Often when people talk about biking, especially in cities, it is linked to “sustainability.” For example the book where many of our readings come from is called Cycling for Sustainable Cities. What does sustainable mean to you?

I’d like to think about sustainability from a broad historical perspective. Beginning around 1775 starting in Great Britain and spreading from there, the world has been conducting an experiment: What happens when we combine limitless fossil fuel energy, continually advancing technology and capitalism? That experiment has been now running for 250 years. There is no doubt that this experiment has raised much of the world’s standard of living and has had many material benefits. The question we are now faced with is the world we have created sustainable? Why is sustainability important?

Before and After
Prior to this time the amount of energy available to a society was highly limited and could be traced back rather quickly to the sun, either based on crops or on animals or people who fed on crops. Afterwards people had access to energy that had been created over millions of years–first in the form of coal, and later in the form of oil. (You could say that we are living off an energy bank account that had been opened millions of years before.)

Before this experiment, societies were always forced to live within strict limits, which confined how they could grow. Once societies came under the influence of limitless fossil energy, developing technology, and capitalism, these limits were to a large degree removed. In fact economic growth became not just possible, but it became an expectation, almost a requirement.

This graph (From Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms) dramatically shows the effects of this experiment. On the y-axis is income per capita, on the x-axis are years. As we see that upward sloping line on the right side, we might ask if that slope is indefinitely sustainable.

In addition to economic growth, another characteristic of societies shaped by fossil energy, technological development and capitalism is that humans tended to develop systems that would replace the natural environment. They saw the natural environment as unreliable and that human-made systems could be more dependable. Can you think of some examples of these types of systems? What do you think the costs and benefits of these systems are?

Another characteristic of these societies is that they became highly specialized, with specific engineers, scientists, and managers having control over different technologies and thus different aspects of the society. Not unrelatedly I would argue that one of the long term characteristics of this experiment has been to dis-integrate aspects of society, that is to take them apart and look at a variety of things individually rather than to look at the whole.

As I said before, these societies have produced remarkable economic growth, but they have had their costs, often not fully accounted for. With respect to long term sustainability, the biggest cost may be associated with global climate change. Burning fossils fuels releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas which traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere. Scientists estimate that since the industrial revolution, humans have burned half a trillion tons of fossil fuels. Through the burning of fossil fuels, we have raised the level of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere from about 280 parts per million at the start of this experiment in the late 1700s to 420 parts per million now. Scientists believe this rise is responsible for the global rise in temperatures and the climatic instability. If this rise is not stopped, dramatic climatic changes will occur (changes that will make our current elevated temperatures seem like nothing), likely leading to equally dramatic social effects world-wide. Some parts of the world will become inhabitable, climatic events will disrupt human processes….

Scientists and engineers are working on a variety of ways to either reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we emit or to limit the climate effects of the carbon dioxide we have produced. The latter category includes geoengineering, attempting to reengineering the earth’s climate by such means as spraying sulfur dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere. The former category of limiting our carbon dioxide emissions includes such “high tech” solutions as solar cells, electric cars or nuclear power.

Some people (and I am one of them) believe that there is a problem with these types of solutions in that they don’t recognize the bigger problems with this experiment we have been conducting. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook made famous the motto “Move Fast and Break Things.” One could say without too much exaggeration that that has been a motto of the whole period of this experiment. And what are these “things”? Sometimes older technologies, but also older social arrangements or older habits. And these “things” are broken without much consideration of their positive effects. We have left a trail of broken things left behind either for someone else to try to fix up or to remaining as lasting wounds in our world. One of the most prominent critics of today’s American society in that regard is the farmer, author and poet Wendell Berry. In 1980 he wrote as essay “Solving for Pattern,” critiquing our approach to solving problems. (He did not use the work “sustainable” because that word wasn’t widely used then, but that was what he was talking about.)

Berry says that there are solutions that cause “a ramifying series of new problems, the only limiting criterion being, apparently, that the new problems should arise beyond the purview of the expertise that produced the solution – as, in agriculture, industrial solutions to the problem of production have invariably caused problems of maintenance, conservation, economics, community health, etc., etc.” Berry’s essay is talking about agriculture, but can you think of examples of what he is talking about in other areas? In transportation? The United States have put a lot of hope in electric cars to limit our carbon dioxide and save us environmentally. What problems might electric cars create? What problems might they not solve?

Read this excerpt from Berry’s essay. He is talking about agriculture, but let’s try to move from agriculture to transportation and city planning/development. Can we see “solutions” in this space that cause more problems? Look at the 14 principles Berry gives at the end of the essay. What do you think of them? Is our society based on them now? What would it look like to have a transportation/city planning system built on these principles? Do you think movement by bicycle is compatible with these principles? Why or why not?

Another way to think about these new problems created by our “solutions”, a way used by economists, is to think of them as externalities, costs that are not factored in. What are some of the externalities of our automobile based society?

Berry talks about putting down health as the aim of our solutions. Is that commonly done?

What do you think it means to have a solution that creates a “ramifying series of solutions”? Could we think about bicycles in that way? What other problems might be solved by riding bicycles instead of driving?

The environmentalist Bill McKibben has put it this way “To me the question is how big humans want to be, whether we want to be in control of everything around us.  .. Beginning with the explosions of the first nuclear weapons …, now with our ability to change the very climate  of the planet and to reach inside DNA molecules to to change what humans are, we have become extraordinarily large.    One of our jobs is to figure out how to make ourselves smaller.  If we do, I think the planet will be a happier place, and we will happier people on it.” In what ways do you think the automobile is part of making humans (or at least some humans) extraordinarily large?

Thinking about the costs of an automobile-based society

When people talk about the efficiency of the automobile, what do you think they mean? How are they measuring efficency? Are there other ways to measure efficiency in which we might see the automobile is inefficient?

This nitty-gritty analysis of the energy usage and green-house gas consumption of various means of transportation argues that the bicycle has a carbon footprint ten times less than that of driving. (Sorry I couldn’t find an ad-free version.)

A Dutch journalist, Thalia Verkade wrote “If someone invented the car today, it would never be allowed on the roads. Think about it–a machine that kills thousands, contributes to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and requires more than half of the public space in towns.” Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet, Movement: How to Take Back our Streets and Transform our Lives (London: Scribe, 2022), 153.

In a certain sense, we have gotten so used to the automobile, that we passively accept the absurdities and violence that have come with it, while we consider absurd something much more rational! We can call this “autonormativity.”

Let’s think about the externalities of the automobile. (costs that are difficult to measure and that are often born by someone else rather than the driver of the car):

-The construction of highways has involved involuntarily removing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and tearing down hundreds if not thousands of buildings–businesses, churches, etc. Robert Moses displaced 250,000 New Yorkers in his career, where he built 618 miles of highways mostly in New York City. Here is an infamous local example, where an African-American community (Hayti) was destroyed to build the Durham Expressway. And it still goes on today! Read this example of highway construction to accommodate a new electric battery factory in Chatham County. In addition to the displaced buildings and people, highway construction involves converting trees and grass to asphalt and concrete. Take a look at these two Google Earth images of the I440 Beltline intersection at Wade Avenue. This one from 2015 before the project started and this one from 2021. Here is a folder of pictures of the construction process.

The car has taken over space in our cities in other ways. This piece discussed the space costs of parking in the US.

Forty three thousand Americans died from vehicular violence in 2021. What is more globally 1.3 million people were killed this way. Here is a piece on “accidents.” What does the word “accident” hide? What other terms might be more appropriate? Why don’t we use them? In the 1920s, several cities built monuments to children who had been victims of traffic violence. What purpose is served by downplaying the costs of traffic violence?

–road noise. (For example, the Federal Highway Administration says, “Levels of highway traffic noise typically range from 70 to 80 dB(A) at a distance of 15 meters (50 feet) from the highway. These levels affect a majority of people, interrupting concentration, increasing heart rates, or limiting the ability to carry on a conversation. “

–Air pollution–We think of air pollution from exhaust, but read this piece on air pollution from tires.

Why do we ignore these costs?