Environmentalism and the Bicycle

Environmentalism continues a tradition of the bicycle playing an important role in social movements. During the 1890s the bicycle became symbolic of women’s push for greater freedoms; it enabled an escape from gendered norms in styles of dress, patterns of mobility, and types of leisure, such that ‘the movement it set in motion for re-evaluating social conventions of dress, manners, status and roles was irreversible’. Falling prices between the late nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War produced a democratic expansion in the accessibility of bicycles, which became an important aspect of the cultural and political worlds of socialists throughout north-western Europe and North America. In Britain, cycling was a key part of the Clarion movement, which ‘provided cultural support for socialists’, and which ‘was very much part of the socialist offensive in the Edwardian period’. Each weekend urban cyclists took to bicycles and rode into the countryside to spread what Stephen Yeo calls the new ‘religion of socialism’.
Feminists and socialists utilized a relatively novel technology to change their everyday lives and construct wider demands, for release from patriarchal constraints for women, and for a socialist society to liberate the working class. Thus in its early days the bicycle was caught up in the pursuit of greater freedoms; as an object of independent mobility it powerfully enabled the expansion of real and imaginative horizons. But by the 1960s, British society was accelerating towards mass motorization, and other modes of mobility were consequently being marginalized. A new critique of the negative side-effects of processes of modernization, and growing environmental awareness, began to take hold. An important issue for post-1960s progressive politics is the growing dominance of the system of motorized mobility and its effects; ever increasing speed, distance and dispersal alongside the erosion of ‘local community’, conviviality and ‘nature’. Mass automobility had already been a target of Situationist critiques. This tradition of thinking, in which the car symbolizes an inauthentic and alienated life, informs a contemporary anarchism which celebrates the bicycle as the car’s other.
But what of the bicycle’s relevance to environmentalism? The early 1970s were dominated by concerns over energy crises. In his hugely influential Small is Beautiful the economist E. F. Schumacher warned that ‘the inroads being made into the world’s non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead in the quite foreseeable future’. A range of influential writers also wrote out of this context, including André Gorz and, most significantly, Ivan Illich. In Energy and Equity, however, Illich moves beyond the energy crises to lament what he sees as a more fundamental ‘involuntary acceleration of personal rhythms’ which motorized traffic imposes.
During this period environmentalist concerns shifted away from the protection of particular sites and species and towards more explicit critique of specific environmentally damaging practices, such as use of the car. Before the 1960s, concerns about the car were largely the preserve of transport campaigners, and emphasized the damage cars cause to individual bodies, and especially to pedestrians and cyclists. As automobility accelerated, rising traffic and congestion, alongside the substantial reshaping of urban environments to accommodate the car, provoked widespread concern. Like the later anti-road campaigns of the 1990s, controversies around the destruction of neighborhoods and communities by rising car use and constant road building contributed to broader processes of the car’s politicization and vilification. So already during the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by new environmentalist discourses, the damage which cars in general do to society and the environment in general is coming much more into focus.
Aligned with this shift was the incorporation of various ‘green’ practices into new political repertoires. With regard to transport, what is needed is a vehicle able to negotiate the urban environment without leading to its degradation, suffocation or ceaseless expansion. With cars driving affluent societies towards the environmental apocalypse, bicycles become the route to ecological sanity. As the car becomes increasingly constructed as ‘the problem’, the car’s other, the bicycle, emerges as ‘the solution’. In Energy and Equity Illich insists that ‘free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle’. Illich also provides a set of figures still used by environmental transport campaigners. Based on a series of calculations of the amount of time it takes to pay for and run a car, Illich suggests that ‘The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour’.
With much in its favor and little to say against it, this vehicle takes center-stage in the virtuous materialities of environmentalism and, among environmental activists, cycling as a practice clearly embodies and performs environmental concern and commitment. It is no accident that symbolic green journeys, what we might call ‘green pilgrimages’, are frequently made by bicycle. Though not all activists are committed riders and outspoken advocates of the bicycle, they invariably recognize and respect this object as unambiguously good. It occupies a central role in the environmentalist imaginary even when absent from the mundane practices of everyday life.
To summarize, the bicycle’s very importance as a mode of mobility among environmental activists facilitates a way of life that is relatively ‘local’, ‘public’ and ‘healthy’. The centrality of a distinctive and ‘public’ form of mobility in a spatially compact everyday life results in a high degree of interconnectedness, keeping local environmentalists in touch with one another and thus contributing to the reproduction of their collective green culture. Environmentalists’ use of the bicycle, in other words, actively constructs a local green culture, and the distinctive green lifestyles which that culture tends to reproduce.