Huge beasts facing extinction

 Modern pickup trucks remind me of prehistoric megafauna that we only know from the fossil record. They're weird looking. They're ponderously large. They eat a lot. They're doomed but don't know it. Like any megafauna, they'll kill you if you get too close. They're the bulls. The roads and streets are their china shop.

I've spent my entire lifetime observing the accelerating pace of consumerism as the driving force of global destruction. And maybe we're just like mold on a piece of fruit, living the high life while we destroy our home, because that's our role as decomposers. Our attempts at space flight are the equivalent of launching our spores. Unfortunately, no good fruit lies within a lifetime's travel of our feeble capabilities. Or maybe fortunately.

We might have choices that molds do not. Some physicists contend that we are made up of particles set in motion by the Big Bang, incapable of altering our trajectories. Some biologists contend that we are hardwired to think and act in certain ways. By that reckoning, only some of us are hardwired to believe in predestination; all of us are subject to it.

Those of us whose trajectory and hard wiring allow for the idea that we could alter course from the doom to which we have set ourselves will act in ways that we believe will establish a pattern for a better way of life.  Everyone else will ignore us. Whatever is going to happen will do it anyway. Que sera, sera.

As luck would have it, as gasoline prices shoot upward as a result of the incompetence and mindless aggression of the current regime, it's about to be bike commuting season. That will take a lot of financial pressure off until September. 

Unfortunately, the spike in diesel prices will drive the cost of firewood up again. It never really recovered from the spike in diesel prices from the pandemic. I don't have the energy to cut three or four cords off of my own land anymore. Poor people's fires are a persistent problem in curbing emissions. Sorry about that. I'll have to quit buying lattes, so I can put that money toward a complete solar makeover. Except I don't buy lattes. I buy green beans and roast them in an old popcorn popper. A frugal and resourceful friend taught me that.

Frugality is terrible for economic growth. Product durability is terrible for economic growth. Manufacturers don't want to make replacement parts. They want to sell complete items. Something has to be new to drive demand. New customers will buy whatever they're told is good at the time that they enter an activity. Existing customers have to be convinced that a new product will make them enjoy the activity more than they do already.

A balanced ecosystem is composed of overlapping cycles of imbalance among related elements, like a surge in seed production leading to a surge in small birds and rodents leading to a surge in predator populations. The system runs on death, but that's just life. As soon as one organism innovated by consuming another one, the food chain was born. The human economy doesn't have to run on death and destruction as much as it does, but it's only natural. Our talent for technology leads to larger imbalances than we can control. Sprinkle with a large amount of negative emotions, heat, and serve.

From the shop windows I get to watch and listen to the vehicles that people leave idling, sometimes for as much as an hour, while everyone bitches about fuel prices. Elections are won and lost on the rising cost of living a wasteful existence. The vast majority of people driving today did not live through the long waiting lines and fuel rationing of the 1973 gas crisis, the one that launched it all. It should have been a wake up call for the ages. Instead it was just a sustained inconvenience to most people, that they were willing to pay their way out of through fuel prices that climbed inexorably from thirty cents a gallon to more than a dollar. Nowadays, we would flip a U-turn in the middle of a crowded expressway to get to a place selling fuel for twice that.

There was every reason to start adopting less petroleum dependent social structures, starting more than 50 years ago. The ten-speed bike boom gained some of its power from the idea that healthy, well-fed people in a peaceful country could propel themselves around and gain both physically and economically. Just about everything in the modern industrial economy was stacked against that, though. Transportation planning centered on moving motor vehicles as rapidly as possible through the plumbing of our streets and highways. Sad experience has shown that traffic always manages to exceed capacity, so that ever-widening roads simply choke with more vehicles, but we're having trouble finding our way out of that trap. Planning principles seem to be shifting gradually. Like all vitally needed progress, it is way too slow.

The thing about living a simple life close to one location is that I don't get to experience much of daily life anywhere else. I do know that the local economy is heavily influenced by the affluence of both seasonal and year-round residents. There are poor people, even homeless people in the area, but also a great many retirees who planned well enough to live comfortably here at least for a time. Maybe some of them find funds running out sooner than they expected, but an awful lot of them seem to maintain their lifestyles pretty well. And the seasonal population includes actual billionaires. Bottom-rung billionaires, but billionaires nonetheless.

While the town is usually quiet in the gap between winter recreation and the real onset of springtime, the quiet times throughout this winter and the technical first days of spring have been ominously deserted. While I did extensive work on a nice late 1990s Olmo and a 2008 Fuji carbon road bike this week, the cash register logged daily totals of $11, 20-something, and at least one day of flat-out zero.

A kids' camp in the area brought in the first installment of their heavily abused mountain bikes. I discussed repair versus replacement options with the guy who dropped them off. Given the shabby quality of low-end and midrange components, comparable replacement for a bike they probably paid about $500 for, more than ten years ago would likely cost at least 20 percent more than that. Maybe they got a better deal, buying through a shop closer to them than we are, that has since gone under. The parts spec was already a bit chintzy. In the same price bracket today, it's much worse. So, while these aren't the nearly immortal bikes of the late 20th and very early 21st century, they're still worth paying a bit to nurse along. Abusive campers would obliterate a cheap mountain bike of today.

Well before the pandemic, bike prices were rising much faster than the general rate of inflation. They soared along with every other price during the pandemic, but by the time that the industry could produce enough units to meet the demand from 2020-'21, that demand was gone. Faced with a surplus, bike companies began dumping as much as they could, but the ones producing primarily meat-powered ones are finding that no one wants them anymore. That's an overstatement, but not by much. The vast majority of consumer dollars seem to be going to the many available e-bikes at competitive prices, enticing buyers who only learn later how abysmal the product support is. We're decades away from a support network for e-bikes as ubiquitous as what motor vehicles enjoy. 

Ah well. Onward through the fog.

Extravagance

One question has been at the back or the middle of my mind since the 1970s: What is the morally justifiable average lifestyle worldwide? Given that we keep lining up more people to consume pieces of the Earth pie, the slices have gotten steadily smaller.

Technology has helped us somewhat in the past, but never as much as we thought. It was easy to accept creature comforts and entertaining diversions affordably marketed in your technologically advanced society, and take a soft-focused view of those other countries where people still lived in more primitive circumstances. What did we owe them? Not much. And that may be true by some measures. Some genuinely primitive tribes famously repel attempts by modernists to come in and upset their balanced lives. In other cases, the locals would welcome a bit more in the way of comfort and respect.

From primitive to modern is another continuum. Unfortunately, once you accept some technology, you rely on whatever spawned it, and you will feel pressure to go further, even if you were satisfied at the previous level. And our technology has failed to make us better people, even though it hasn't really made us worse. Except that it has, in the critical sense that it makes us more voracious consumers of resources, while numbing us to the awareness of that fact.

A lot of technology uses resources more efficiently, reducing waste. But a growing population in developed nations consumes more resources in basic lifestyle amenities than a smaller, more stable population living off of more direct use of natural resources: hunting and gathering, and small-scale agriculture.

If I had to live at a primitive level, I would definitely do it where I didn't have to wear wool next to the skin. I'd be down in loincloth territory, preferably near some nice beaches, too.

When I got into bikes, and later into the bike business, I considered it a benign use of technology, infinitely expandable without negative consequences. Any number can play, and it only makes things better. It was true then, and it's still true, of basic cycling and a limited amount of recreational riding. Bicycling as it is practiced today has moved away from that. It is now an extravagance of the developed world, fed by glossy magazines, up-to-date websites, social media, and partnerships with other consumer pleasures, like beer and coffee.

Beer and coffee are food groups. My perfect world includes them. Even in primitive cultures, most of them have developed some kind of recreational beverages. I'll defend that one. But the performance side of bike culture has become increasingly resource-intensive, not just in its use of materials and substances to make a functional modern bike, but in the demand on riders to be able to afford it. What do you have to do for a living to generate enough income to spend it on each of the expensive category bikes you will need to fully enjoy "cycling?"

Some economist will point out that prices adjusted for inflation end up coming out the same as, or lower than, prices for what passed for performance equipment in decades past. Pick your decade. There's an economic index to show that things are no worse now. The critical difference is not the up-front cost of equipment, it's the cost of properly maintaining that equipment in all of its complexity. You'll go through a lot of tire sealant, brake fluid, cartridge bearings, and shock oil if you follow the instructions that came in all of the owner's manuals you got with your new bike. Parts you wear out, like chains, cassettes, and tires, are all more expensive, and the chains and cassettes are more prone to wear because there is less metal in links and cogs. And I defy an economist to tell me that a $45 dollar chain today is equivalent to a $9 Sedisport chain from 1982. As of 2018, the inflated price of a $10 chain would be just over $26.  I added a buck because the price of the Sedisport did creep upward gradually during its long and glorious reign as the best deal in the chain industry.

You can say that the Sedisport only worked on the drive trains of the time, but the same width chain works from six cogs on up through eight. I could piece together a Sedisport from old links in my chain stash and run it on any of my bikes today. Along with price inflation comes the reduction in versatility, and the decreased service life of the crowded drive trains of today.

Years ago, on a group road ride, we were discussing Shimano's new STI road shifting. Several of the riders had leaped to adopt that innovation. "If you truly love cycling, you'll pay whatever it costs to participate," one rider asserted.

"If you truly love cycling, you won't need gimmicky modern bullshit to enjoy it," I replied.

Racing is another matter. Racing is an arms race. You need equipment equivalent to the weaponry your competitors will be using. Racing equipment has one job: increase your efficiency in tight competition with other riders whose only goal is to keep you from winning. Maybe they're working to help a teammate. Maybe they are the aspiring champion who wants to cross the line first, with arms upraised. It's a series of short term goals embedded in the long term goal of a successful racing season.

We who pedal fall into the trap of comparing our activities to worse activities: "It's better than tearing around on ATVs. It's not as bad as street racing little sports cars and hot rods." And so on. Cycling used to be able to say that it was not only not as bad, it was definitely an improvement on wasteful and polluting forms of transportation and recreation. Human powered recreation in general is much better for our species and our world. But resistance is strong. Persuasion is difficult. There's a long list of things you can't say, or ways you can't say the things you might dare to express. This is why real social progress is so agonizingly gradual. We meander and sidle and murmur and nudge, getting basically nowhere until grievances erupt into an outright war. The smoke and flame and blood spatter from that ends up obscuring a lot of what we were fighting about in the first place. The mere end of hostilities is such a relief that we call it good. Perhaps slightly improved after the experience, we go back to our previous piecemeal advancement of the things that really weren't solved at all by the orgy of violence.

The mountain bike boom was started by idealistic bike nerds who had stayed on after the road bike boom faded out. We all kept hoping that the hints of social acceptance in things like the movies Breaking Away, American Flyers, and Quicksilver indicated a growing public understanding of our worthy goals. Bikes even got a nod from Doonesbury:

Of course mellowness fell out of favor during the early 1980s, and militarism regained popularity. It was easy to back a strong military when no one was required to join it. The volunteer force was already evolving into a separate warrior caste, while the general public could enjoy the Hollywood portrayal of our brave fighters in comfort and safety.

As mountain biking evolved through the 1990s, police departments adopted bike patrols, usually on modified versions of the simple and versatile mountain bike platform. Some jurisdictions have actually continued the practice. There was even a television show about bike cops. It was done on the Baywatch format, right down to the California setting. It did little to advance transportation cycling or bolster the longevity of the bike patrol concept. The average citizen's sense of safety and desire to try riding on the public streets has steadily eroded even as the average price of a bike has steadily risen.

Bike advocacy does advance. We make incremental improvements even as the need to make massive adjustments grows more urgent. It's better than nothing, in the same way that a single cotton ball stuffed into an arterial wound is something. We could save the situation if we had enough balls.