Articles by Todd Hymas Samkara
Todd Hymas Samkara is Grist's assistant editor.
All Articles
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Move Thyself: A tribute to fallen cyclists, and cycling away the gas-price blues
Tonight in some 200 U.S. cities (and six other countries), cyclists will be joining in the Ride of Silence to pay tribute to bicyclists who've been killed or injured on public roadways.
And there are a lot.
From the Seattle Times article:
In 2004, in Seattle there were 258 bicycle collisions with cars -- resulting in 224 injuries and one death, according to the city's Department of Transportation.
Um, make that 260, and 225 injuries. My two collisions that year went unreported. (Stupid minivans!)
And from the Oregonian:
The most recent Oregon Department of Transportation statistics show 14 bicyclists died in Portland-area collisions with motor vehicles from 2000 through 2005. Meanwhile, the number of reported bicycle crashes has held steady for years at about 160 annually.
Join a ride near you and reclaim the streets.
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Rhymes with unanimity
Basically everyone agrees: we're full of chemicals. Hooray, agreement!
Now what to do about it? Some California lawmakers are suggesting a program to monitor and catalog said chemicals in residents' bodies.
Senate Bill 1379 would create the nation's first statewide biomonitoring program to study levels of chemical contamination in blood, urine, fatty tissue, or breast milk.
Essentially it's a state-specific version of the CDC's National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. Predictably though, powerful forces are aligning against it, fearing an educated, informed, environmentally aware public.
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Multiple Chemical Sensitivities can drive sufferers into poverty as well as ill health
Consider the trappings of modern life: Calvin Klein Eternity, gasoline, Gore-Tex, Aveda hairspray, paint, particle board, polyurethane iPod cases. Is this the face of the future? Photo: iStockphoto. Now imagine that you’re allergic to virtually all of them. Environmentalists usually think about chemical toxicity as either a dramatic local crisis (Bhopal, Love Canal) or the […]
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Careful about what stickers you put on your bike, people
Recent bike-related news offers an answer to the oft-posed question, "I'm a police officer -- when the hell am I going to need to know about pop culture?" The answer, of course, is when a sticker on a bicycle bearing an indie band name you're oblivious to prompts the destruction of said bicycle with the jaws of life in order to extract a nonexistent explosive device.
To be fair, the band's name -- "This Bike is a Pipe Bomb" -- isn't quite like affixing a "NIN" or "The String Cheese Incident" sticker to your seat post, but still.