. 0 Comments

About his controversial climb of Delicate Arch, it is still impressive to watch Dean Potter at work.

I stumbled upon this admittedly-old video of him ascending the Nose of El Capitan in 2006 via the wonder that is the Google Homepage. Makes for good Friday viewing while you’re waiting for 5 o’ clock to roll around …



You Should Be Watching This

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on April 2, 2007
in in the media and motivations
. 2 Comments

6 days until I can hike again.

Until then, I sure am thankful for the Discovery Channel / BBC’s “Planet Earth” documentaries. The 11-part series is running through the end of April, and over the weekend my TiVo caught the episodes I missed last week.

It. Is. Incredible.

The series took five years to film, and was shot on state-of-the-art cameras in every conceivable situation … and it shows. It’s hands down one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on television, and notable for being the very first thing I’ve seen that made me wish I owned an HDTV.

Check your local listings or set yourself a Season Pass. You will not be disappointed. Even if you haven’t joined the digital television ‘revolution’ yet.

Ken Burns Wants Your Park Pics

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on March 29, 2007
in National Parks and Monuments and in the media
. 1 Comment

Would you donate your old National Parks home videos and snapshots to America’s finest living documentarian? Of course you would! Why wouldn’t you?

Ken Burns is starting work on a new documentary about the history and human experience of our National Park system, and he wants your pictures, movies, and stories.

He’s specifically looking for materials from the 1980s and earlier, and the folks at National Park Traveler have all the contact info you’ll need.

If you send something in, you won’t get it back, but if it gets in the finished documentary you’ll get a free DVD of the series … which is pretty nice. Those PBS box sets can get pricey.

ViceTV on Mountaintop Removal

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on March 27, 2007
in Environmentalism, Web Sites and Apps and in the media
. 1 Comment

Google Earth files and pictures are great, but nothing does the injustice of Mountaintop Removal like full-motion video.

Luckily, ViceTV takes care of that for us, with a five-part mini-documentary called Toxic West Virginia.

Eco-Chick was kind enough to embed the first episode of the series, which has some nice production value to it. Well worth checking out.

Via Treehugger.

Missing Mountains

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on March 16, 2007
in Environmentalism, Politics, Web Sites and Apps and in the media
. 4 Comments

Google Earth is a great program. You can use for anything from casual sightseeing, browsing a hike, or spying on your neighbors. Now it’s also being used as a visceral visual aid for a continuing environmental tragedy that somehow continues to go unnoticed.

“Mountaintop Removal” is the surprisingly accurate name for a popular type of mining in Appalachia. Basically, to get at coal veins, the top of a mountain is deforested and exploded, with the debris pushed into neighboring valleys. The coal is processed, leaving huge lakes of toxic slurry behind, and then the mine operators plant some non-native vegetation and move on to the next mountain.

Obviously, this causes some problems. Deforestation increases the risk of landslides, and several slurry ponds have burst through their dams or through old mine shafts, wreaking havoc on the communities below them. The 2000 Martin County Sludge Spill contaminated the drinking water of 27,000 people and was 30 times larger than the Exxon Valez spill.

As the push for “clean” coal escalates in the coming years, mountaintop removal is likely to increase … unless more people know about it. And that’s where Google Earth comes in.

I Love Mountains hosts a comprehensive Google Earth “Memorial For the Mountains,” which shows the mountains before and after mountaintop removal mining began. It’s also got detailed information on each mountain, written by local residents, maps of all the sludge dams in the mountains, and an overlay of the larger mining sites on top of major cities — so us urbanites can get a good idea of just how huge these things are. Here’s one of the mines nearly covering the entire island of Manhattan:

Pretty crazy, eh?

And if Google Earth doesn’t float your boat, they’ve also got some Flickr pools of photographic evidence:

Urban Hiking

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on March 13, 2007
in City Life, Web Sites and Apps, hiking and in the media
. 1 Comment

When I first started up this site, some of my more urban-environment-loving friends suggested, probably only partially jokingly, that I take a few days off to embark on hikes inside the city of Los Angeles. Decked out in hiking gear and with tongue firmly planted in cheek, I concede that it would probably be pretty funny. I might still do it someday, but I’d have to keep time for an actual hike or my system gets all thrown off balance for the week.

Lucky for me, though, there’s already someone who’s doing it. I stumbled upon Walking in LA while I was putting off doing work, and was pleasantly surprised. The unnamed site-runner takes walks through sections of the LA sprawl and accompanies them with some great pictures.

While I’d like to get a bit more writing out of it, it’s a fun site to poke around. And for those of us who can’t even stand to look at pictures of cities, there are some great road trip albums of handsome western states and some explorations of the L.A. River.

Convenient Truths

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on March 9, 2007
in Environmentalism, Web Sites and Apps and in the media
. 0 Comments

Treehugger and Seventh Generation have been running an online video contest called “Convenient Truths.”

Participants were asked to create original 2 minute movies aimed at inspiring, raising awareness, or showing how us Average Joes can make a difference in the climate crisis. The videos are up and waiting to voted on by us, the environmentally-leaning internet audience.

I’ve been scanning the site for a little while now, and the entries run the gamut from MySpace-quality video blogs to documentary teasers to surprisingly effective public relations pieces.

Many of the entries are, unfortunately, aimed at the sort of people who are probably already doing everything they can to reduce their carbon footprint. It’s great to see people converting their cars to biodiesel or installing composting toilets in their yards, but the biggest change is probably going to be from masses of people making small changes in their habits. That’s why these two videos, encouraging the switch to CFL bulbs and biking to work, are probably my favorites of the nearly 100 candidates:


Click To Play


Click To Play

I also really, really like this one. But that’s mainly because I have a not so secret love affair with the Prelinger Archives:


Click To Play

Disagree? Go vote, why don’tcha?

Sierra Podcast

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on March 6, 2007
in in the media
. 0 Comments

I got an email from the fine folks at the Sierra Club, pimping out their latest edition of their Sierra Club Radio podcast.

I’ve never listened before, but it’s actually a neat, concise little piece of audio. This week’s episode features a great interview with Arlene Blum, who’s known primarily as a climber (and scientist), but has some great hiking tales, too. Like many folks I know, she was inspired to hike by the scenery of the West Coast, and she’s got a great story about forcing her way to the summit of Denali back when women were only allowed to trek to base camp to help cook and clean.

Crazy.

The rest of the podcast is divided into smaller news stories, green living tips, and some great in-depth coverage of the TXU coal power plant struggles in Texas.

Check out some past episodes and learn how to subscribe at the Sierra Club Radio site. I’ll be signing up as soon as my iPod gets back from the shop…

A River Reborn?

Published
by
Modern Hiker
on February 2, 2007
in City Life, Environmentalism and in the media
. 0 Comments

I still remember the first time I saw the Los Angeles River.

It looked and smelled like a sewer, walled-in by concrete and lined with garbage, beer cans, shopping carts and mattresses. A chain link, barbed-wire fence surrounded both sides, not that anyone would ever want to get down closer to it.

Not surprising, I guess, for a city with such a history of Paving Over Everything, but still a shock to a transplanted New Englander. I only knew cities that grew up around rivers because they provided for them, not any that grew near rivers in spite of them.

Due to a series of massive floods in the early and mid 1900s, Los Angeles and Orange Counties went through an expensive and lengthy surgery, courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Rivers were dammed, banks were filled in with concrete, and in the end we were left with quite possibly the ugliest urban river in America. Hooray.

Los Angeles, in its Infinite Wisdom, finally noticed that just about every other city with a river integrates it into its infrastructure, making parks, centralized living and commercial spaces, and generally pleasant, unifying urban areas. Now we want that, instead.

End Pavement links to an L.A. Times story about a new $2 billion plan to tear down the concrete and turn our glorified drainage ditch into “one of the city’s most treasured landmarks.”

Or, visually, from this:

to this:

The plan would also raze many nasty industrial and abandoned areas along the river and replace them with small, dense residential and commercial neighborhoods and public gathering spaces, which are sorely lacking in the current sprawl.

Obviously, the price-tag and timeline (25 to 50 years for full completion) seem steep, but the potential to drastically change the very makeup of Los Angeles for the better is unbelievable. Much of the money needed has yet to be secured, but the Times points out the plan has some serious political momentum behind it. Most of the City Council supports it, as does Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who launched Million Trees L.A. last year.

And anything that makes L.A. even a tiny bit greener is alright by me.

If you’re into official city documents, you can read the full plan in PDF format here.