Beginning May 11 and continuing into the summer we are touring across North America for our just released Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay. We are trying to make the book publicity part of local transportation campaigns be it for bike paths, more accessible bus fare, car free streets etc. Would you have any interest in helping to organize an event or know any groups that might? We will be in your part of the world from June 10-15. We could send an e-book if that's of interest. Below is the about the book and blurbs.
Thanks for your help
Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi
Yves Engler
http://stopsigns.fairtrademedia.com/
Authors offer 13 ways North America’s automobile-dominated transportation system is irritating, irrational, irresponsible and increasingly inhuman
The I-13
- Cities have been torn down, remade and planned with cars’ needs as the overriding concern.
- Only three percent of the car’s fuel energy actually moves what needs to be moved.
- Behind the wheel it’s me, myself and I.
- Cars encourage sprawl and the privatization of space.
- Car-burbs are infertile ground for the social movements necessary to tip back the scale between rich and poor.
- The car’s insatiable appetite for space crowds out bikes and pedestrians.
- For every mile of travel, the car is dozens of times more likely to cause death and injury than the train, bus or airplane.
- Cathedrals are built to worship the automobile.
- A quarter of our working lives are spent paying for cars.
- Automotive pollution kills tens of thousands annually.
- Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to subsidize off-street parking.
- Auto-dependent development is pushing oil extraction into increasingly sensitive environments.
- A model of transportation that relies on individuals hopping into two, four or eight thousand pound metal boxes to get from one place to another is utterly unsustainable.
In Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay, authors Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi argue that the automobile's ascendance is inextricably linked to capitalism and involved corporate malfeasance, political intrigue, backroom payoffs, media manipulation, racism, academic corruption, third world coups, secret armies, environmental destruction and war. An anti-car, road-trip story, Stop Signs is a unique must-read for all those who wish to escape the clutches of auto insanity.
Mugyenyi and Engler's Stop Signs is at one and the same time an entertaining, fact-filled anthropological tour of the land of Homo Automomotivis, and the first all-out global ecological critique of the American automobile addiction. Not since Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation has a book appeared that so clearly exposed the auto-irrationality of the most car-dependent country on earth.—John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and co-author, The Ecological Rift
This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the impact of the private automobile on our urban transportation options.—David Cadman, Vancouver City Councillor, International President ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability
In Stop Signs, Mugyenyi and Engler take readers on an insightful, fact-filled journey through the primary habitat of the car-dominated species they call Homo automotivis. With wit and originality, they weave travel tales into a convincing argument against the auto economy, culminating with a fresh call to leave car culture behind.—Katie Alvord, Author, Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile
Mugyenyi and Engler illustrate the relationship between cars and suburban living. You come away shaken, but ready to roll up your sleeves and contribute, however modestly, to constructing a new world in the twenty-first century.—Richard Bergeron, Montreal city councilor, urban planner and author
Yves Engler has four published books including The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (Shortlisted for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non Fiction in the Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards)
Bianca Mugyenyi was born in Uganda in 1980 and came to Canada as a child. Mugyenyi spent parts of her youth in Swaziland, Kenya and England. She is the former chair of the Canadian Federation of Students- Quebec and coordinates campaigns at Concordia University's Centre for Gender Advocacy
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