Chicago, the Windy Green City

Hi friends,

Greetings from Kalamazoo, Michigan! We just spent the last few days in Chicago for our Green City Spotlights and saw some great things in the Windy City.

We came into Chicago on Saturday night and stayed with hosts in the city, then visited the 2nd UU Church in Chicago on Sunday morning and gave a presentation there afterwards. We spent the afternoon in the city then drove up north to Deerfield and gave another presentation at the North Shore UU Church there. Both were great crowds, and now the only presentation we have left on our cross-country journey is in Toronto next Sunday. If anyone is wondering why I am mentioning Unitarian Universalism in these posts it’s because most of our hosts are UU’s and most of the presentations we’ve been giving along the way have been at UU churches. Staying with the many generous folks who have hosted us on our travels has been a tremendous help in making our two months more affordable and we are very grateful. It’s also made traveling much more interesting, meeting folks everywhere we go instead of staying in one boring hotel after the next!

We had a chance to see Chicago’s green offerings yesterday and today – there has been a strong push recently to make Chicago the #1 green city in the U.S. and they’ve made great strides. Having been to the #1 green city, Portland, Oregon, I have to say they’ve got a ways to go but a big tip of the hat to Chicago for their efforts. We were pleasantly surprised to see just how much green space there is in Chicago, especially along the lakefront. There are miles of bike paths and walking paths, beaches along the coast, etc. They are putting in many new bikes paths throughout the city, which seems a great place for riding since the city is pretty flat. The elevated train (or just the ‘L’) runs all over the city and makes public transportation easy, plus a number of commuter trains coming into the city from the suburbs. Chicago has one of the strictest green building requirements in the country for all new construction, and City Hall proudly boasts a green roof with gardens on top. We found Chicago to be a fun place to visit!

Here’s a random thing we’ve learned while driving around the country: oil refineries smell really, really badly. We’ve seen the iconic oil pumps moving up and down as we drove through Texas and in different spots since then, and it was a foul smell coming just from those, but the big refineries just smell terrible and look like huge industrial behemoths – a real eyesore. We just passed one on the drive out of Chicago in Gary, Indiana and couldn’t imagine how people who live there put up with the awful smell, with the refinery on one side of the highway and the houses on the other.

We are heading to Detroit tomorrow for more filming that we almost didn’t get. I’ve been trying to line up these interviews for some time now and didn’t know if they were going to happen for certain until, oh, 7:00pm tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Be well,
Colin McCullough
www.OurRenewableNation.org