Environmentalism and the bicycle

Abstract

In the United Kingdom, the bicycle has played a role in the oppositional cultures of various social movements; feminism and socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, post-1960s anarchism and, most recently, environmentalism. This article discusses the significance of the bicycle to the discourse and practice of the contemporary environmental movement. At the level of discourse, the bicycle is mobilised routinely in constructing the green visions to which environmentalism aspires; and in practice, use of the bicycle organises and helps to sustain the distinctive ‘green lifestyles’ of environmental activists. Thus, as an object both utilised discursively in green talk and texts, and actually ridden by green practitioners, the bicycle powerfully enables the articulation of an alternative society, a green vision of sustainability. The case of the bicycle demonstrates how ‘ordinary’ materialities can contribute to the development and performance of antagonistic cultural and political identities.

Acknowledgments

A serious debt is obviously owed to those activists whose everyday lives form the basis for this article. Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University, and to the British Sociological Association Annual Conference at the University of York, both in March 2004; many thanks to participants at both events for stimulating debate and helpful comments. Particular thanks to Sue Holden, Paul Rosen, Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry for their very supportive and useful suggestions, to the two Environmental Politics reviewers, and to the ESRC for research funding.

Notes

1. Obviously, the bicycle is not always and everywhere political; the importance of specific material artefacts to specific kinds of politics does not make those artefacts political per se. Objects cannot be stripped away from their cultural locations, the sites where they are made meaningful, and different cultures attach very different meanings to ‘the same’ kinds of object.

2. For a more recent critique of speed, and a similar call for societies, including cars, to slow down, see Honoré (2004: 97–110).

3. The other six being the condom, ceiling fan, clothes-line, public library, ladybird and pad thai.

4. In Lancaster, for example, beyond the presence of Dynamo, a cycle campaign group, Friends of the Earth activists and Green Party councillors have contributed importantly to improving cycling provision.

5. Research exploring intra-urban mobility in the United Kingdom across the twentieth century finds use of the independent, personalised modes of the bicycle and car to be consistently higher among boys and men (Pooley et al., 2004).

6. Environmentalism not only politicises materialities, such as the car and nuclear power, perceived as wholly antithetical to green visions; it also tends to problematise even those objects such as the computer which are widely recognised as nowadays central to environmental activism and green lifestyles (see Pickerill, 2003; Horton, 2004).

7. Iain Boal (2002: 173) notes that the bicycle ‘is thought of as a green mode of transportation, yet it is intimately linked to the history and culture of automobilism and to the development of ecologically destructive roads’, and that the bicycle is ‘a cause of exploitation (rubber slavery)’ (see also Wheatcroft, 2003: 29, 55). Mick Hamer (1987: Ch. 3) elaborates some of the ways in which, at the turn of the twentieth century, advocates of the bicycle played a crucial role in the development of the United Kingdom's road infrastructure.

8. Although not a task for this paper, it would be worth exploring the effects of cycling from other perspectives; medical studies have shown the positive health effects of cycling, but its effects on psychology, or perceptions of the ‘local environment’ and ‘the natural world’, for example, remain poorly understood.

9. On, for example, the increased distances between the homes of marriage partners enabled by the bicycle, after 1887, see P. J. Perry (1969). Perry (1969: 133–4) notes: ‘Before the coming of the bicycle the countryman generally travelled on foot…Dependence on walking, however, much restricted the area of frequent and everyday contact…It was this situation that the bicycle, inter alia, transformed’.

10. In the United Kingdom in 2001, 62% of trips between 1 and 2 miles were made by car (Beecroft et al., 2002: 31). ‘Progressive’ transport policy tends to see the bicycle as an alternative to the car for such local journeys; indeed, policy literature tends to take ‘cycling distance’ as potentially anything under 5 miles.

11. On the blurring of boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ induced by car dominated mobility, see Sheller and Urry (2003a).

12. Though that is increasingly true of the car (see Putnam, 2000; Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2002).

13. Marcus Jones (2001: 8) notes the related policy-relevant point that ‘By getting adults out of cars and out and about in the streets [cycling] also helps to improve the vitality and security of the urban environment’.

14. Cycling as a demonstration to others is particularly well illustrated by the tendency among some activists to go out of their way to pedal past stationary motorised traffic. An environmental activist is also generally happy to be identifiable as a cyclist away from her or his machine; whether carrying panniers, still wearing a fluorescent jacket or helmet, or with trouser clips still in place, it is not embarrassing but good to look as if you have recently arrived by bicycle.

15. Interestingly, this kind of bicycle, which manufacturers term the ‘hybrid’ or ‘city-bike’, currently accounts for the fastest growing category of bicycle sales (see http://www.bikebiz. co.uk/infozone/stats.php, accessed 14 July 2005).

16. On similar expressions of guilt among car-owning participants in the cycle protest event, Critical Mass, see Blickstein and Hanson (2001: 360).

17. Bicycles are used for 27% of all trips in the Netherlands (Larsen, 2002: 132).

18. However, like environmental activists, pro-cycling policy is going against and attempting to reverse very dominant and well-entrenched mobility orderings and social patterns. Perhaps much more so than other northern European societies such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, the United Kingdom has become ‘locked-in’ to systems of automobility (Sheller & Urry, 2003b; Urry, 2003). And despite increasing pro-cycling rhetoric, car ownership and driving continue to grow more popular than ever. But the fact remains that, at least at the level of rhetoric, cycling is today clearly endorsed by government.