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The Bicycling Life
Our lives have become fiercely competitive and fiercely co-operative, but bicycling helps us find balance and connection

Energy efficiency is fast-becoming a cliché not only in South Africa, but also in many other countries. High fuel, food and electricity prices impact on everyone. The bicycle presents a unique solution, but perhaps even more, teaches with maximum fluency the mindset of efficiency. Save your energy, weigh less, share in your efforts, work together, and by working together, everyone benefits.

Perhaps the most vital attribute a cyclist needs to have is – wait-for-it – slimness. At a time when energy costs especially are forcing companies and individuals to be as efficient as they can be, carrying unnecessary fat and burning unnecessary fuel is a big no-no. Slimness allows for efficiency and important, quick adaptation, flexibility and rapid response to a changing scenario. In car terms it’s a Yaris and a Hummer racing one another for the nearest petrol station in peak hour traffic. Being lightweight allows for easier movement, better overall health and a reduced risk of injury notwithstanding the effects of gravity and entropy.

Coherent, Cohesive Intelligence

But one of the biggest sins in cycling (beyond obesity) is being a hothead that sprints foolishly ahead of the bunch; wasting precious endowments of glucose and getting nowhere. In this sense, tact and intelligence are vital. Pure strength, technology on its own, lightness, all the ingredients on their own are not enough to guarantee a good ride. They must be integrated into a coherent system, a program (both in terms of training and how these sessions are employed towards effective racing performances).

All By Myself

Naturally of course there are riders who rebel against the herd instinct. They don’t want to conform, they want to rebel. Every rider feels this at some stage. There is a compulsion be an individual, to indulge in what one wants when one wants it. It’s the consumer-mindset. The heaviest rider in a bunch will shoot ahead of the pack on a downhill…why not allow himself to get ahead, and build momentum for the next uphill? A light rider might find the pace up the steepest section far too slow. Sooner or later those initial gains are countered by working alone against the wind. An alliance with other individuals sometimes (rarely) pays off. The place for individual effort is just before the finish line. So cycling involves the strategic use of a collective co-operative effort. In the working world and even at home, teamwork and co-operation will benefit both the individual and community.

Specialized

Our highly specialized vocations allow us to do one thing, while someone else does something else important, and so almost no time is needed to put food on the table – this is a modern co-operative innovation that took agrarian societies millennia to realize. Living in villages connected to other villages by roads is another trick unique to modern society that we take for granted, yet without the company of others the sukkel for food and basic necessities would dominate our days. In cycling, staying in the group has profound benefits. Ask anyone who has labored alone on the long road against the wind, having to deal with cramps, punctures and other mishaps all by himself.

Natural Instinct

To see the co-operation of cyclists in action is to see something beautiful. On the first loop of the OFM (on the Thaba Nchu road) colorful flotillas of synchronicity SSSSHHHHHHIISSHHH by one another on opposite sides of the highway. Each large group is essentially its own organism, a cyclopede of wheels and legs. The message is obvious: if consumers and surburbanites realize they are part of a larger organism, like cyclists in a peloton, the entire system becomes more functionally efficient.

Short Term Contracts (like Renting or Car Hire)

While even the everyday rider will experience fierce competitiveness of other riders, for the bulk of a race the imperative to co-operate is even fiercer. Riders will often book a place in a line and curse and spit, prod and push when their ‘spot’ is taken by someone else. Riders who have never seen each other before suddenly work together, talking to each other, shouting and swearing if co-operation isn’t adequately rendered. It’s essentially a short-term scenario of close co-operation for an anonymous crowd of individuals. All they have in common is a common destination and whirring wheels between their hamstrings. But once again the benefits in terms of energy saving are real.

We All Sing Together

Perhaps cycling’s greatest lesson is that it instills a very real sense of community amongst its members. The rider needs to depend and be very aware of those around him or her, and must also realize others are depending on there being a co-operative effort too. If a surbanite builds high walls and instills the best alarm system, but a neighbor does not, the surbanite is just as vulnerable as the neighbor. To apply a cyclist’s co-operative strategy to this case: a neighborhood watch paid for by the community it protects benefits everyone. The wealthy helping out the poor benefit the entire community. Cycling uniquely places the teenager, the strong 20-something, and the old Oom in the same group, and allows them the opportunity to challenge, co-operate and compete.

Gearing and Leverage

Gearing and leveraging on a bicycle is something like compound interest. Over a period of time, the effects (and possible benefits) are significant. Cycling is one of the most technically complex sports. There are many factors to consider besides how to function in a rapidly changing peloton. There is aerodynamics, engineering (position and angle of saddle relative to the pedals), work rate (cadence) and also gearing. Gearing also has to do with efficiency, but when gearing is used more specifically to enhance leverage, well, then efficiency is no longer the priority, power is. Someone said: “Give me a long enough stick and I can move the world.” Leveraging gears and muscles – which implies an intimate understanding of oneself and one’s machine – will mean the difference between winning the sprint, or staying in touch with a group of stronger riders, as opposed to the worst case: being dropped. The same concept can be applied to leveraging one’s savings into investments, including into property. It may seem like a gray area, an insignificant cloud of subtlety, but small refinements here have powerful long term effects.

All or Nothing Competition

Cycling is not just about “Good morning Sport, after you.” It happens to be also fiercely competitive. The competitive nature of cycling is often under-estimated. The ongoing doping scandals at the Tour de France demonstrate to what extent the Professionals are reluctant to give up even an illegal advantage. But even amateurs risk life and limb simply to hang on to a bunch, even if it means finishing a race nowhere near the podium. In a Carnival City race an older rider was so close to my wheel that he fell when I moved to a better slipstreaming position. Just before this I’d observed: “Why is everyone so quiet; why is everyone so serious.” Everyone was concentrating hard at 65km in the B bunch. Older riders were doing their best to hang with the stronger guys, but a constant erosion was taking place. The will to remain in contention, even if that simply meant staying with the bunch, is powerful. The Argus is filled with thousands of average riders compelled to be as competitive as they can be on one day in March.

Information Overload

More than any other sport, the information from a heart rate monitor, cadence meter and speedometer on a bicycle can be overwhelming. There are Watts to consider, average speed, average heart rate, cadence, and the powerful impacts of wind and altitude. All athletes have to be savvy in terms of technological innovations. Which light, aerodynamic materials? Which nutrients and when? Devices that accurately record progress. Efficiencies can be fine-tuned by measuring and responding to changes in performance. A good rider knows which levels of exertion to apply in training and racing.

Pyschology

Bicycling inculcates a valuable sense of balance in the individual, which brings us back to the bicycling mindset.
The basics of cycling involve ups and downs, inevitably punctures and breakdowns – and how to get over these with minimum strain and maximum enjoyment. How to fly without falling? Isn’t this what life is all about? Cycling well means balancing a host of important psychological skills: anticipation, using and conserving momentum, executing strategy and most important – developing a thriving economy, whatever the energy constraints may be.

While Lance may have inspired millions to ride their bikes, it’s also true that cycling’s time has come. In the same way that the world has become smaller and flatter thanks to the internet and cheap air tickets, the world has never been more intricate or fast paced. The only way to stay in touch with these changes is on your bicycle.

Thought For The Day

“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
—H. G. Wells, 1904

Americans on America (SCARY STUFF)

DAMN OBVIOUS

Maybe the best place to start is with a general comment. It's getting pretty damn obvious that the world is sliding head-first into the abyss at an accelerating rate, with most Americans as oblivious as ever. The latest indication of impending doom is a festering credit crunch brought on by the inevitable puncturing of a bubble puffed up over the past few years through the issuance of thousands of patently idiotic subprime, adjustable-rate, and interest-only mortgage loans.

Series of Bubbles

The deeper story is that this is just the last of a series of bubbles that the US Federal Reserve has inflated in order to sustain for as long as was humanly possible a fundamentally unsound national financial condition.

As I explained in Chapter 2 of The Party's Over, the US got rich exploiting its own resources and labor. Its most valuable resource - oil - went into decline forty years ago; since then, we Americans have tried to stay rich by exploiting other nations' labor and resources, using leveraged trade rules, dollar hegemony, and military threats.

Deal Or No Deal?

All this time, we congratulated ourselves: we were living in a post-industrial information economy; they were doing the dreary, obsolete work of actually making things. They sweated and saved; it was up to us to spend and borrow. We served an indispensable function in the global economy as the consumer of last resort, as the engine of new debt creation (more debt equals more money in circulation - i.e., more GDP growth), and as the global cop keeping order in an unruly world (while also sneaking donuts and taking bribes). The Chinese burned their coal and poisoned their workers and environment to make our stuff, enabling us to enjoy a cleaner environment by keeping our coal in the ground, while they loaned us the money to buy cheap Chinese stuff with. Such a deal!

A Delusion That's Now To Expensive...

Life in bubble world was grand while it lasted. First there was the Third World debt bubble of the '80s; then came the tech bubbles of the '90s; and finally the real estate bubble of the '00s. Along the way, Wall Street hoped for a little extra hot air from the privatization of Social Security, but even Americans weren't stupid enough to sign onto that particular leveraged buyout. All during this time, suburbanites got used to having more gadgets and bigger cars and houses, even if they couldn't actually afford them.

Line Ends Here-

But now we're at the end of the line. At last the rest of the world is coming to realize that it doesn't really need Americans: the Chinese can consume, too, after all. And the Asians can't really justify loaning us more money; we're not going to pay it back - or if we do, it will be in devalued dollars. But those loans can also be looked at as investments: other nations have in effect bought US assets, which means that the wealth created from those assets will flow to the new overseas owners, not to Americans. What's left to buy - other than a lot of soon-to-be-foreclosed real estate? And how much wealth will those assets produce once the bubble deflates?

Alternatives

It's also clear now that there are alternatives to the dollar, including the euro, the yen, and the yuan. Not that the dollar won't be missed; when it tanks, there will be as many financial casualties in Mumbai as Manhattan. But currency traders are clearly heading for the exits, and the last one out gets the booby prize - a bag of wooden nickels.

WMD or else

Yes, the rest of the world still must fear America's awesome weapons of mass destruction: this mighty nation can certainly create an unholy mess when it means to, as it is demonstrating in Mesopotamia. But that doesn't mean that other nations actually have to obey it any more. The US can bomb to smithereens any country it chooses, but it can't always count on forcing that country to hand over its resources at gunpoint.

$DOWN

The dollar is hitting record lows. Gold and silver are hot commodities - always a bad sign for the reigning paper currency[but good for South Africa - NVDL]. There are rumors of possible bank failures (following a run on one British bank). If the Federal Reserve tries to solve the liquidity crisis by lowering interest rates, that just worsens inflation and exacerbates the dollar's problems. If the Fed raises rates to prop up the dollar, that forces the banks and hedge funds to confront their mountains of worthless paper and leads ultimately to defaults, bank runs, and bank failures. Clearly the Fed fears the latter scenario more than the former, so by lowering interest rates this month it effectively pulled the plug on the dollar.

The Saudis are now preparing to de-link their economy from the US currency, while China is quietly selling off dollar-denominated assets. One way or another, Americans are going to soon see a rapid decline in their real standard of living.

Of course, another big event this month was oil's nose-bleed ascent to record-high prices, over $82US per barrel. Part of the price hike resulted from the dollar's weakness, but - as Goldman Sachs has pointed out - the main reason was simply that demand is up while supply is down. The May 2005 peak for the rate of production of regular crude and the July 2006 peak for all liquids are still holding. It may be that the technical maximum global rate of flow for liquid fuels is still a couple of years away, but in effect the peak is here now.

Options: WAR

As for Iran, "all options" are still on the table, and the pretext for a broad-scale air attack is apparently being patiently laid. Bush has vowed that he will not leave office with the Iran question unresolved, and France's new neocon leaders are running defense for Bush/Cheney, calling for "the most severe sanctions possible" and for war if those "don't work."

Meanwhile, when Tehran actually complies with the International Atomic Energy Agency's requests, this is viewed as a provocation. This month, Newsweek revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney at one point considered asking Israel to launch air strikes on an Iranian nuclear site, so as to provoke Iran to lash out, thus giving Washington a pretext for more extensive attacks (a scenario I discussed in MuseLetter for April 2007, "Iran: We Will Know Soon").

Iranian President Ahmedinejad's appearances in New York (at the UN and Columbia University) seemed only to give the US media an opportunity to whip up further anti-Iranian public sentiment, while the Senate's passage of the Lieberman-Kyl amendment (which Hilary Clinton supported) provided a stamp of approval for any future military actions by the current administration.

But surely the single most important event of the month was the revelation that arctic sea ice is melting faster than even the most dire forecasts had predicted. This is significant because it shows the power of reinforcing feedback loops: as sunlight-reflecting ice melts, it leaves dark water in its place - which absorbs more heat, causing more ice to melt, and so on.

The World Is Melting

This year's minimum extent of ice was about one million square miles (as of September 16); the previous record low was 1.5 million in 2005. The rate of melting this year was 10 times the recent annual average. This month the Northwest Passage was ice-free for the first time in untold millennia. At this rate, the north polar region could be ice-free in summer by 2015.

What Are The Vital Issues (For STOOPID SOCIETY)?

Altogether, it was an extraordinary 30 days. Yet so far there's been no instantaneous economic implosion, and there's not much blood in the streets (except perhaps in Myanmar), and so the mainstream media can safely focus on the truly vital issues like O.J. Simpson's current legal scrapes and Britney Spears's performance at the MTV awards.

REALITY

Many writers who discuss the sort of stuff that interests me ("reality" I think it's called) wrap the unutterable sadness of it all in a crisp cellophane of cynicism. I'm guilty of that, too, from time to time - certainly in this little monthly summary. How else to make it somehow bearable?

Addendum: The latter brief essay is gloomier than my usual writing, and one early reader inquired whether I am personally okay. I suspect that the tone of the piece results partly from the stresses of recent travels and from an intense period spent caring for a declining parent. While clearly I was in a venting mood when I wrote these words, it was not my intention to communicate hopelessness. On the other hand, I refuse to be required always to play the role of cheerleader: it is important to identify solutions, but it is also occasionally essential to point out where we are collectively in our species journey, even when the facts call forth uncomfortable emotions.

NVDL: If this Museletter from Richard Heinberg - author of Powerdown - has not moved you, then there is something wrong you [and indeed there is a great deal wrong with society worldwide right now]. For more, and his forecasts, go here.