I’m excited to be participating in the 21st Annual Bikes Not Bombs (BNB) Bike-A-Thon on June 8th, riding 62 miles to raise money for this fine organization that promotes biking for transportation and community development.

ABOUT BIKES NOT BOMBS
BNB is doing many things right: recycling donated bikes, training city kids to repair bikes, sending bikes to developing countries and fighting to make the city more bike-friendly. What’s more, BNB has become the local bike shop that go to when I need repairs.

Biking may not be the answer to all the worlds problems, but it is an increasingly important lifestyle choice that allows many of us to get where we need to go and to contribute to the health of our communities and the environment.

HOW YOU CAN HELP
I’m looking for people to contributing to BNB’s work by supporting my ride. If you’re able to contribute something, I would really appreciate it.

You can donate securely online at: http://www.firstgiving.com/tim-lindgren

Or, if you are local and want to drop it off at my house, or don’t mind mailing it, your gift will go farther as a check or cash (BNB pays a 7.35% processing fee for each online donation). Please make the check out to “Bikes Not Bombs”, put “Tim Lindgren BAT08” in the memo line, and mail it to me at the address below (or put in my mailbox). Please send me an email to let me know if you are making a donation this way so I can record it properly.

Please make your donations before June 1st.

If you are interested in joining me on the ride (the more the merrier!), there are several distances to choose from: 15, 25, and 62 miles. You can also come by and enjoy the Green Roots Festival! See the Bikes Not Bombs website for more info about the organization and the events on June 8th:

http://www.bikesnotbombs.org

Please forward this email to others whom you think would be interested in supporting Bikes Not Bombs.

Thanks for your support!

Tim

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Today Cathy sent me alink to this amazing photo of an albino squirrel near Jamaica pond taken by cottenmanifesto and posted at Loving Nature While Living in the City. Apparently its existence dominated the lunch conversation at her work today.

The life of a squirrel can be a precarious one, as I witnessed earlier this evening when I walked out of my office and was met by a red-tailed hawk standing on the sidewalk, talons firmly around a squirrel it had just killed. After a few moments, it flew away, leaving a small pool of blood on the concrete where it has been standing.

I didn’t realize until reading Kevin’s blog this week that bikes can also present a fatal hazard to squirrels, as this photo demonstrates:

These incidents reminded me of the rather conflicted relationship I’ve had with squirrels over the years. I got to know them quite intimately when I llved in Allston, or more precisely, when we lived together in Allson, since they occupied the walls and attic space around my room most of the time I was there. It wasn’t an amicable relationship, I’m afraid; they kept me up at night, gnawned on wires, and chewed through my belongings stored in the attic, so finally I had to begin trapping them so that pest control could pick them up. Ultimately, it was the landlord’s fault since he wouldn’t fix all the holes in the house, and I resented being forced into this antagonistic relationship with animals that under normal circumstances I’m confident I could get along with quite well.

But these are the lessons we learn, living together in the city, and I hope to have more pleasant encounters with my neighbor squirrels in the future.

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Yesterday I attend a JP community summit at English High (the oldest public high school in the US) sponsored by the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood development corporation, an event which helped give me a better sense of what’s going in the larger JP community. I’ve been getting to know my immediate Stonybrook neighborhood during the last year by attending neighborhood association meetings and getting to know my next-door neighbors. But I was amazed to learn of the opportunities to get involved in JP at almost any scale, from street to neighborhood to city and beyond.

There is a long history of grass-roots activism here that has helped revitalize the JP into a healthy urban neighborhood, but this success has also brought some of the problems typical of gentrification–many of the people who worked hard to improve JP now can’t afford to live here and the diversity that many people value is changing as new people move in. This summit was meant to help community members share ideas about how to make JP an equitable place even as it continues to develop and change.

As one of these newcomers, it’s easy for me to feel like I’m part of the problem–just another bearded white guy buying a condo in a newly converted building–but the summit helped me see that I can also be part of the solution if I’m willing to understand how JP got to be the way it is and then get involved to do my part in keeping it healthy. I still have a lot to learn, but I feel lucky to be in a place that seems to be a good teacher.

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