Determined to finish this today!

UPDATE: I finished this bike ride which charts the edge of the area that the bees living on a highrise building in Ginza can fly to. I think in balance there was more green space than I expected for Tokyo, and I also noticed how much more mixed the spaces in Tokyo are than I originally thought. The whole of Koto-ku seemingly full of schools and families. I only saw one actual bee on my journey, not a honey bee, some more lethal looking variety looking slightly drunk and unfortunate on a pink flower outside someone’s house.

Here are the live maps recorded from the gps on my phone:
Roppongi Hills to… a few metres down the road
Azabu Juban to the sea
Daiba to Ryogoku

I enjoyed reading the piece about Al Gore in The Guardian today. It addresses many of the issues facing the environmental movement and people’s feelings about it. When I left the UK there was a lot of support for green issues and finding others who were involved was easy. Outside cozy England and, not-so-much, I’ve found. One thing is for sure, its easier to be hopeful when you have other people in your network to add to the sense of community and accumulated political clout. So, what struck me is that Al Gore, at least publicly, is putting across a tone of what journalist Oliver Burkeman called “optimism infused with urgency”. He makes no qualms about this pressing issue – how do you engage people without the Waterworld-come-Day-After-Tomorrow overtones?

When making his Oscar-winning 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore arguably had it easy: it’s fairly straightforward to grip an audience when you’re portraying scenes of apocalyptic destruction. The new book pulls off a considerably more impressive feat. It focuses on solving the crisis, yet manages to be absorbing on a topic that is all too often – can we just come clean about this, please? – crushingly boring.

Well, if Gore can’t switch us on to a brighter side of politicking our way out of the crisis, there’s only a couple of people left. I don’t believe he has all the answers but I certainly appreciated the dose of optimism with my breakfast this morning.

I’m going on a bike ride today, track my progress:

The Ginza Honey Bee Project (sorry its in japanese) is keeping bees on the roof of a building in the centre of the city. Bees can apparently fly 4km in any direction……. so I thought I’d see what they can see by cycling around the circumference of it. Potentially opening myself up to all kinds of scary cyber privacy issues but decided to use an iphone app called mymovingmap to track my progress. The circumference of the circles is about 25km…. Setting off in about 20 mins I hope.

UPDATE I managed half way around and took about 500 pics but then the light started receding and I called it a day. I got from Roppongi Hills going North (clockwise) around the area and ended up just south of Asakusa on the sumida gawa river that borders between taito and sumidagawa wards. I’m thinking of finishing the ride on Monday by going anti clockwise from Roppongi down through the sea-facing wards and back up again to nearby asakusa. Wow those bees travel far, I was pretty tired coming back – even though I didn’t do the circuit I was still the other side of the city when I decided to came back, it must have been between 20-30km in all. The mymovingmaps gadget worked great, when I sort through all the info I collected I’ll put up a collated map of where I actually went.
It recorded my journey in pieces, they are:
Roppongi Hills to… Just down the road
Gaien-Mae to Ichigaya
Iidabashi to Asakusa

(some parts missing)

Stay tuned for more on Monday.