On Wednesday, March 4th, noon, the Take the Tooker Bloor bike lane folk will meet at Christie Pits (the park at Bloor and Christie) and ride together down to City Hall to present a 5000 signature petition to Councillor Adrian Heaps calling for the Bloor bike lane.
Angela Bischoff states:
In the 3 years since we launched this campaign in Tooker's honor (Mar. 3, 2006), this issue has become the number one priority for cyclists in Toronto, although at the time we launched the campaign people thought we were crazy.
Angela wants to remind you to visit the Tooker Gomberg Memorial Library at the Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina (at Queen), 4th floor, open during office hours.
Tooker Gomberg was an inspirational and passionate activist and Angela's partner. You can read more about him on the Greenspiration site, or be inspired by some of his quotes:
- Have hope, passion and confidence that valuable change can and does happen because individuals take bold initiative.
- You can easily join the millions of people around the world working towards ecological health and sustainability just by doing something.
- Go forth and agitate.
- Our greatest hurtle is not money; it's imagining how things could be different.
- Am I dreaming? Of course I am. But what's the alternative? I would rather dream that things can be better.
- Imagine what impact it would have if millions of people were prepared to risk arrest for their principles.
- Hitchhiking, walking and bicycling should become signs of good citizenship.
- Be creative and persistent. Creativity and decentralization are our strengths.
- Peace, like freedom, takes effort.
- Everybody knows that the greatest threat to our species' survival, next to all out nuclear war, is the massive experiment we are undertaking with the very air we breath, the atmosphere that cushions our blue planet from the frostiness of deep space. Through ignorance, greed and a perverse economic system, we are throwing more and more fuel on a fire that we all know needs to be extinguished.
- If there was a fire across the street, wouldn't you break a window, or break the law, to save a life? Are we facing unprecedented crisis on planet earth or aren't we?
- As the climate changes, so must our consciousness. And our words into actions.
- Each of us can and should ride our bike, compost our car, and weatherstrip around our windows. But we can and must also apply political pressure.
- We must always consider the consequences that our decisions will have on our children.
- In the hallways of power we must tell the truth: the costs of all this auto-mobility are much too high. In human terms. In dollar terms.
- We must find ways to spice up our imaginations, and tap into our yearning for clean air and a livable city. We bury the car today in the hope that we can stop burying our friends and our loved ones. With spark and spirit we can end the car-nage, and rebuild our city so that cars are hardly necessary; where what we need is in our neighbourhood or accessible by healthier means of travel. We can evolve our city into a healthy place for people and nature, not asphalt and poison. We can do it. If we will it.
- After twenty years of working to educate and mobilize for sustainable cities, I'm now convinced that the process of change is mostly a cultural one. New ideas are first ignored, then scorned, and then embraced as obvious. The first step is to get the ideas out into the public arena for consideration.
- It's time for the passion for change to rush over the planet like a tidal wave.
- Let's focus the glass and sizzle the tinder into blazing action.
- We succeeded in putting forward a vision of a sustainable city, and showed that more often than not, doing right by the Earth also helped the city's financial bottom line.
- Elections are a time when people consider possibilities. It IS possible to protect the earth, create meaningful employment, revive our neighbourhoods, and involve citizens in the decisions that affect their lives. And especially during elections people are yearning for an attractive picture of a sustainable, equitable city of the new millenium. Let's get out the paintbrushes!
- It IS possible to protect the earth, create meaningful employment, revive our neighbourhoods, and involve citizens in the decisions that affect their lives.
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