Who am I and why am I here?

Happy New Year 2008, and what is this "blogging" anyway? As I enter the downward side of middle age, I have decided to find out, lest I confine myself to the technological backwater of bloglessness.

Initially, when looking for a blogging theme, I thought of a place to store plans for my homemade bicycle headlight, a very limited theme. Then I thought I might as well expand that to commuting to work by bicycle, which I have started doing, and to utility cycling in general. But, since riding a bike to work is basically the same event repeated day after day, even that is not something that would tend to generate a wealth of ideas for blog posts.

Expanding, what am I really trying to accomplish by riding a bike to work? What does it represent? It represents an effort to simplify, a course change away from a life of heavy resource usage to one of less. So that suggested the theme, a chronicle of my attempts to use less, have less, do less, reduce my environmental impact, and not leave to my children a polluted world and a houseful of stuff they will have to shovel into a dumpster when I am gone. In short, to lighten ship.

But why write about it; who cares? That was my initial thought, but then the answer came to me. Human society is like an organism, and the people are the cells. Communication is the way the organism learns and evolves. As more people start talking about something, like reducing the carbon footprint, the concept rises to the general consciousness, becomes less foreign and more accepted, and gradually people might start to do it. So if I believe, for example, that we should use less oil, I should do it myself, be seen doing, and...talk about it to do my bit to bring the idea to the general consciousness, that is, to help the organism of human society learn and evolve. I can see that happening to me as I read web sites about peak oil, climate change. Ideas that I had never heard of became common knowledge, and behaviors that I once took for granted as normal came to seem bizarre and irrational.

So I begin with that lofty goal, but still with only the small first step of riding my bike to work.