7 sustainable wonders.

• Author: Durning, Alan Thein

Common items we take for granted--such as bicycles and clotheslines--do wonders to protect the environment.

I NEVER HAVE SEEN any of the Seven Wonders of the World, and to tell you the truth, I wouldn't really want to. If I ever got to the pyramids, I'm sure I'd only think about how many slaves must have died cubing boulders and shoving them about. I once came close to seeing the Taj Mahal, which, though it came too late to register as an original wonder, surely would qualify on a new ranking. Everyone we met in India said we had to go see it, but my wife and I balked when we figured out how early we would have to arise to do so. Who wants to get up before dawn for a hell ride through traffic (Hindus are especially bad drivers because they believe in reincarnation) to see a tomb built by a long-dead imperialist? We slept in, then spent the day riding bicycle rickshaws and smelling th jasmine in Delhi.

To me, the real wonders are all the little things that work, especially when they do it without hurting the Earth. here's my list simple thing that, though they are taken for granted, are absolute wonders. These implements solve everyday problems so elegantly that everyone in the world today--and everyone who is likely to live in it in the next century--could have and use them without Mother Nature ever noticing.

The bicycle. The most thermodynamically efficient transportation device ever created and the most widely used private vehicle in the world, the bicycle merits first place on the list of the sustainable wonders of the world. Invented just a little over a century ago, bikes let individuals travel three times as far on a plateful of calories as a person could walking. Moreover, they are 53 times more energy efficient--comparing food calories with gasoline calories--than the typical car. They don't pollute the air, lead to oil spills (and oil wars), change the climate, send cities sprawling over the countryside, lock up half of urban space in roads and parking lots, or kill a quarter-million people in traffic accidents each year.

Bikes also are cheaper than any other vehicle, costing less than $100 new in most of the Third World. Mine, a zippier model, still ran less than $400. (Fluorescent spandex tights, of course, are extra. Bicycles do take steel, aluminum, and rubber to manufacture, and making these has an environmental cost, as a glance at any iron mine or rubber factory will demonstrate. However, they are lightweight of necessity...