[Sdpg] Fwd: San Diego & Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

[Colin Leath]

SDPG:
Is there anyone who knows of any folks in SD who'd like to help with
the following?
Please forward this on to them.
Colin
j9k.org


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yves Engler <yvesengler at hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 17, 2011 at 12:29 PM
Subject: San Diego & Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to
Economic, Social and Ecological Decay
To: colinleath+cfu at gmail.com




Dear Colin, Beginning May 11 and continuing into the summer we are
touring across North America for our just released Stop Signs: Cars
and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay.
We are trying to make the book publicity part of local transportation
campaigns be it for bike paths, more accessible bus fare, car free
streets etc. Would you have any interest in helping to organize an
event or know any groups that might? We will be in your part of the
world from June 10-15. We could send an e-book if that's of interest.
Below is the about the book and blurbs.
 Thanks for your help
Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi
http://stopsigns.fairtrademedia.com/


Authors offer 13 ways North America’s automobile-dominated
transportation system is irritating, irrational, irresponsible and
increasingly inhuman

The I-13
1.    Cities have been torn down, remade and planned with cars’ needs
as the overriding concern.
2.    Only three percent of the car’s fuel energy actually moves what
needs to be moved.
3.    Behind the wheel it’s me, myself and I.
4.    Cars encourage sprawl and the privatization of space.
5.    Car-burbs are infertile ground for the social movements
necessary to tip back the scale between rich and poor.
6.    The car’s insatiable appetite for space crowds out bikes and pedestrians.
7.    For every mile of travel, the car is dozens of times more likely
to cause death and injury than the train, bus or airplane.
8.    Cathedrals are built to worship the automobile.
9. A quarter of our working lives are spent paying for cars.
10. Automotive pollution kills tens of thousands annually.
11. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to subsidize
off-street parking.
12. Auto-dependent development is pushing oil extraction into
increasingly sensitive environments.
13. A model of transportation that relies on individuals hopping into
two, four or eight thousand pound metal boxes to get from one place to
another is utterly unsustainable.

In North America, human beings have become enthralled by the
automobile: A quarter of our working lives are spent paying for them;
communities fight each other for the right to build more of them; our
cities have been torn down, remade and planned with their needs as the
overriding concern; wars are fought to keep their fuel tanks filled;
songs are written to praise them; cathedrals are built to worship
them. In Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic,
Social and Ecological Decay, authors Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi
argue that the automobile's ascendance is inextricably linked to
capitalism and involved corporate malfeasance, political intrigue,
backroom payoffs, media manipulation, racism, academic corruption,
third world coups, secret armies, environmental destruction and war.
An anti-car, road-trip story, Stop Signs is a unique must-read for all
those who wish to escape the clutches of auto insanity.
"Mugyenyi and Engler's Stop Signs is at one and the same time an
entertaining, fact-filled anthropological tour of the land of Homo
Automomotivis, and the first all-out global ecological critique of the
American automobile addiction. Not since Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt
Nation has a book appeared that so clearly exposed the
auto-irrationality of the most car-dependent country on earth."
John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and co-author, The Ecological Rift

"This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the
impact of the private automobile on our urban transportation options."
David Cadman, Vancouver City Councillor, International President
ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability

"In Stop Signs, Mugyenyi and Engler take readers on an insightful,
fact-filled journey through the primary habitat of the car-dominated
species they call Homo automotivis. With wit and originality, they
weave travel tales into a convincing argument against the auto
economy, culminating with a fresh call to leave car culture behind."
Katie Alvord, Author, Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with
the Automobile
"Mugyenyi and Engler illustrate the relationship between cars and
suburban living. You come away shaken, but ready to roll up your
sleeves and contribute, however modestly, to constructing a new world
in the twenty-first century."
Richard Bergeron, Montreal city councilor, urban planner and author

Yves Engler has four published books including The Black Book of
Canadian Foreign Policy (Shortlisted for the Mavis Gallant Prize for
Non Fiction in the Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards)

Bianca Mugyenyi was born in Uganda in 1980 and came to Canada as a
child. Mugyenyi spent parts of her youth in Swaziland, Kenya and
England. She is the former chair of the Canadian Federation of
Students- Quebec and coordinates campaigns at Concordia University's
Centre for Gender Advocacy