Picture this: You’re 75 miles and one full day into a two-day, 160-mile bike ride. You’ve just reached your campsite by pedaling on bike paths, side streets, and highway shoulders and walking across one long bridge. And you’re completely, totally exhausted. 

Do you go on?

I meant to write to you this week triumphant after completing my second long-ish biking trip, waxing poetic about the joy and logistics of people-powered, low-emission transit and the gorgeous scenery of Rhode Island and Cape Cod as summer melts into fall.

After our success riding to Montauk in June, my friends and I decided to level up. We planned a ride from Providence to Provincetown with a night in Sandwich, MA. Last week, we took the train up to Providence from the city and planned to set out early in the morning. I was nervous — and it turns out, I was right to be.

I couldn’t make it. I rode myself into the ground on day one. The next day, I sheepishly said my goodbyes at mile 80 as I fell behind my friends once again, and instead took a bus to meet them at the end of their ride in Provincetown.

When I got to Sandwich and couldn’t keep going, I wondered if I had made a mistake in coming at all. My instinct was to call the trip a failure because I couldn’t complete it.

That’s not an unusual instinct. We tend to think in absolutes, in sunk costs, in perfectionism — to think that if you can’t do something all the way, it’s better not to do it at all. 

Take our biking route. We pulled it from the East Coast Greenway, a 3,000-mile-long continuous biking and pedestrian trail from Florida to Maine … or that’s the plan, anyway. The Greenway, I learned, is still more dream than reality. About 65% of the trail is completed, and the rest is a vision, a planned route linking existing paths. 

But the fact that it’s incomplete doesn’t mean it’s worthless. It’s an expansive, imaginative vision of a more connected and greener transportation future. And it’s also better than many other paths as it is right now: Our route along the now-and-future greenway was already far more bike-friendly than our route to Montauk, which was maybe 7% bike path.

Then there’s the clock that looks down on Union Square in Manhattan. 

Maybe you’ve seen it. When I was growing up, it displayed the time. Then, in 2020, it became the Climate Clock: a countdown of years until we run out of time to limit global warming to the 1.5ºC scientists have long warned against surpassing.

Today, the Climate Clock says we have two-and-a-half years left.

If we surpass 1.5 degrees (by some metrics, we already have), the impacts will be devastating. For many, they already are — we saw that this summer, globally. We must work as hard as we can, now, to avoid that number. 

But what happens if the clock runs out and we haven’t curbed emissions sufficiently?

Do we give up? Let polluters run rampant, throw our hands up and give up on a green future? Does not meeting our goal completely mean trying at all isn’t worth it?

I am of the strong opinion that we have to keep pushing. That the years after that clock runs out are still years we have to make the world more livable; that life after 2029 will be worth living. Any amount of climate action we can enact, any fewer greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, will mean cleaner air and water, a safer future, fewer floods and fires and biodiversity loss.

It’s not a particularly optimistic vision, I have to admit. But it’s honest, and it says it is worth doing something even if we can’t do it 100%.

As for my ride? I am so glad I did what I could, even though I couldn’t do it all. I ate cranberries straight from a cranberry bog, rode my beloved East Bay Bike Path out of Providence, had an awesome plantain burrito in New Bedford, saw the season’s first red leaves against the most beautiful blue water, and still got to take the ferry from P-town to Boston.

Here’s to imperfection!

– Ella Spungen, Editor, Bluedot Living Brooklyn

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As a historic nor’easter began to bear down on New York City on September 25, hundreds gathered in Red Hook for “FLOODLINES” at cultural arts and science center Pioneer Works.

“There’s a nor’easter brewing offshore. It feels like a poignant, potent time to gather here tonight in our sanctuary of art and science and culture,” said Pioneer Works’ Director of Publishing Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.

“Pioneer Works is a place where we try and endeavor to put together disciplines that aren’t necessarily in conversation out in the world ... and tonight where we want to endeavor to turn our hearts and minds to the places where cities and oceans meet.”

Read on for an inside look at Pioneer Works’ take on Climate Week, with Hanif Abdurraqib, Eileen Myles, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and more.

Dear Dot,
So … plastics recycling seems to be a scam and news reports say that less than 10% of all plastics have been recycled. What does that mean for me? Do I bother tossing that plastic dish soap bottle in the bin or just throw it away? 
– Fred

The Short Answer: 
As far back as 1986, a plastics trade association admitted that recycling couldn’t be considered a long-term solution to waste. Nonetheless, recycling became the darling of the “three Rs.” Yet, according to an analysis of what happened to all the plastic ever produced, just 9% was recycled. The rest? Languishing in landfills (79%) or incinerated (12%). So, yes, plastic recycling is a scam. But there’s nonetheless hope on the horizon and action we can take both at a systems level and to reduce our own consumption of single-use plastics. 

Read on.

Got a question for Dot? Write her at [email protected].

The Bluedot Brooklyn newsletter is edited by Ella Spungen. If you have any questions, suggestions, ideas, or want to tell us what you’re doing, email [email protected].