Cool interview though.

http://www.activeliving.org/index.php/Stone_Profile/226

Thanks. Now I know why he is so friggen skinny. Will someone please feed the boy, I think I out weigh him.

what a legend

I approve of hippies. They do good things.


I would even go so far as to say "I 'heart' them."

I'm glad to say that I look up to Stone in lots of ways. I enjoy riding bikes more than driving cars as well.

STONE FOR PRESIDENT!!!

the sonic wall filter at work is banning me from viewing it!

I love riding my bike as opposed to driving, but it gets too friggin' cold here around this time of year to even think about riding.

just one more reason why Stone is the man.

That was great. First his green building piece in the Bootleg Companion and know this. Stone might be my favorite member of the band now.

...well, Jeff still has his own flow course in the woods, so its a toss up.

This makes me love this man even more...

one more reason for the band to play in Rio: we have bike paths!

I loved that part.

Gotta love Stone. If I lived somewhere else (like the small town that I grew up in for example), I would ride my bike more. Las Vegas just isnt the town to do it in, too many crazy drivers, and well, I think this town is kinda ugly.

I would go biking in the Oakland Hills, but one problem...no bike

My dad has more in common with Stone than I know.

Rocking and Riding - Full Interview
Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard riffs on road trips, walking to school and why he’d rather bike than drive.

Active Living (AL): Did you walk or bike to school when you were growing up?
Stone Gossard (SG): I walked to Seward School first through fourth grade. It’s just amazing to me now that we’d walk down 10th Avenue on Capitol Hill [Seattle, WA]. It’s a mile or a little less, and my parents would let me walk when I was in second or third grade, which I just don’t think people do anymore. Which is sad because I think people could do it. I’m not sure if it’s actually more dangerous now—statistically dangerous—but it’s just not something you do. And I remember as a second or third grader having some autonomy to go to the store if I felt like it, walk home, take my time, kick the can. We were on our own schedule after school, so that was cool.


AL: Did you do any recreational biking when you were a kid?
SG: Yeah, just cruisers when I was a kid. I liked the banana-seat bikes with the high handle bars…maybe a card in the wheel could have been part of it.


AL: You rode your bike here today. What’s your motivation to ride your bike around for transportation or errands?
SG: I really enjoy not getting in a car and running errands on bikes. I’m excited about it from a lot of different points of view. A lot of fun stuff happens when you go out on a bike compared to when you’re in a car. You’re more in the environment. It’s enjoyable. Even when it’s raining its still fun.

You take different routes; you have different reasons for taking different routes. I’ve seen neighborhoods that I would have never driven though because I’m riding my bike, because I’m looking for side roads, looking for maybe more hills or less hills depending if I’m exercising or not. You see a lot more, and you get the flow of a city a lot more.


AL: You spend a lot of time on the road with the band. What do you notice about the places you travel?
SG: The cities that I really like to go to tend to be the ones with running paths. I have a lot of different theories about running paths and why they’re good. But I think the cities that are coming up economically and in terms of their psychology, the city psychology, have people interacting and exercising between parks and corridors that allow people to either ride their bikes or run. And making those areas sort of centralized I would think is a really economically viable way of creating public well-being.


AL: What about cities in the U.S. compared to other countries?
SG: Well, you go to Holland and everybody’s on a bike—nobody would think to have a car. But it’s also [about] how small the country is, when the roads were built and how they were built. Some of it is circumstance. I think they realized a lot longer ago that it’s more enjoyable and easier to get around Holland on a bike than it is in a car.

Now that they’ve gone that way I don’t think they’d go back. You see people really enjoying themselves and it’s just part of it, nobody would think twice about riding 20 minutes home on their bike after being out or going to work. And there are trails everywhere. Instead of roads they’re building more bike trails. How much cheaper is a bike trail than a road? And then how much money do you save on people that are now staying healthier longer in terms of medical costs? And new businesses open because of the bike path, because now people are stopping in this neighborhood or that neighborhood, so how much more money comes in as tax revenue because of that? You can imagine the benefits from people getting on their bikes.


AL: What reasons would you give people to get out of their cars more often and onto their bikes?
SG: You take care of exercising and transportation in one fell swoop. I think if you exercise, your state of mind—my state of mind—is usually more at ease, ready for more mental challenges. Once I get the physical stuff out of the way it always seems like I have more calmness and better self-esteem.


AL: How do you think people in small communities could make a move towards creating activity-friendly places?
SG: I think they’re already doing it. When more green design and the more holistic approach to community building takes over, people are going to [see change]. Every time they build a community it would be great to think of the whole picture: all the transportation within the community, what’s going to stimulate and sustain that community for a long period of time, what are the limits to its growth, how does it deal with its water supply and its run-off—all of these things.

And I think what has to be incorporated into that equation is transportation, and particularly walking and biking or alternative transportation—getting away from one person in a car driving 18 blocks to get a bag of Doritos. That kind of planning has got to be part of the future of city planning, a part of the future of suburb planning, and the part of the reinvigorating older cities to incorporate some of the existing structures that are already there.

Rivers are the ideal place for bike trails because [people] already have a reason to go along there. People already want to naturally go along there. It’s a perfectly human instinct to want to be near water. You look at railroad tracks, you look at rivers, you look at connecting little communities. I think that there are some really obvious and logical sort of ways of looking at it that doesn’t have to be ‘let’s knock down a city and rebuild it.'


AL: When do you think we might see a day in this country when we have pedestrian-only corridors, or bicycle-only boulevards?
SG: It would be great to take one city street and turn it into a pedestrian corridor and see what kind of effect it has on the businesses in that area…It’s the future I think. I see it. There’s always the big resistance, but I think there’s a way that economically you can make these things make sense. There’s a way to allow people see them not as a cost to the taxpayer but as a benefit to the whole city, and maybe as a way of actually increasing the economy. Particularly small business economy—cafes, small restaurants.

I think if you could look at every old railroad track that was in a region that potentially could be [a trail], that’s the first place you could start. In terms of putting blacktop over railroad tracks, I’m not sure that’s such a huge cost.


AL: You began talking about the link between sustainable places and active living. Can you elaborate?
SG: I think it’s all tied together in terms of making a leap to a different way or a broader way of thinking about the whole. There are the elements that make up your happiness and your fulfillment, and part of that is going to be having access to a natural environment. You can see it in kids very easily in terms of what a fountain does. I think everybody has that fundamental desire to be connected with nature. So access to nature, and health and exercise is another big component, in terms of what I imagine would be the fundamentals of human happiness. And then connection to community, connection to family—those would be the big three I would imagine.

And I think all of those get touched on with the idea of bikes and of small communities becoming more interconnected. We’re pretty fractured I think. We’ve gone a different direction in terms of how our communities have interacted—gone away from the ‘it takes a village’ mentality to nuclear families sort of isolated.


AL: How might kids transition into being active adults?
SG: I think if there is a bike trail kids will use a bike trail—you know what I mean? I think there’s something to be said for making sure there are creative people at schools that are inspiring kids by their own behavior to be active. I think there’s probably a lot of room for different types of activities in public schools that are only a creative idea and some logistics away from happening.

And maybe there is a way to turn kids on to the different things that are untraditional comparatively. Versus what P.E. usually is in terms of pull-ups and basketball.


AL: Are any of your bandmates very active?
SG: Everybody is active in a different way, whether it’s surfing or snowboarding or going to the gym. We’re in better shape now than we’ve ever been—and happier as a band. You know, at 35 or at 38 or 40 you really start to see what your body could look like if you just don’t do anything all winter long. So that’s another motivating factor, our vanity.

He's my favorite from the band.

Stone should start writing all the music.

He is definately right. The Yankees do suck.

haha. I love it! What a great interview. Stone is so many great things all in one. One hell of a pimp hippe.

Thanks for posting this!

"We’re in better shape now than we’ve ever been—and happier as a band."

Yes! Amen to that.

Kickass article.

Now, given this article (on the right):

http://www.arthurberry.com/boise_articles.htm

they HAVE to play here again!!!!