think or thwim

From National Geographic:

When the English arrived in 1607, more than 15,000 Indians lived around Chesapeake Bay. Within 60 years, English settlers had pushed the Indians off the most fertile waterfront land. Only 2,000 Indians remained.

Its common knowledge that the Native Americans were decimated by smallpox and typhoid introduced by the Europeans, but how did the first English settlement manage survive before those diseases took hold? This National Geographic article comes to some surprising conclusions.

Earthworms, honeybees, mosquitoes, and pigs brought by the colonists changed the ecosystem within a generation. Who would have guessed that North American forests didn’t have any earthworms? That, and the local Indians, seeing how many of the colonists were dying didn’t consider them a threat. They valued the guns and metal tools the colonists traded, and failed to comprehend how many more Europeans would arrive until it was too late.

Charles C. Mann | America, Found & Lost

If you like this article, you should like Jared Diamond’s books:

• Guns, Germs, and Steel
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Here’s a small gallery from my favorite photographer (my son). I think it’s interesting to see the world through the lens of a four year old.

His equipment is a Canon SD800-IS that he borrows from his parents. When he’s not traveling and making pictures, Buscher enjoys playing Uno, coloring, and riding bikes. He’s single, but not currently interested in girls.

Take a look at our new friend Rod Rylander’s latest project. He’s moving to Costa Rica today to co-found the International Center for Sustainability. They plan to have a month long gathering every year in January.

The main point, as I understand it, is to show the people of Central America and other developing regions that they don’t need and should not want our idiotic American consumerist lifestyle. Developing countries are in a good position to take advantage of technologies that make sense to improve their standard of living and learn what to avoid from our mistakes.

Rod is the right guy for the job. He’s been experimenting with and teaching methods of sustainable living for 30 years. Until today, he’s been living very comfortably in a small hand-built house in North Carolina.

His total housing expenses have been about $40 per month including taxes and community fees ($0 per month for utilities). I’ll show you how he did it when I get back.

In the meantime consider the Costa Rica gathering in January. They are accepting presenters as well as participants.

The thing I like best about Asheville is that it’s hard to tell who’s homeless and who’s not. Here’s some drumming in the park downtown on Friday evening.

We’re heading back into the mountains. Don’t expect much from me for another week.

One more thing before I go back into hiding:

Charlie Kelly sent me a link to his website, which is filled with cool stuff: pictures of the bike Joe Breeze built him, his posters advertising the repack races, a truly universal bike review, and a lot more. Check it out.

We’re currently staying here. There’s no cell phone coverage, and hence no internet connection for me. It looks like it may be at least a week before we return. Stand by.

The mountain bike wasn’t the result of a eureka moment by a brilliant inventor in his basement. It wasn’t developed by a research team at a big corporation. It wasn’t the brainchild of a marketing team. The mountain bike evolved from a group of people doing what they felt like doing. “We were just havin’ fun.” - Joe Breeze

In the mid 1970’s somebody in a group of friends including Joe Breeze, Otis Guy, Charlie Kelly, and Gary Fisher had the idea to ride their bikes down the rutted dirt fire roads on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County California. That proved to be a brilliant idea, but it was hard on equipment. They started raiding the local bike shops for pre World War II single speed junker bikes with stout frames and balloon tires that could stand up to combination of rough roads and speed. The 40 pound bikes became affectionately known as klunkers. Riding one was called klunking.

Before long the friends started racing downhill. More people joined them, and the events became known as the repack races. Riders would have to repack their hubs after every run because the combination of dirt and riding the coaster brake all the way down the mountains broke down the grease.

Unbeknownst to the Klunkers, 75 miles to the south in the hills around Cupertino, Russ Mahon and the Morrow Dirt Club were doing the same thing. The two groups briefly came in contact with each other at a cyclocross event in Mill Vally, CA in 1974. Klunker Gary Fisher was competing with his skinny tired road bike, but Russ Mahon entered with his klunker-like fat tired bike. Fisher was impressed that Mahon had added 10 speed gears allowing him to ride up hills and disk brakes with motorcycle levers to avoid the repack problem with coaster brakes.

After the Mill Valley event the Morrow Dirt Club disbanded when some of it’s members moved away, but in Marin county the evolution of mountain biking carried on. Gary Fisher returned home from Mill Valley and modified his 1930’s Schwinn Excelsior. Similar to Mahon’s bike, Fisher added multiple gears, thumb shifters, drum brakes, and motocross handle bars. They continued to improve components for durability, and in 1977 Joe Breeze welded up the first beefy frame specifically intended downhill racing.

Breeze’s client was Charlie Kelly, Gary Fisher’s roommate, who also coined the term “mountain bike” in 1979. That same year Gary Fisher, Charlie Kelly and Tom Ritchey formed a company called MountainBikes to manufacture and sell them. In 1983 that company dissolved, but that same year Specialized started selling the first mass produced mountain bikes, and Gary Fisher started Fisher Mountain Bikes which was acquired by Trek in 1993.

This is the trailer for Klunkerz - a documentary about the history of the mountain bike. It just came out this month.