Environmentality, 5 June 2013

Hello Environmentality listeners,

Today we had another pleasant conversation with an old friend of Environmentality, John Merory. John is a neurologist and a committed environmentalist and he agreed to spend some time with us talking about sustainability and transport.

From the conversation it was clear that John has spent a huge amount of time thinking about this issue, and thanks to this we managed to cover quite a lot of ground. Some of the topics discussed included the environmental and health impacts of fossil fuels based transport, pros and cons of helmet laws, the controversial East-West road link or the potential introduction of a congestion tax in Melbourne.

John Merory - courtesy of the Heidelberg Leader newspaper

As people can imagine, John is a passionate advocate of the humble bicycle (as he put it, by far the most energy efficient mode of transport ever invented)  as a mode of transport, and we also talked about the need to provide infrastructure to support increasing bicycle usage (green ways, more train services).

One of the things I will take away from our conversation was John's explanation about how inefficient conventional cars are (in his words, only about 1% of the fuel is used to transport the person travelling when one person is in the car), and his clear account of the health impacts of this mode of transport through  reduction of physical ability.

The tracks we heard were:

Black boy / The Medics and Bunna Lawrie
How to see through fog / The Drones
Quasimodo's dream / Gotye and Perfect Tripod
A man like that / The Transatlantics

I hope this is enough for you to decide to listen to the podcast!