Last week my son Ellis started daycare at Jardin Magico, a bilingual daycare located near our house in Minneapolis. They teach kids in English and Spanish, serve organic foods, use cloth diapers and make sure kids get time outdoors every day. Perhaps best of all, we can get there by bike. I got the bike bug last year after visiting and biking around the Netherlands, and I am happy to be able to use my bike for everyday needs at home. I’m not the only one – every day there are are several bikes parked outside the daycare, with parents…

Of all the talk lately in the mainstream media about how to be more “green,” the discussion is typically about how we live, not where we live. Rising gas prices have “fueled” the discussion of green even more, and thankfully today’s New York Times contains an Op-Ed by Paul Krugman called “Stranded in Suburbia” that finally brings the topic of “where” we live in to the discussion in to the mainstream media. Everywhere you look, there is talk of green. My local paper, the Star Tribune, published a special section recently on how to be more “green.” It discussed the…

Three years ago the talk at dinner parties was how much people made on their condominiums. Now it is the price of gas. We’ve had it good for so long, and now people are getting nervous when they have to spend upwards of $100 to fill their tank. All of this emphasizes the need for an improved transportion bill by congress next year. Unfortunately, the discussion revolves around how to get the price of gas back down. Even our presidential candidates float the idea of a federal “gas tax holiday” for the summer, a ridiculous notion considering our literally crumbling…