Last week Finnish artist Kaisa Salmi outfitted the Finnish Parliament staircase with about 60.000 gerbera flowers in an attempt to show that this very same place could be the natural habitat of these tropical plants if the climate change continues in the direction of global warming.

The artist explains that seen from a distance her environmental piece of art also reveals a double rainbow. Possibly, although I tried approaching the work from various distances and no such thing as a rainbow revealed to me.

It is not only a great idea, but also a strong political statement. Especially since climate change has been a hot topic in Finnish media and politics for more than a year now. Reversing the current trend of global warming should also be one of politicians and citizens top priorities.

Already upon setting up the work Kaisa Salmi announced that people can come and collect the flowers once the exhibition was over. Even though the announced collection time and date were Saturday, June 9th at 9 o’clock in the morning, first flower snatchers appeared already during the night as they were returning home from clubs. Anyway, there was still enough flowers as more than thousand people came to collect them on Saturday. They emptied the monumental staircase in just a couple of hours. The work was on display for exactly a week.

It was nice to see flowers instead of manure, eggs or rotten tomatoes in front of a parliament.

Mladen

What you see above is one of the best recent additions to passenger transportation in Helsinki. Beginning with this spring these riders will take you on their bike rickshaws anywhere within the Helsinki city center. I have seen them in front of the main railway station in Helsinki and it seems that that’s where their main base is.

I think that both idea and realization are fantastic, but it seems that people in Helsinki still have to catch up with with it. Just a few meters away from where I have taken this picture at Helsinki main railways station was a 30 meter long regular car cab queue.

One of my first thoughts was that even though this manual cab is a payable service, I would still most likely have a feeling that I am exploiting the bicycle rider. I guess because one can immediately see the result of someone’s manual labor.

Nevertheless, these bicycle rickshaws are an excellent solution for the modern city. As far as I know, there are only five operating in Helsinki at the moment, but if there were more, they could definitely contribute to decreasing the downtown short-range traffic. Environment and citizen friendly mode of transportation. Whoever is behind this idea just needs to grab the opportunity here in Helsinki where for more than a year now there has been a serious shortage of car cab drivers.

Mladen

Ever since I have heard about the Critical Mass I wanted to take part in one of these semi-emergent rallies. The only problem was that I have never lived in a city (or was at least not aware of the event during shorter trips) where Critical Mass bike rides would happen. Until now.

In Göteborg, as they usually do in other cities too, people gather with their bikes on the evening of the last Friday each month to ride through the city streets. It’s both a happening and a movement without an organized structure. The main goal of thousands of people around the world who gather in their cities is the promotion of car free cities. By flooding the streets en masse they make up an emergent movement with both a strong political and a social message.

I don’t own a bike here in Göteborg, but this did not discourage me from at least wanting to participate in the event. So, yesterday I set out to the very heart of Göteborg’s shopping district. It was Friday evening and the city streets were bustling with people. It looked promising. But at 6 o’clock I am standing on the square where critical massers should gather. Looking around I see only one girl with a bicycle looking a bit confused. So was I. Where are all the people who want to ride their bikes instead of cars; environmentalists and citizens who want cleaner air and environment; forward looking people; supporters of sustainable development? Where are they?

After five minutes of standing around bemused I approach the girl with a bike and ask her if she is here to participate in the Critical Mass. She is and it is her first time, just like it is for me. The only difference being that a friend invited her to come, thus she soon finds out where the meeting place is. It’s right across the street and we immediately notice three other cyclists there. I mean, they could just as well be random three friends meeting up for a pint of beer.

Two more participants come with their bikes, now numbering six in total. An absolute minimum I hear. And not exactly critical mass, if you ask me. When I’ve seen Still We Ride (make sure you check the trailer), a documentary about Critical Mass in New York that ended up in a clash with nervous and overly aggressive police, there were thousands of people there. They literally flooded the city with their bikes. It really was critical mass. Likewise in San Francisco, where the movement started back in 1992.

Quite naturally, if you want to make a statement by riding your bicycle in a car centered society, you have to multiply yourself by at least several tens or hundreds to get the message across. What happened on a beautiful sunny day in Göteborg yesterday would never bring up attention of passers-by, not to mention authorities who are usually interested in assemblies of all sizes, as one can find on the Critical Mass site:

When local police learn of your ride, they may insist that you get a permit, perhaps a parade permit. Don’t do it. The point of Critical Mass is that biking is a right, not a privilege. Cars don’t need permits to ride on the streets, and neither should cyclists.

Rebellious and rightfully so. But obviously the residents of Göteborg are very content. But I was dissillusioned. Especially when I got so pumped up for this event amongst other things reading the following:

Remember that CM is supposed to be a celebration of cycling, not your opportunity to see how much inconvenience you can cause to others. It’s about asserting our right to the road, not denying others their right to the road.

Check the Critical Mass Web site for a ride in your town. Join the ride and spread the word. If there are no Critical Mass rides in your town yet, be the innitiator. Here’s a few how-to tips. And don’t forget about the bicycle safety.

Ride on.

Mladen

Finns are serious when it gets to winters. Whatever gets in the way of a proper winter surely becomes a grave topic. This year they’ve decided it is the climate change that caused the European winter. Who’s causing the warm weather? How to reverse the trend and reclaim our snowy, sub-10-degrees-below-freezing real winters?

Pretty sure almost everyone knows that they have collaboratively contributed to this year’s black Christmas, as Finns like to call Christmases when there’s no snow around. But when it’s so hard to let go of the always hot saunas, domestically produced tomatoes and all that paper consumption. Or, rather, for many it’s difficult to be the first one to give up on those things and start protecting their environment. Not to mention that it’s probably most environmentally unfriendly to live this far north and build a self-sustaining society at the same time.

But when it comes to problems it’s easy to revert to the ol’ good blame-the-other strategy. Who’s to blame for the terribly polluted Baltic sea: Russians. Who’s causing the climate change: Americans. Not so fast. According to the recently published WWF Living Planet Report 2006 Finland has the third largest ecological footprint. If the total supply of Earth’s biocapacity in 2003 was 1,8 global hectares per person, an average Finn consumes 7,6 hectares–four times as much. Something doesn’t add up here.

It’s quite obvious that those two million saunas in Finland must be heated up somehow and that agricultural production here consumes much more energy then in sunnier and warmer climates. At the same time it’s also quite obvious that environmental preservation is important. This at least shows in their meticulous recycling habits. I’m quite sure Finns have developed one of the more elaborate recycling systems. Citizens diligently divide their garbage into nine different categories, yes nine: paper, cardboard, bio-waste, dry waste, glass, containers (such as milk and juice cartons), fabric, used batteries and tin. Believe me, taking the trash out is quite and ordeal. Unless you take it out daily, you’ll definitely have to make more than one trip to the nearest garbage bins. And even “Darling, could you take the trash out?” brings out a new response: “What garbage?”

Obviously, it will take more than just improving on the recycling habits that will bring back the thick layer of snow for Christmas and a real Finnish winter. Hopefully people will turn out to be smarter than the Miss Finland 2006 Ninni Laaksonen who when asked about the climate change and its prevention came up with the following wisecracker: “I haven’t even thought about it. I’ve seen the word in the headlines, but I cannot remember now what do they mean by climate change. Isn’t it that that there would be a longer and warmer summer? I don’t know how to prevent it.”

Mladen