Host Erik Jorgensen interviews reporter Doug Fine, a speaker at “Today's Transportation Choices” at the Portland International Auto Show on Thursday morning, January 28
As a young freelancer, Fine reported for the Washington Post, Salon, U.S. News and World Report, Sierra, Wired, Outside, National Public Radio, and other venues from little-visited jungle war zones like Burma, Rwanda, Laos, Guatemala and Tajikistan. He became a world-class adventure writer and investigative journalist, writing culturally insightful and funny dispatches. One of these, about democracy efforts in Burma, was read into the U.S. Congressional Record.
Later he moved to extreme rural Alaska to see if a former suburbanite could survive away from Costco. Happiness and self-awareness were the goals. This resulted in his award-nominated first book, Not Really An Alaskan Mountain Man, a wildly humorous and meaningful adventure narrative, which is now in its third printing.
For his second book decided to embark on a “Hypocrisy Reduction Project,” to see if he could truly live a sustainable lifestyle. He moved to an obscure valley in Southern New Mexico to write Farewell, My Subaru, to quite simply examine whether a Digital Age Human can live without Petroleum but without giving up any of his Digital Age Comforts. His conclusion? He can, once he figures out how to keep the coyotes from eating his chickens, his solar panels from electrocuting him, and his vegetable oil truck exhaust from giving him a bad case of the munchies (it smells like Kung Pao chicken).
Pacific Northwest and CWCC present "Today’s Transportation Choices" by Doug Fine at the Portland Intl Auto Show, Oregon Convention Center, 9:00 am to 1:30 pm - -www.cwcleancities.org
- KBOO