There’s probably no doubt that someone like Jens Voigt, Heinrich Haussler or Andy Schleck could win a bicycle race on a lesser bike than the one they’re sponsored to use. There’s also no doubt that we can enjoy other things like listening to music and going for a run and enjoy the experience without spending up big. But, I have a theory that finding the precise balancing point of form-function-price is going to be as elusive as finding an alien signal via SETI, so long as we allow the death grip the marketing profession continues to inflict on these trying, post-Copenhagen times.

As we launch off into the teen years of this new era where ecology and economics have, finally, declared open-war, the search for more modest consumerist satisfactions will become ever more important. Sometime soon, the all consuming flood tide of culture change will start to recognise excess as the new ultimate social fopaux. Conspicuous consumption will become the baggage of the ‘naughties; that odious era of the Global Financial Crisis and government bailouts for those who should, more reasonably, be left to float in the bilge of their own vile excess. Lean footprint consumption should be the meme for these new teen aged years of this, our 21st Century.

But the challenges presented by the necessary purge-we-have-to-have, have me worried. You see, marketing can corset flabby reality under the disguise of an iron spun PR girdle. To play the new ‘lean is keen’ game of what should be a genuinely enlightened new era, we’re going to have to shove the virus of marketing hype and vacuous spin into the airlock and open the door. All those marketing campaigns proclaiming ‘eco-sensitive’ SUV’s, the virtues of weight-loss pills and zero-footprint bottled mineral water: out they go! Into the airlock. It’s going to be harder to insult our intelligence with junk like this as we enter these more jaded, post failed-Copenhagen years.

But, never underestimate the cleverness of the dark marketing arts. These black witches work on the very gravity well of our souls: our ego’s. Those master-builders of fallacious social constructs are out there and looking for prey. How many fell for the clean-green claims for enviro-fouling SUV’s? How many sucked the slop of Emissions Trading Schemes as the panacea of all our collective, accumulated enviro-evils? And who fell for the abject nonsense of carbon-offset air travel?!

I declare that the overriding sign that we are ready willing and able to grow up and face the consequences of our environmentally-destructive actions is a new-found cynicism for ALL marketing campaigns. Will the human race evolve to become self-aware of the manipulations of the marketing machine? Our progress will pace that emergence via the rise of a degree of cynicism that has, hitherto, been a commodity rarer than diamond and more valuable than fresh air.

So, to return to my opening point, the new crusade to launch at the dawn of this new decade is a new search for truth; the truth of our real needs as opposed to the needs we think or are told we should have. To focus on an example close to the home zone of my own obsessive pile: how can and should I choose my next bicycle? If I need a next bicycle at all.

As a rampaging subjectivist (truth is in the eye of the beholder), it’s a little perverse that I am about to contemplate objectivist choices all of a sudden. But perhaps mathematics can, indeed, help us out. Imagine an equation wherein we could measure up all the attributes of a bicycle (or a new refrigerator, a new car if you must, or a new TV…) that best suits the needs we might claim are in need of a fix. There’s two sides to this equation. On one side are the attributes of the thing we want. On the other are attributes of the needs we are attempting to fulfil.

Let’s take the attributes of the thing we think we need. If it’s a racing bike that’s desired, and racing is the thing you want to do, then the key elements are weight, mechanical efficiency, reliability and handling. All these attributes are somewhat hazy and imprecise for sure, but we can at least have a go at filing our facts on the decision tree. Notice what’s missing here? All those bits to do with ‘image’ and apparent prestige. Forget those bits for now. Do as wine tasters do and white out the brand. Taste our choices blind to makers names and the like.

Now let’s look at the mathematical bits on the other side. Let’s look at needs. This is the wild side of just about any of the choices we make. Extract, with the dedication of a surgeons knife, the tumours and related extraneous growths our egos tend to impose. What are the real needs? The real needs… other than for meeting the demands our tyrannical ego’s usually impose. If your need is to go fast, suffer a minimum of mechanical failure and to be as unimpeded by technology to put all the power you genuinely command onto the road in the form of speed, we can start to fill in the equation with some realistic facts. If, on the other hand, the real need you have is to look like a Fred, that’s revealing too. In that case, do us all a favour and buy a car instead.

OK. If we populate our equation with as much in the way of measurable or at least vaguely quantifiable data as possible (which means that the machinations of our egos and the related panderings of marketing spin have been removed), we can get down to work. The results might prove to be a surprise.

I’d be willing to make a bet. If we could take such a clinical calculation, unclouded by the fictions of marketing spin, most of us would be best served by significantly more humble choices than the choices we’d ordinarily make. I’d probably be choosing a mid-range Giant instead of a top-end Colnago. Ultegra over Dura Ace. Chorus over Super Record. In a different space, that might mean a 40 inch TV over a 50 or 60. K-Mart shorts over Gucci … Blundstones over Prada. You name it. Once we de-spin the choices once poisoned via that odious orgy of marketing in perpetual copulation with ego, these new lean, more enlightened times should, indeed, be freed to take a firmer hold. I am going to proclaim this new post-Copenhagen, post-top heavy governmentalism, post-consumerism era to be the dawn of our necessary ‘Ultegra-Chorus Years’. Hallelujah.

I was riding along the other day when I came up behind a cattle truck stuck in the middle of the road. It was nose up against a herd of cattle all busy balking at a bridge. Now cattle don’t like crossing bridges; they’d almost always prefer to go around, under or, generally, in any direction other than over the scary insecurity of what they must perceive of as a ramp to certain hell… Same thing goes for horses and sheep. But cattle are particularly hard to push across structures such as these. Mainly because they are so astoundingly stupid. I prefer sheep…

So, here we were, truck and bike waiting patiently while a couple of stockmen threw curses and instructions to their dogs to, somehow, break this stalemate of who-goes-first. But these steers would not shift. They turned their backs to the bridge to counter this threat of barking dogs. They bellowed and decorated the road. They stood their ground like defenders of some kind of lost cause. No one was going anywhere, at all. Until one iconoclastic hounded beast decided to head off over the closest fence; a clever mooove, I am sure, to confuse the enemy. Which it surely was. As now the stockmen have another task to perform quite contrary to their original intention.

Finally, after about 20 minutes or so, one solitary steer turned to sniff the bridge. He placed a hoof to experiment with the security of this possible path. Then another. Looking back, looking forward, our brave explorer took off up the road and, like all chain reactions of follow-the-leader, all the rest soon followed suit. At last, the herd was across and the truck could proceed. So could I, but it was not fun for my clean carbon rims…

There was something astoundingly familiar in the dramas of this scene. Looking at all the excreta on the road, the stupefaction of the target audience, all that pointless barking and shouting and all that dysfunctional milling around, I was reminded of the current Great Climate Change Debate.

The bridge is the Copenhagen Conference. The mindless mentally loop-locked bellowing crowd in-search-of-a-leader is us (well, those not possessed of bicycling mind, anyway), and that notable beast who took off over the fence in search of a better, less traumatic place to hide, is the model of our current political leadership and their advisers (chasing Emissions Trading Schemes and other worthless fantasies).

There are some exciting parallels to note. That steer that took the first step across the bridge … is the stall-buster we’ve all been looking for. The barking dogs are the frenzies of big-stick managerialism at work (wielding trading schemes and associated policy prods) – all noise and pointless confusion to the real task at hand.

The stick might work, perhaps, but all it really took is one steer to take that first step; then the job was easy! In this case, the big barking stick simply inspired that contrary escape across the fence: a diversion and futile escape from the traumas of temporary realities. No, this herd did it’s thing via the time-honoured tradition of grass-roots emergent leadership. If we can catalyse just one beast to take the first step, the mob will follow. It’s ALL about the mob. It’s all about clever catalysation; or the pulling of clever levers to get the mob to move. That’s how fashion shifts work; that’s how religions grow; that’s how social change ordinarily proceeds (except when prodded by the gun of tyrannical Managerialist psychoses from which reality-sheltered academics, public servants, and corporate machine managers seem to particularly suffer). That first hoof across the bridge is how paradigms shift. The impetus for change can come from any element in the crowd; in beautifully unpredictable, chaotic ways. But change does happen. Eventually. Even if only because we all die from the effects from far too much standing around in each other’s ever accumulating poo…

So, you see, the task at hand is not about cattle dog barking conferences, agreements and other associated over-priced diversions. The task at hand is to work on the crowd; directly, intelligently, patiently and with a degree of cleverness completely missing from the current Climate Change Debate.

The task at hand is to spark a revolution of emergent, grass-roots derived revolution of purpose and action. It’s all to do with the folk milling in the crowd at the edge of the bridge. Not with the application of big sticks, shouting and energetic cursing. Those are blunt, unwieldy, energy intensive tools to apply. Much better to get in there and ‘whisper the right words in some well chosen ears’. The task is much more a process of herding cats… or steers, than laying down some polished rails from the platforms of mega-conference ego-fests.

I am un-surprised by the herd culture most people seem to be displaying in relation to Climate Change. All these debates of denial vs. advocacy are the mutterings of a bunch of steers balking at the bridge. It’s all a noise of brays and moooing … signifying, ultimately, nothing at all. Except, via a five star irony of momentous proportion, for all the atmospheric gassing and mega ecological footprint defecation our leaders will be depositing on the bridge precipice of Copenhagen.

It really is astoundingly simple, that first step. Here’s what we each can do. Here’s what we each should do. These things are easy and cost virtually nothing. Indeed, these things are win-win for our personal wealth, health and happiness. Here’s some things for each of us to do that will collectively change the world:

• Control population. We are all in this together. The world absolutely does not need more people. Stop at two kids per couple.
• Reject the car. Use bicycles, or public transport instead.
• Control consumerism. We don’t NEED all that junk!

Imagine if everyone followed this simple plan! This is stuff WE can do without the urging of policies, plots and plans. These are the steps we can take to cross the bridge. Stop watching that runaway Hopenhagen steer. We are the people who make the world work. Not the corporations, tower sitters and the machinery of state. The cause is for each and every one of us to take personal responsibility for our journey across the bridge. You, me and 6.5 billion others. Before the poo piles get far too deep.

I was clopping the 50 metres up the local mall to fetch my papers – a distance which is the feasible limit for walking in cleated road cycling shoes – when a lady enquired about the price and availability of said shoes as it was her intention to buy a pair for her son-in-law. Which, apart from making her the world’s best mother-in-law, invoked a response to which I am not sure she was completely prepared. Actually, the answer I gave put her into something like a logic loop spin.

Which got me to wondering about the curiously asymmetrical dimensions of value. I’d always thought that, though involving of large amounts of cash, investment in the numerous accoutrements of cycling is just part of the scenery of being a cyclist. To me, the expense of these things causes pain, but not shock. And there’s not much of a notion that these expenses can be successfully avoided; no shoes, no ride.

Then I thought, what does it cost to shoe a car in tyres for a year? $800 for a set? More? What does it cost to keep that pile of stinking tin fuelled and oiled for a year? What does it take to payoff the local Road Mafia with taxes and insurance contributions?

But I don’t want to talk about the comparative costs of motoring vs. cycling here. I just want to consider the comparative mindsets of value folk tend to apply when they consider one thing over another. Here’s my main point: what happens when one applies a car driver’s mental model of ‘value’ to the parallel universe of cycling? What happens when you attempt to go all ‘accountant’ on comparisons like this? Does the ensuing benefit cost ratio of cars vs. bikes actually make sense?

Yes and no. Yes, you an make comparisons like this and bikes might come out on top (depending on the creativity of the calculations which might or might not include things like ‘opportunity cost of longer commuting time through cycling for fabulously overpaid senior executives’ vs. the ‘net present value of accumulated health benefits valued in extra productive time spent behind the desk for fabulously overpaid senior executives’ vs. ‘the net social loss from loosing said overpaid cycling super executive from the economic gene pool via the statistically higher chance of being run over by a lesser economic agent – like – gasp! an unemployed person – driving a car …’ ). No, because these two worlds involve an entirely different metric for value (time spent riding is not valued the same way as time spent driving because people with intelligence could not possibly enjoy their time behind the wheel vs time spent blissfully pedalling…).

No, I want to just suggest that the idea of valuing the cycling experience cannot and should not be undertaken from the perspective of ‘Car Mind’. That’s like trying to value the exhibits in the Museo National de Prado in Madrid via the cost of paint, boards and paintbrush depreciation. The answers won’t make sense.

Which is why so many motor-heads simply cannot comprehend the amounts we cyclists spend on our bikes and related gear. They scratch their heads in disbelief that anyone could possibly spend $600 on cycling shoes … and then run off to buy a pair of Gucci loafers for $700 enroute to get their cars re-tyred for a mere $1k. No. Car Mind is the wrong space through which to consider bikes. But the universal extension of Car Mind to things non-motoring is precisely why our planet is screwed! If you extend the curiously deranged psychoses it takes to belong to the game of cars, we start to get all manner of stuff ideo-valued via the same metric that gave us traffic jams, global warming and ‘Made in China’ stickers on everything we own.

If the sort of mental model that can accept spending $50k on a lump of fume-spewing tin is then applied to the other choices we make, it’s no wonder we get curiosities like driving to the gym; spending $100k+ to be guide-handled to the top of Mt Everest, big game bwana hunting, personal trainers, and that ultimate statement of a species in terminal decline: the drive thru takeaway! It’s no wonder that our forests are converted into toilet paper and packaging for McFat Bugers. Our value systems are screwed. Car Mind is exercising too much influence over the choices we make. It’s like seeing the world through the eyes of a virus. A bad, neurotic, evil virus.

So, next time someone asks ‘how much for those shoes’, the answer I should provide is ‘pure air and freedom’. That’s how much.

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I am into my descent to the local town. It’s a nice long fast hill that I usually take at the maximum posted speed limit. Just as I get into my aero tuck position, I see a utility vehicle pull up to a side road intersection with the hill I am negotiating. He’s only about 10 metres away and looking directly at me. But I don’t trust those who choose to drive cars. Ever. Which is fortunate as, true to form, this driver pulls straight out into my path while wearing a victory smirk of abject contempt for both myself and all other cyclists. I am ready via my ingrained mistrust and swerve into a pre-judged escape route.

This incident is typical of most rides into this car infested town. It’s a place where the car is an instrument of personal assertiveness; a vehicle through which to proclaim visions of self importance and the irrelevance of others. This is not a nice place to travel by road…

The immediate sensations are towering rage, consummate hatred against all motorists, the oil companies, cars in general and of my crippling incapacity to take meaningful action. It passes by the time I get to the bottom of the hill; the residents around here must be used to the language we cyclists are prone to articulate to the disappearing tailgates of moronic car drivers. The only feeling left by the time I am in the town proper is one of fatalism that I am due to repeat this exercise again and again, possibly even before I reach my final destination.

This is an experience that every single cyclist who ever dares to share the road with motorists will know too well. We are all assaulted by those who would use their cars as a weapon of self-assertion, or merely as an instrument through which to demonstrate ignorance and inattention, on a day in day out basis. Some of us are killed. Thousands a year are removed from our numbers. Murdered by car drivers. What can we cyclists do? What’s the answer?

There’s debate and more debate; furious letters to editors and endless editorials that just go ’round and ’round without hope for resolution. It’s a problem that’s not going away. Its a problem without a clear, totally self evident solution. Any selected response is going to be an exercise in compromise, usually emasculated via bureaucratic committee responses suffocated by the eunuchry of the cult of being politically correct.

I read one passioned cyclist plea for a bicycle registration-funded lobbying programme. I note the existance of ‘bicycle safety committee’s’ woven throughout the transportation planning and policy bureaucracies in most parts of the world. I note the citizen action of critical mass rides; I note the myopia of city planners who can only entertain the one-size-fits-all solution of dedicated cycling lanes as the solution to all that ails us. I also note that the problem of car driver inflicted ignorance and carnage persists. It never goes away. Nothing seems to work.

In my view, the reason why this search for the ultimate solution is continually frustrated is that there is no ultimate solution. In the best tradition of complexity and chaos theory, no single-thing is going to solve any multi-faceted problem such as this. When the problem is complex, solutions are at least as messy. The problem with complex problems is that people seem hell-bent to consider them simplistically; there’s an inclination to reduce, dissect and divide messy problems into bits and then treat each bit on its own. The thinking is that the ensuing portfolio of bit-solutions will add up to an overall solution that works. That can never, ever, be. That’s the law of complexity. The reason being that the various facets of messy problems are actually all connected together via links that are sometimes very hard to see. Because everything connects to everything else, solutions also need to connect and be conceived as one collective continuously self organising, ever adaptive bundle of responses that, as from the pages of the Art of War, are alive to the ever changing living thing that these problems will always be.

What does that mean? Well for starters the issues that confront cyclists on car-shared roads are a combination of the culturally embedded stupidities of car drivers, of the hegemony of the car in contemporary society, of mobile phone use while driving, of chemically intoxicated drivers, road raged drivers, inadequate roads, cars that can go too fast, lack of respect for others, the proclamation of cars and driving as exhibition of imagined sexual prowess, laziness, sloth, obesity, stupidity, physical enfeeblement from age and disease, poor sinage, and so on and then so on again.

What single solution are we to pick to manage this festering mess of psychological, cultural, engineering, planning and policy concerns?

Well, there actually is one single solution but that’s not likely: ban cars. And, really, it’s the drivers of these contraptions that need attention, not the lumps of fuming tin they drive.

Barring that, the mix of options to which we seem to be defaulting spans advocacy, marketing and policy and infrastructure engineering. Plus let us not forget the wonderfully self-organising system of upwardly spiralling fuel prices (which is already removing cars from the road and encouraging more and more cyclists to join our sainted ranks).

From all of this, the main fixation seems to be on building cycling lanes and putting up signs; the classic engineering response to problems that are cultural or cognitive in origin. The reason why engineering responses are so prevalent is that they are relatively easy; the worst possible and most ill-fitting responses, yes, but relatively easy. My contention is that solutions that focus on building stuff are the inevitable outcome of committee-based deliberation. You can’t really expect anything else from the insight levelling committee system. The big problem is that setting up committees is the usual first line response from governments who fail to understand what is really going on and which have even less inspiration in relation to how to respond.

Let’s take some inspiration from my favourite computer company. Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is not driven by committee-based group think. Apple Inc. works as an extension of it’s CEO’s towering ego. Apple Inc. is the egotistical manifestation of one Steve Jobs, His Jobness decides all, His Jobness is the weilder of the tiller. His Jobness is indesputably in charge. Fortunately, and here’s the thing, Steve Jobs is a genius at picking the market, picking his products and leading change. Apple works because of this charismatic genius. Put a dullard into empowerment like that and we’d be attending Apple’s funeral instead. I’ve watched organisation after organisation die an unseemly death when those who aspire to empowered ego trips like this are found to possess the talents of Steve Jobs only in their dreams. True leadership of the Steve Jobs kind is rare. You know it when you see it and you sure do know it when you don’t.

So what does the razor-refined ego-assertive punch approach offer to the progress of cycling? The main attraction is the prospect to escape the constrictors of committee decision making. The committee is an exercise in compromise; the goal of a committee is consensus as without consensus, decisions cannot be made. This is especially so when the problems to be addressed are complex (which means multi dimensioned, feedback driven, messy and potentially chaotic). Committee’s try (at least implicitly) to develop shared models of how things work or why problems are the way they are. Once the collective committee mind thinks it has the ‘mechanics right’, it can then get down to the business of engineering solutions. Which would be all fine and good if the world worked like a clock.

But the world does not work like a clock and the issues that keep on killing cyclists on the road are certainly not described by the mechanics of pendulums. There’s a pile of messy, chaotic human cognitive stuff in the mix. Most of the issues to be addressed originate between the ears of those who choose to drive cars. I would concede that it’s entirely possible for a committee to develop creative and inspired insights into the matters at hand and then to devise solutions that might inspire desirable progress. But the chances are slim as committees usually try hard to constitute themselves to be as like-minded as possible in order to deliver on their charter to recommend solutions. Put too many wild cards into a committee and it will spend all of its time in a never ending circle of argument and debate; contributing nothing to the problems at hand (just like most of the committee’s devised so far to address global warming). But wild cards offer insight from the margins and insight from the margins is often where traction for solving perplexing problems is to be found. After all, the reasons why some problems persist so long is because the insights from self-referentially validated committee thinking have only the singular attribute of irrelevance to offer.

Which segues back to Steve Jobs. There are committee’s in Apple Inc, but Steve Jobs is the ultimate wild card empowered to intercede and split the night of any committee’s inclinations back to the comfort zone of self-referential consensus. Jobs keeps applying chaotic electro-shock interventions to keep chaotic lateral thinking mixed through the potion bottle of their deliberations.

The real deal for the management of any complex system, from the politics of cycling to the avalanche of global warming, is to become forever vigilant, for those who are empowered to remain in a continual process of tuning to the ever unfolding and perpetually emergent world around us. There are no laurels to rest upon. No definitive answers. The only certainty is that there is no certainty. Given this, any intervention we might make in relation to an issue is to be regarded as an experiment to watched. In this regard, a predilection to building stuff, to the construction of persistent engineered solutions to problems that are alive through change, is, at best, ill conceived. The engineered band-aids will immovably persist after the disease manifests in some other place.

Which means that building bike lanes as a response to the pathologies of car drivers intent on or at least content with the murder and disfiguration of cyclists is at least a touch ill conceived. What we need is to spark a cultural shift instead; and you don’t need an engineering degree to construct that response. This is precisely what Steve Jobs has done. He created a culturally-driven phenomenon of demand for a product the world had not yet seen. The iPod and the Mac are so much more than circuit boards. They are only devices to surf the wave of change that Job’s world shaping had more significantly achieved. That’s what we need to address the traumas to arise when cars and bicycles share the road. We need a cultural shift of respect; of acceptance and regard. Not competition and tribal defensiveness. Cyclists already know that cars have a right to the road; ignore that and you are dead. But car drivers need an insight that allows us to co-occupy the spaces they hitherto regard only as their own. We need a Steve Jobs-like shake up of the cultures of intolerance and vindictiveness that precludes the full flowering of what cycling can offer to this warming world . To preserve and nurture the consummate magnificence of a mode of transportation that gives health, recreation, transport and a doorway into a human-environment relationship that is vastly more in tune to the long term resilience of our species and all others that share this, our only world. We need an iPod revolution for our roads.

What might a response of the kind I advocate here actually look like on the road, so to speak? I have an example in mind. Perhaps a Jobs-like campaign might work on whipping up the nationalistic adulation our communities temporarily give to hero cyclists when they do well in the Tour de France and the Olympics. A great Jobs-like campaign of culture shifting might work on this cyclist-as-hero theme and thus build more widespread regard and respect and thus underpin our rights to share the roads through the improved safety that that respect would provide. Another similar response might involve a deliberate campaign to get other community heroes onto bicycles as well; non-cyclists from football and, gasp, motor racing might work wonders too. If we take these ideas and submit them to the ‘reality distortion field’ that a master like Steve Jobs could provide, the world will be a better place for cyclists and the world, in turn, will be a better place through there being more of us. And so it goes; a wondrous virtuous cycle through which to make the world a better place. There are an infinitude of possibilities to consider when we are agreeably tuned to the power of lateral thinking combined with the culture shifting power of genuinely inspired leadership.

I’ve found a jolly good read: Bicycle, by David Herlihy (Yale University Press, 2004). It’s a history book written like a novel.

I have to say that the history of the bicycle unfolds like the storyline of our civilisation over the past 150 years; it’s astounding just how deeply integrated into the fabric of society the bicycle has become. When you really think about it, it’s also amazing just how we have so profoundly taken this noble machine fore-granted for so very long. The bicycle has always been there for us; waiting patiently as we went insane over the noisy toxic confusions of the motorcar; as we poisoned our planet and turned to lard for want of exercise; as our devotions to the car turned into the manic construction of motorways, the car parking of our forests, and, like a bloody sacrifice to an evil god, even offering up prime time cohabitation for this oiled tin god under the roofs of our homes. The gold toothed rat of the motorcar has taken us all for a ride. But our ever faithful two wheeled friend has maintained its infinite maternal caring patience for its wayward masters. It’s always been there, ready and willing if ever we could simply recall just how good life was before we were hijacked by the car.

The plot starts in the mid 1800’s as the bicycle we know took up lodgings through the primal swamps of hobby-driven mechanical tinkering and seepage into prevailing cultural mindsets always one step behind.

There was no great single explosive moment in the history of the bicycle. It all kind of crept up gradually, bit by bit, pacing like single malt-deep rich red wine maturing time. It’s important to note that when the first ancestor of the bicycle we know today hit the scene, there were no cars. The only alternatives to walking in those days were the horse and cart and the train.

That primal bike was the velocipede; a two wheeled contraption of two wheels linked by a wooden frame and powered by feet on the ground. There were a few false starts but by the 1860’s the fad was in full force; fashionable Parisians foot pedalled themselves across boulevards, in the forecourts of palaces and along country lanes; with the more sporting athletic gentlemen of the time also taking up some mannered racing around primeval velodromes. Then, as fads generally do, as the more excited infatuations calmed, the velocepede took hold in the USA. The next big step was to add some pedals to the big front wheel and the bicycle was born. Boneshakers gave way to penny farthings and then back to the safety cycle and so gradually to the wonder of considered engineering we have today.

A key thing to note is how gradual and considered all this progress has been. The history of the bicycle is a lesson in emergence and refinement rather than in blustered bouncing from one big crash stop to the next (as has been the history of the car). Every step of the way on cycling’s Great Historical Tour has worked through progress paced by our continually reconfiguring cultures; cycling has always followed the weft of society’s warp. It’s been a nicely harmonised adaptive process that has always accommodated the bicycle within our cultural core.

With the advent of the car some 60 years after the bicycle first took hold, the lure of effort free transportation diverted our attentions from the quiet self-motivated pedal powered liberation only the bicycle can afford. Particularly in the more furiously paced economies of Europe, the UK and the USA. Wars intervened and the more pastoral pace of cycling reverted more deeply into our social foundations; always there but frequently overlooked as our car infatuations burned. A noble few persisted through it all; bicycle racing became an elite nationalist fervour of a sport and peasants fetched and carried their daily bread cycling to the tunes of French rustic accordions and the theme plays of wholesome village life. While their urban city cousins crashed and banged their way through life like Toad from Toad Hall, glassy-eyed in their deliriums of the car.

By way of sharp distinction from the considered pace of the bicycle, the history of the car has been a study in noise and attention seeking histrionics. Cars have crashed and banged their way into our society, reconfiguring our landscapes and cultures in a holocaust of frenzy. Roads, our social places, and even our homes are now shaped to the needs of cars. Nowadays car parks infest our sacred places, squeezing out the history and grandeur of our ancient places, natural and man made. Visitors to places like the ancient places of Segovia, Leon and the Grand Canyon will know exactly what I mean. Cars have prime timed their way like a cancer in the front rows to all these special places. Is there anything more obscene than that car park along the Southern rim of the Grand Canyon? Or the ludicrous image of cars scraping their way up the historical pave of one horse width lanes in world heritage declared towns? Have you ever noticed how cars infest picture postcard places like Aix en Provence or the Cathedral inner sanctum of Canterbury? Like vomit on the footpath, these vile machines are a study in our contempt for generations gone and the monuments they built.

We’ve let the car abuse our physical well being, our sanity and our need for a more considered pace of life. But it’s all just an interlude. The car has crashed the party of our civilisation for around 100 years, but it is now more like a burnt out star; more like smouldering remains than the object of progress and potential that it once seemed. The era of the oil powered car is nearly done. We’ve peaked the oil it needs and fouled our world with the violence of its environmental demands. The future is unclear but we do know that this interlude is nearly done.

So, with the reawakening of the need to restore the physical health we have so carelessly flushed through the vortex of the car, and of the need to restore the air the car has so furiously fouled, the bicycle is on the verge of manifest renewal once more. While I can’t see a future that admits bicycles alone, one thing is sure, the day of the bicycle is returning once more. In this next reawakening, bicycles will share the road with fume free contraptions motivated by solar, hydrogen or kinetic power. It will be a more harmonious coexistence; as the bicycle and cyclists ascend once more to the social acceptability, and even adulation they once rightly claimed. Those committed to non-pedal power will develop more admiration than contempt for those of us who seek to reacquaint ourselves with that greatest surviving testimony to human mechanical genius and artistic flair; we the cyclists who bridge the glories of the past with the potential of times to come. We pedal this time honoured link and relish the fact that we can be so favoured to delight in a pastime and transportation choice so rich and magnificent as this. When the human race is finally done, the image that should mark the memory of our time on this earth can be nothing else than the image of the velocipede. It was and remains our greatest ever achievement.

People always conspire to wreck the perfection of economic and scientific theory. We are nasty uncontrollable creatures always prone to odd and unruly behaviour. Indeed, so frustrated with this kind of thing were the early economists that they invented a new classification for those of us who refused to conform: we became the irrational minority on the dangerous pathway to a majority. And so in love with the nirvana that their theories described they felt compelled to invent a new species of people who, other than them, would solely qualify to ascend to their vision of paradise. The new species was homo economicus; a perfectly rational well behaved super-race who would conform to all the predictions their theories could describe. I don’t jest. It’s true. Like the followers of an impassioned cult, these economists then went on to write their theories only for the species they, as the gods they declared themselves to be, created for that higher plane. The troubles started when those who succumbed to the advice economists gave forgot for whom these prognostications were made. Instead, the politicians started applying the theories to us.

And so we ended up with our unquestioning reverence for the pleasures of the globalised market place. And for the ultimate rewards in pecuniary heaven that our devotions would inevitably provide. Such a well ordered pace that will be! Where all ‘factors’ (that is, you and I and all the other inputs into the production system) will gravitate to their (our) highest value (lowest cost) deployments and thus squeeze the last infinitesimal cent from the last remaining unused resource available. Even if we are all wearing gas masks on the toxic asteroid the Earth will thus become. Because economic theory is entirely and totally anthropocentric (meaning that any species other than homo economicus is unimportant; including you and me), all is to be geared only for them. Which is why, dear fellow cyclists, we must breathe the fumes of cars and go to war over oil.

But this world of ours is persistently resistant to fantasies such as those to which the economic rationalists aspire. For starters, there are lots of economic irrationalists around (the foolish rationalists gave me a Phd in economics as an exercise in self flagellation, I am sure…). There are lots and lots of much more intelligent economists who admit all manner of odd behaviours and surprising things once they agreed to tie homo economicus to the stake and set it on fire.

I’ve discussed one of these before (the lovely theories on the Small and Beautiful by E F Schumacher, for instance). But let me focus on alleviating the gloom I painted in my previous post. Namely, on the world wide trend to centralise everything we make in that toolbox of the world: China.

Our world plays out like sculptures in the sand. Shapes come and go, always shifting and reconfiguring. One minute, the economic rationalists (the theorists and their political servants) hold sway. Laws are written and agreements signed; wars are declared and programes deployed. All designed in the workshops of economic rationalist thought. Included here is the notion that it’s all perfectly OK to pillage our entire cultural heritage for the sake of the global market place. And to believe in such astoundingly stupid notions as carbon credit trading where the rich and wealthy can purchase their penance’s for environmental destruction through paying for trees (or other kinds of carbon sequestration) someplace else. As though we are all, somehow, not really all citizens on the one shared environmentally challenged planet. No, all this compounding dumbness builds like a tide and then … breaks. Sometime, and sometime soon, we the schmucks of the marketplace will start demanding stuff made locally again. Right now, the tide is turning. Consider makers’ fairs. And the fact that more bicycles were sold in Australia than cars over the past year. And, despite all, and beyond all the possibilities of economic rationalism, some of us are still prepared to pay vastly more for our bicycles than for our cars!

As the tide of Chinese nationalism continues to grow, and probably ignite through the Olympic torch, we, the rest of the world are becoming a bit concerned. Visions of a world population frog marched to the glory of Chinese economic imperialism is a bit like the spectre we saw once before; the last time the Olympics were hosted by a vile autocracy. In 1936. The Berlin games. And we did recover from that. Eventually, after millions had died.

Our collective concern will, it is to be hoped, inspire us all to search out those last bastions of the locally made. To seek and be prepared to pay slightly more when we know that investments such as those will return, ultimately, so much more. Like the continuity of a civilisation it has taken centuries to build. And which globalisation requires only years to destroy. And why we are at it, let’s be really irrational here. Eschew cars. Take up bikes, or public transport, or the horse. Let the oil companies weep as their desires to turn our planet to toxic sludge evaporate along with their profits. Vote regional. Stay out of wars. Commute via the internet. Avoid Chinese goods like the plague. Fight economic rationalism with its own weapon; spend your cash like the tactical weapon it should be. Buy local. Spend locally. And above all, we should treat our planet with the reverence that finds no place in the tyrannical theories of economic rationalism. Think long term, instead of just for tomorrow. And know that what we each do is a contributor to a collective action that can either destroy or repair.

That a society could ever conceive of an obscenity like carbon credit trading schemes as a solution to the warming of our world is a screaming indictment that something is very very wrong with the society we vote and spend to support. The notion that we could and should shift the garbage we generate into the yards of those who are too poor to respond is of the same moral calibre as lighting the Olympic torch in Beijing. We each need to take control, individually, of our responsibilities to this one single world we inhabit and persist in destroying. What we each do has consequences for everyone including ourselves. There is no escape, even if it hurts, we cannot continue to subscribe to the theories of economic rationalism while our planet, literally, burns. For myself, I am watching in glee as oil prices expload. Only now are the sheep in the economically rationalised flock starting to shift their gaze; bigger steps are needed than the feeble non-solutions from those who are only too keen to fuel our enfeebled excesses of spectacular self-interest. Hybrid cars for people too fat and lazy to ride or walk. Government subsidisation of the price of oil. And carbon trading schemes that allow us to pollute all we like so long as we pay for biodiversity destroying monocultures of trees where rainforests once grew. They’re tunes to play while the place is on fire. We need vastly more enlightened thoughts. The first step, I suggest, is to reconnect with our regional places. Let globalisation be the the only thing to overheat and burn.

I went on a crusade the other day. My toaster broke. It was a ‘designed in Australia, made in China under our strict quality control’ affair. So, off I went to the shops to find a toaster that would be less apologetic about where it was made. I figured that if a manufacturer needs to advertise strict quality control, there must be quality issues to address. So there I was, surveying rows upon rows of shiny new toasters; computer toasters, toasters that could warm a house and others promising my entry to a new world of style… I think I must have alerted the security camera voyeurs; because I turned each and every one upside down; took some out of boxes and really went to town. Every single one was made in China. Every single one! Each proclaiming diligent quality control; all were most carefully and explicitly ‘designed’ someplace other than China.

As a dedicated researcher with too little to do, and standing as I was in a large department store, I decided to investigate some more. Off I went to the audio visuals. DVD players were a good place to start. Nope, even the most established brands are all made in China. Clothing? You know what that search would reveal. But how about this one: books. Check out where most paperbacks are now printed. Camping goods, luggage, kitchen utensils, motor mowers, garden pots. All universally made in China.

OK, that’s almost what you would expect from a department store; a place where the balance between quality and price is managed to the precision of a actuary’s closest cent.

How about a quick foray into the specialist high end? I needed to check a couple of the icons of genetically coded unassailable quality. High end audio would be a great place to start. Where are those sentinels of British high fidelity made these days? Kef, Wharfdale, Mission Audio… No! Yes! All made to ‘our exact quality specifications in China’. Well… mostly all. The real nutter stuff is still hand made in the UK, USA and Sweden. With extraordinary prices to match. But that’s a plot I will leave for next time.

Camera gear? 90 per cent plus made in China. Ultralight bushwalking gear? Same. Computers? No, not Apple! Not my iMac? Not my MacBook Air?!

Time to seek refuge in the solaces of a good cup of (Yunan Chinese) tea and a nice visit to my favourite purveyor of goods from the artisans of Treviso (aka Pinarello selling bicycle shop). Time for a good old moan. ‘Where, I asked, is that Bianchi made?’ China. Where does that Colnago come from? China. Ridley Noah? Scott Spark? NO! YES! No…not, no, you don’t mean… Pinarello?? Well, not my Prince; that’s designed in Italy from carbon made by Toray in Japan and put together in Treviso. It says so on my ‘Prince reborn’ jersey. But further down the line? Sorry.

Some sage once said that you can purchase any quality you like from China. I don’t doubt it. With the will-power and dedication, any human can create to the highest possible standards. That’s not my concern. If Pinarello or Apple Computer decide to make their stuff in China, the quality will be anything they desire. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that we are all, collectively, as consumers and makers, busy outsourcing our connection with control. I recall that Fausto Pinarello once said that ‘no one can make carbon frames in Italy these days’. There are more layers to that statement than in a 13K carbon weave. We know that all these makers who take pride in what they produce are deeply embarrassed about making their stuff in China (and Taiwan, which, I suggest, is basically the same thing). Otherwise, why this overwhelming need to emphasise their exercise of ’strict quality control’? But these quality control qualifiers are also indicative of a deeper concern. They know and we know that making something ‘over there’ rather than ‘here’ is simply not the same.

Most of us can be convinced that ‘Made in China’ is not necessarily a sentence to product failure and frequent warranty claims. No, the issue is vastly more insidious than that. The issue is an economic system geared to dependency on globalised cost minimisation. We are outsourcing much more than our manufacturing skills. We are outsourcing our claims to regional pride, to our capacity to nurture our own regions and embedded economic systems. We are divesting our heritage and regional cultures. We are so busy out-sourcing (or plunging into the global marketplace) to the point where all that is manufactured in the factories we once admired are reputations and image. Our once proud engineering icons are, these days, busy only with spin. The tools of the shop floor are replaced by the fantasies of the marketing department.

As the proprietor of my local bicycle store noted, a visit to the Treviso headquarters of Pinarello is a sobering experience. All that’s left is a shop front. You can buy only memorabilia. Apart from the paint shop and assembly room, all the action is now off-shore. How can we possibly be content that the only link to the heritage of the past is through marketing rather than in the art of the making? What are we left with here? Meaningless brands to be placed at random on production lines of uninspired uniformity in Shanghai? Our economic system of globalisation has allowed, if not compelled us to sell off the one thing we should never sell; our heritage and pride.

And what exactly is the endgame here? As we export more and more and more of our heritage and skills, what will be left of our cultures when we have cashed China to the point of total global control? China is now landlord to the US economy. They are buying up Africa. They are the engine room to Australia and Japan. What sort of master will China be? (And we are all set to endorse their reign at the throne of the forthcoming Olympics). What is the ultimate outcome from the game we are now playing? The answers are to be found in the same place that inspired globalisation in the first place. Economics 101. The ultimate outcome of our drive to pure economic efficiency is total and complete uniformity in all things as we ascend to the only metric that matters; the minimisation of all costs and the realisation of that last marginal dollar of revenue. Even if that last dollar is the only dollar we get. It’s a nasty, dehumanised, artificial world of economics ruling complete; of the rule of the machine accountants; of a matrix world where we are all here only to support the ultimate realisation of the perfection of the marketplace.

But, and there are more buts in view here than one can see by following the pro peloton, there are more qualifiers to this story than the quality assurances of Italian high end bike makers striving to hold onto the glories of their artisanal past. You see, the world is more than economics 101 and I shall take up that story and what it means to us anxious admirers of illustrious heritage in my next instalment.