“Bicycling, once largely seen as a simple pleasure from childhood, has become a political act,” writes Jeff Mapes in his new book, Pedaling Revolution–How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities.

Mapes, a Portland-based reporter for The Oregonian who regularly commutes by bicycle, offers a thoughtful account of the bike scene, past and present, with a glimpse of the future.

I read the book after the UN Climate Change talks broke down in Copenhagen. Bikes, Mapes notes, could play a crucial role in shrinking the U.S. carbon footprint. He cites some startling data. “If everyone cycled for an hour and reduced their driving by an equivalent distance, the U.S. would cut its gasoline consumption by 38 percent,” he writes. “Greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 12 percent, which is greater than the reductions called for in the Kyoto treat.”

But Mapes isn’t naïve about getting every American out of a car and onto a bicycle. It was his love of bicycling that inspired him to write the book, not a churlish attitude towards cars.

Mapes fell in love with bicycling as a kid, but didn’t think seriously about it until the 1990s when Portland embarked on an ambitious program to build a network of bike lanes, trails, and bicycle boulevards that crisscrossed the city. “The improvements helped turn me into a daily bike commuter,” he writes.

He first traces the history of bicycle advocacy in the United States. Then he tours around the world, stopping in bike mecca Amsterdam, Davis, California, and New York City.

One of the things I found compelling about the book is Mapes’ analysis of the two philosophical camps within the bike scene: those who want to bike on the roads like a vehicle and those who advocate for separate space.

The number one reason why more people don’t bike is safety. “As long ago as 1996, the U.S. surgeon general, in a landmark report on physical activity, said that 53 percent of people who had cycled in the previous year said they would commute to work by bike if they could do so on ‘safe, separated designated paths,’ ” Mapes writes. 53 percent!

Separate paths of bikeways may be the future (some cycle tracks already exist in Portland and New York City). Currently the most popular and cheap way to accommodate biking is bike lanes.

While critics say bike lanes can give a false sense of security, there is some safety in numbers. Mapes quotes Jane Stutts, a retired safety researcher from University of North Carolina, who acknowledges a paucity of hard data. “About best you can do is show [bike lanes] increase bike traffic without increasing crashes,” she says.

After reading Mapes’ book, it seemed to me that we need more bike lanes, more bike ways, and more cycle tracks.

It’s a sign of the “mainstreaming” of bicycling that funds from the stimulus package include spending on improvements for bicyclists and pedestrians. Republican Senators John McCain (AZ) and Tom Coburn (OK) attacked the funding as “pork.”

Streetsblog reports:  “McCain and Coburn released a report criticizing 100 projects being funded by the Obama administration’s stimulus law. On the senators’ hit list were three bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure projects, in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota.”

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood fired back at McCain and Coburn’s report  on his blog:

“We’ve worked hard this year to get our Recovery Act dollars out to the states quickly and effectively. Yes, some of those projects include bike paths, a key ingredient in our livability initiative to allow people to live, work, and get around without a car. . . . We don’t call that waste; we call it progress.”

It is progress! Bikes may only get 1 percent of the transportation budget, but it’s something.

The book ends with a chapter called “Bringing Kids Back to Bikes.” Too many kids do not ride to school, often because their schools lie on the outskirts of cities near dangerous intersections. He suggests bike clubs, held after school. Kids would get the exercise they need and learn to become safer riders.

What I appreciated most about this book was the tone. Mapes does an exemplary job explaining the arcane workings of federal funding and offers readers a ride through cities we may never get to visit. He also describes the sadness of a memorial ride for a young cyclist who was killed by a cement truck turning right on red.

But he has no fury towards cars. At the core of the book is joy—Mapes really does love his bicycle.

(I interview Mapes on WORT-FM on December 23. Click here to listen. It starts 45 minutes in.)

Hilarious. Tender. Brutal. These are the trademarks of one of America’s most dazzling writers, Sherman Alexie. His latest book, War Dances (Grove Press), a collection of poetry and short stories, renders emotional landscapes—anger, joy, anxiety, grief, fear—with skill.

In “War Dances,” the short story that lends its name as the book’s title, the narrator remembers visiting his sick father in the hospital. His dad, post-surgery, is cold in bed, and the narrator asks a busy nurse for a blanket.

“With blanket in hand, I walked back to my father,” the narrator notes. “It was a thin blanket, laundered and sterilized a hundred times. In fact it was too thin. It wasn’t really a blanket. It was more like a large beach towel. Hell, it wasn’t even good enough for that. It was more like the world’s largest coffee filter. Jesus, had health care finally come to this? Everybody was uninsured and unblanketed.”

War Dances contains good poetry, too. My favorite of the bunch is his “Ode to Mix Tapes.” The digital revolution has changed how people create these soundtracks of seduction. Alexie writes that it’s too easy to make mix tapes these days with CD burners, iPods, and iTunes.

But I miss the labor

Of making old-school mix tapes—the
midair

Acrobatics of recording one song

At a time. It sometimes took days

To play, choose, pause,

Ponder, record, replay, erase,

And replace. But there was no magic
wand.

It was blue-collar work. . . .

But O, the last track

Was the vessel that contained

The most devotion and pain

And made promises that you couldn’t
take back.

Malalai Joya’s A Woman Among Warlords (Scribner) tells the amazing story of one of Afghanistan’s leading democracy activists.

The Progressive had the opportunity to meet and interview Joya for our radio show back in 2006. Her steadfast resolve in the face of death threats touched us deeply.

So it was a real pleasure to find out more about her life by reading her autobiography. As a girl she loved poetry and would “read late into the night by the light of our propane lamp” the works of Langston Hughes and Bertolt Brecht. Inspired by her father’s own activism, she tells of opening secret schools for girls in basements, calling it “the most important act of rebellion against the Taliban.” On her wedding day, for security reasons, her bodyguards had to search every flower arrangement for explosives.

Joya fearlessly denounced the warlords at the constitutional assembly in 2003, which she attended. Two years later she ran for office and won, becoming the youngest member elected to parliament. She was later suspended from office for her persistent criticisms of corruption and advocacy of human rights.

She predicted that the Afghan elections, held in August, would be a joke, and warns about Obama’s further escalation of the war. “It could well be that people in Afghanistan will soon say that Obama is even worse than Bush,” she writes. She urges the American people to pressure Obama to withdrawal all our troops.

“In the past thirty years, every kind of atrocity has been committed in Afghanistan in the name of socialism, religion, freedom, democracy and liberation,” she writes. “Now these acts are justified by a so-called war on terror.”

With A Woman Among Warlords, Joya takes her place alongside such leading democracy activists as Aung San Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi, and Rigoberta Menchu. It was Joya who should have won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Click here to read Favorite Books of 2009 by editors and writers for The Progressive magazine.

I’m inspired by the grassroots activism happening at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Police have arrested more than 1000 people so far.

Here’s what my friend and colleague, Molly Stentz of WORT-FM, reported today on her blog from Copenhagen:

We know the drill by now. Head honchos arrive tomorrow. Checklist for today:

• Polish up the Bella Center (vaccum, mop, install more metal detectors)
• Remove untidy protest contingent
• Move in on the groups that police have been surveilling and detain their organizers
• Seize any likely protest equipment
• Arrest & detain now, deal with consequences later

One of the best sources of info is Indymedia Denmark.

For updates from the grassroots, visit Via Campesina, 350.org, and, of course, Democracy Now.

The Yes Men are once again up to their shenanigans.