If you didn't get to come on the Loudest Yeller Earth Day Tour but you're curious about what was said... here are some of the basic notes I wrote for the bike tour. I really liked stop 2 -- the Army Recruiting Center.
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Welcome To Earth Day 2017 hosted by Loudest Yeller for Car Free NYC
My name’s Adam Benedetto I’m going to be your guide today and I’m the owner of Loudest Yeller Bicycle Tours! Our goal is to have fun while talking about interesting cultural and historic things – all on bicycle.
Let’s go though the bikes quickly. Left break is the front, right brake is the rear break. We’re going to be going really slow today. No need to worry if you are out of shape—I am too.
We’re going to be riding to Union Square and ending the tour there. Along the way I’m going to tell you everything I know about NYC and it’s relationship to the environment and to Earth Day. Thank you for coming out to celebrate it.
We’re going to be riding to Union Square and ending the tour there. Along the way I’m going to tell you everything I know about NYC and it’s relationship to the environment and to Earth Day. Thank you for coming out to celebrate it.
I’m particularly honored to be giving this tour because the founder of Earth Day Gaylord Nelson is from Wisconsin and got to meet him when I was a kid growing up there. But that is no coincidence. Earth Day was a result of years and years of people examining and reexamining man’s relationship to nature. Among those people was John Muir who was born in Scotland and raised in Wisconsin as well. He later became the founder of the Sierra Club but the tradition he started in Wisconsin was based on the principle that nature should be not only conserved, but, preserved. He believed that nature was important to a person’s soul. That idea had come to him from Emerson. And so you see there is a long history of ideas that have been cultivated to create Earth Day.
Today is our day of Action so over the next hour and a half we’re going to talk about these ideas because they are important and we need consider and reconsider them as we grow as a people.
Earth Day was founded in 1970 when 20 million American’s from all walks of life decided to participate in the celebration of Earth Day. Here in NYC Mayor John Lindsay took the bold initiative to designate all of Central Park and 5th Avenue to the Earth Day festivities -- which was really important because the Press of NYC is the loudest in the world and the message went out to everyone around the world. It has become the largest Secular Holiday in the world – one billion people celebrate it every year!
Stop 1 Times Square
Let’s begin by talking about where we are. We are in Times Square which is famous for it’s giant lit up billboards. You may ask yourself, “How much power does it use to do THIS?” It takes 161 megawatts to power this area. That’s enough power to power 161,000 average US homes. It’s 1/4th the power output of an average Nuclear power plant. It’s 3 times the power used at the same time by the country of Sierra Leone. And it’s twice the power required to power all of the casinos in Las Vegas.
Over here you have the Former New York Time’s building. It is considered the most expensive advertising space in the world. Up there is where the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. The interior is vacant and except for Walgreens here on the ground floor.
It’s easy to forget that once this area was just hilly Farmland. Manhattan comes from Manahatta which was Lanape for “Island of many hills.” There used to be a nice trout stream that ran from here to the Hudson. There used to be farms and lush forests and wildlife in such abundance that the Dutch couldn’t belive it. Poet Jacob Steendam who lived here in the 1660s said that when he was coming here and his ship rounded Sandy Hook, he could smell a particular “sweet air” coming from the island of Manhattan. The air purity was that good. And later another Dutch scout said, “There are some persons who imagine the animals of the country will be destroyed in time, but his is an unnecessary anxiety.
But look around you now.
Stop II. The Army Recruiting Center
Earth Day was inspired, in part, by peace activists who recognized that in a world full of nuclear weapons we could destroy all life on the planet. If any country uses nuclear weapons they put all of the planet’s life in jeopardy. For the first time we as a people were able to destroy the planet with a nuclear winter, with radiation, with our unreasoning and base penchant for war.
Williams L. Shirer, the author of The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich said, “In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on and uninhabited planet.”
In light of that quote it’s easy to see that Nationalism and the false patriotism of war is just a series of lies to turn land into countries, natural resources into commodities, distant people into foes and our own children into murderers. Tribal thinking and war will only lead to our natural resources being depleted or destroyed. It is only through peace and organization, with the help of science, that we as a people will be able to continue to live on this planet. If you look at Earth from the space, the way Carl Sagan did, it’s just a small pale blue dot floating in the cosmos.
So let’s begin Earth Day by celebrating all life on Earth and and everyone who inhabits amazing planet.
36th Street Stop.
Keens Steak House.
The Republican Party of 1912 was in great internal conflict. A Progressive Party had been formed within the Republican party and was being led by Robert LaFollette or “Fighting Bob” of Wisconsin was set to take the helm of the Republican party against Taft in the Primary. But in 1912 Roosevelt returned to politics running for President on the Bull Moose Party.
Keens Steak House.
The Republican Party of 1912 was in great internal conflict. A Progressive Party had been formed within the Republican party and was being led by Robert LaFollette or “Fighting Bob” of Wisconsin was set to take the helm of the Republican party against Taft in the Primary. But in 1912 Roosevelt returned to politics running for President on the Bull Moose Party.
He thought Taft’s cabinent was full of corrupt lawyers. He even called Taft a “Fathead”. Roosevelt beat Taft in the Primaries but the party bosses gave Taft the nomination resulting in fistfights on the floor of the convention and Roosevelt’s delegates walking out.
To be a Progressive in those days meant to use the power of the government to regulate big business, protect the workers and the environment and clean up corrupt politics.
+ The story of a NYC bartender shooting Roosevelt.
Where did Roosevelt get his ideas? He took a hike with John Muir in 1903 at Yosemite National Park with John Muir and it was there that Muir spoke with him about the idea of conservation. Roosevelt went on to become American’s greatest conservationist.
John Muir too Roosevelt to visit the giant sequoias and later Roosevelt said, "There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias...our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their Children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.”
