This interview went really well. I just found out that I will be introducing him for his talk in April. Nervous. Stoked. Now I’m off to Havasupai Falls. Enjoy.

I was 22 the first time I read A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen. For me, this particular book could not have come at a better time in my life. I was, at the time, in the last few months of my sophomore year at Purdue University. The previous year and a half was either depressing or, at best, awkward. It wasn’t simply that I had little interest in school (who really does at 22?), it’s that I wasn’t particularly excited about life. When my parents pleaded with me to “pick something” and go with it, I didn’t like what my options were; I didn’t feel like I could relate to other people in a meaningful way, and though I tried on a lot of hats in college, I felt as though none of them fit me. Also, and more importantly, I realized that I had been this way most of my life.

Nothing about our culture seemed to make sense. I mean how much sense does it make to base a way of life off of nonrenewable resources or the hyper-exploitation of renewable resources? How much sense do factory farms make? What about slavery, genocide, or sitcoms? Really, at a fundamental level, how much sense does sexual violence make? How much sense does it make to poison our own water? Our own food? In a world with more than enough resources to go around, how much sense does poverty make? In one of my classes, we briefly talked about child prostitution; a girl behind me said, in the most nonchalant way possible, and I remember this as if it happened this afternoon, “wow, sucks to be them.” My jaw remained open as the instructor moved on. I thought something was wrong with me. There had to be. “Sucks to be them?” Was that really the way we were all supposed to feel? I didn’t buy it.

For me, A Language Older Than Words verbalized what I knew all along. I’m not insane; the culture is. If a reasonable definition of insanity is the loss of a connection to physical reality, when I say the culture is insane, I mean it in the truest sense of the word. Responses like “sucks to be them” function only to keep people from not feeling, and that’s really the point. After discovering that there actually wasn’t anything wrong with me, I was ready to read Derrick’s next book, The Culture of Make Believe, which helped me understand the ways in which the dominant culture is insane and that it needs to be stopped before it devours everything in its path. Since then, I’ve read every word Derrick has published, including the shorter, but equally illuminating, books he wrote with activist George Draffan, and one on teaching called, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, a book I’m currently floating around the English Department at NAU. I dedicated this last summer to reading Derrick’s latest monumental work, Endgame, a 2-volume blast of civilization.

Now that I’m officially caught up, I realized I have a lot of questions for him. Also, in an effort to smooth over the awkward “your books changed my life” conversations I’ve had with him in the past, I decided that I should see about interviewing Derrick. I called him at his mom’s house on a Sunday afternoon.

Derrick is one of the most prolific writers I know. When I asked him what he was currently working on, I knew he’d have an answer for me immediately. “I’m actually writing a book about shit,” he said. I laughed and then realized he was serious. “It’s about how we’ve taken this really beautiful gift to the land and turned it into something toxic, and the book expands from there to the whole concept of waste. Of course, in a real sense, wild animals don’t have any waste because when you defecate or if you die, then that’s used by the landscape. There is no such thing as waste. Even up to a hundred and fifty years ago, there wasn’t the sort of waste that there is now.” I immediately thought of a recent U.N. report that concluded that waste from the meat industry contributes more greenhouse gases than all of transportation emissions combined. That much shit dumped in one centralized location single-handedly toxifies the land, the water, and the air. But, of course, there is nothing natural about factory farms.

Derrick also went on to explain the premises behind two books that will be available soon. In May, his long awaited anti-zoo book is coming out that will feature photographs from Karen Tweedy-Holmes (check out tweedypix.com). He is also working on a graphic novel, due out next spring, with cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan (checkout minimumsecurity.net). The working title for the graphic novel is As The World Burns: 50 Things You Can Do To Stay In Denial. I have to say, I’m happy to see that graphic novels are getting so popular. There is something beautiful about two artists coming together and contributing something they love that results in something truly unique. I’m certainly looking forward to that one.

I took a long sip of my tea (I’m off coffee right now…), which had cooled to perfect drinking temperature, and decided that I would ask him a few questions about his book on teaching. I said, “in your book Walking on Water, you talk about ‘praising and loving people into becoming who they are.’ Obviously this sentiment goes beyond teaching and could easily be applied to any relationship between both humans and the natural world.” He agreed as I continued. “It seems to me that if everyone is loved for the absolute singularity of who they are, we might not have the type of power struggles and the need to control that we have today.”

He said that was a crucial point, but that it was deeper than that. “If I have power over somebody, it is my responsibility to use that power only to help them. And if I see someone misusing that power over some one, it is just as much my responsibility to stop them from doing that.” As a teacher, I’m beginning to understand how some kinds of traditional teaching strategies have really negative affects on students. The best kind of learning is self-discovered and self-appropriated. When students are told, in a sense, how to think, the teacher is devaluing the experience of the student, which actually stifles any meaningful learning.

In the same book, Derrick discusses his experience as a creative writing teacher in both the university and at a maximum-security prison. While the book gives teachers a lot of insight, I was curious as to what advice he might have for students, in particular, college freshmen.
He said, “If there is one thing I could say to college freshmen it’s that life gets better; it could take a long time, but life does get better.” I thought back to my early undergraduate days and what a different outlook on life I had before I identified my passions. In the same way I remember thinking something was wrong with me, Derrick mentioned that when he was in school, he was beating himself up because he wasn’t happy. “The truth is, I wasn’t very happy because I hadn’t yet discovered the affects of coercive schooling. It took me a long time to learn how to think, something that had been systematically stomped out of me in school.”

Another thing Derrick would say to college students is, “it’s okay to want to do what you want and it’s okay to do what you want with your life, and find what matches you perfectly, to find where you fit.” Derrick wasn’t quite sure if this matches freshmen because when he was a freshmen he thought he wanted to get a degree in science (Derrick got a degree in physics from the Colorado School of Mines), but later realized that he was doing that because he had been taught this and didn’t have the courage to discover what it was he really wanted.

“When I was in college, I came to the point where I would say, ‘when I die, I want to be able to say, ‘this was my life. It was a really good one and I’m tired and I’m ready to go. I didn’t want to wake up when I was 65 and say ‘who’s life was this? This wasn’t very fun.” Of course this doesn’t mean that everyone should get what he or she wants whenever they want it. That’s simply not life. Derrick, for example, loves giving talks, but hates traveling. But there is a difference between succumbing to false choices and living the life that you were meant to live.

I wanted to move the conversation to his latest work, and the subject for a talk he is doing at Northern Arizona University on April 10th: the two-volume, 1,400-page, Endgame. In the first volume, Derrick explores the many problems of civilization. I asked him what he considers the biggest, most fundamental problem of civilization.

He replied immediately, “well, it’s killing the planet. That’s the biggest problem that there is. There can’t be a bigger problem because if you kill the planet, nothing lives. As you know, from my work, I’m very strongly feminist. I think feminism is a very important issue and I work with race issues, but nothing is more important than having a landbase.” Beyond the threat of nuclear annihilation, it might be safe to say that there will always be a physical planet; the real question is, through this civilization, will we have a livable planet? Will humans and nonhumans be able to drink the water, farm the land, breath the air, eat wild fish? Derrick has an idea for a bumper sticker, “Protect Your Landbase, You Can’t Have Sex With Out it.” A livable environment is primary. Period. I, for one (and hopefully more), really don’t want to have to describe a grizzly bear to my grandkids as an animal that once existed.

One of the secondary problems comes from the idea that our culture is incredibly narcissistic. Derrick described a recent interview he did on the radio where a bible-thumper told him, “It says in Genesis that God gave man dominion over the Earth, and you clearly don’t have an appreciation for that.” Derrick responded that if you express dominion over something, you can’t enter into a relationship with it, and you’ll end up destroying it. This criticism has nothing to do with faith or should it serve as an attack on Christianity as a religion. After all, there are countless verses of the Bible that aren’t quoted regularly (or at all), so the problems occur with the way in which dogma surrounds interpretations of very specific verses that ultimately have harmful affects. If, for example, the Bible used the word “responsibility” instead of “dominion,” our culture could not use the Bible to justify this insane lifestyle, which treats the natural world like a giant smorgasbord. “That’s really what it’s about:” Derrick continued, “coming up with religious, philosophical, and other rationale for a psychopathological narcissism.”

“Another big problem is that our civilization is a pyramid scheme, a system of growth that cannot last on a finite planet. Yet another problem of civilization is that it’s based on a series of hallucinations, in that people don’t generally believe that the land is primary.” Derrick talked about some common responses he gets from those who refuse to look at solutions to environmental problems that aren’t economically feasible.

“One of the many problems with the solutions posed to environmental problems like global warming, is they all take the economic system as a given and the land is secondary. That is exactly backwards and it can’t last.” I thought of the talk that Jim Kunstler gave at NAU a few weeks ago. I told Derrick how refreshing it was to hear him speak of the discourse surrounding sustainability as only interested in figuring out a way to continue using the things we currently have. It seems the only question revolving around sustainability is, “how will we run our cars?” Kunstler said, “a sustainable future will not have cars.” I told Derrick that something huge would have to happen before people realize this.

“Your absolutely right,” Derrick said. “You know, people ask, ‘how can we save the salmon?’ Well the answer is actually really easy: All we need to do is remove dams, stop industrial logging, stop industrial fishing, stop the murder of the oceans, stop global warming, stop the industrial economy, and stop industrial agriculture.” I think I giggled out of reflex, but then realized he was dead serious and, as a matter of fact, completely right. “After all,” he continued, “all wild animals need is a habitat.” I went him one further and said “us too,” though I knew he would include humans under his definition of animals. Access to land means access to food, water, and shelter. Our culture conducts itself on a global scale that robs communities of these basic needs and toxifies the land, making it inhabitable to thriving communities, human and nonhuman.

“Its embarrassing to have to say this because it is so obvious,” Derrick said, “the land is primary and you have to conform your social and economic systems to the land.” The challenge comes in deciding what needs to go in order to preserve what is here and true sustainability will require a reshuffling of priorities. “The answer to ‘how do you have both dams and salmon?’ is, you don’t. The answer to ‘how do you have both cars and polar bears?’ is, evidently, you don’t.”

No matter how many different ways us groovy environmentalists can verbalize that the needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system, there will be people that just won’t get it. Derrick agreed and quoted something he read years ago, “it takes 10 years to change somebody’s mind.” So that’s why Derrick doesn’t spend any significant amount of time arguing with people. The best thing he can do is for those people who “get it” is to try and push them a little further, and for those that don’t agree, he will just “plant seeds and walk away.” I asked him to explain the process in which his mind changed. He explained it by way of his voting record. “When I was nineteen I voted for Reagan.”

“What?” I said

“I was 19. He said he would balance the budget and the news told me that was a good thing. Then, of course, he didn’t do that and nobody was talking about it anymore. The next time around, I voted for a democrat. By the time I was in my late twenties, I realized the whole thing was a fuckin’ sham and I voted for Emma Goldman.”

The idea of “pushing people a little further” brings us to one of the central, and seemingly controversial, ideas in Endgame. “A lot of times in argumentation, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, or in any conversation about this, most of it doesn’t have anything to do with rational discourse, or reasonable discourse, I should say…. I’ve got a lot of crap from lifestyle activists and dogmatic pacifists about Endgame and a lot of the stuff they throw out is entirely projection and has nothing to do with the arguments themselves, because they have a really strong visceral response to it and they need to push that away because it scares them too much. And so, one of the things I’ve thought about doing—and this is a joke, I’m not actually going to do this—is put out a version called Endgame For Pacifists.”
I laughed as he continued. “it would be a thousand blank pages with one page in the middle that says, ‘sometimes it’s okay to fight back,’ because that’s the only line their reading anyway.” And we all do this to a certain extent. Derrick, for example, grew up with an abusive father who drank a lot. Now, if he were to go out with a woman and she started to drink, that’s the only thing he would be able to concentrate on because, through his experience of the world, he has developed a strong emotional response to alcohol. So, “I’m not specifically blaming pacifists for their response. The difference is I’m self aware enough at this point that I wouldn’t then lash out at that person. I would recognize that this is my issue and I need to either extricate myself from that situation or deal with it in terms of claiming that issue.”

“My point about bringing all that up is that one of the problems with everything we face today is that the problems aren’t specifically rationale and therefore, not always amenable to rationale solutions.” This gets back to the insanity of our culture. How much rational sense does it make that every single stream in America is contaminated with carcinogens? At the most fundamental level, how much sense does rape make? “A lot of what we’re dealing with just doesn’t make any sense.”

To further explain the insanity of our culture, Derrick went on to explain that many years ago, he developed a habit of asking people whether or not they like their jobs. He said about 90% of the people he asked said no. “That was just insane to me. I mean, why would you have this system that’s set up that is killing everything and it’s not even making people happy? It’s just crazy. I mean, the phrase, ‘thank God it’s Friday,” how insane is that? That you’re thankful another week has gone by.

Whether one is listening to a talk on these issues or reading a book about these topics, the question that invariably bubbles to the surface is: what can we do about all this? One of my favorite parts of Derrick’s talk comes at the end when he responds, “Do what you love.” There is something so simple and so beautiful about that idea that I had to ask him about it.

“That’s one of the good things about everything being so messed up;” Derrick went on, “no matter where we look, there is great work to be done….though it’s pretty crude language, I think it’s a pretty good way to look at life, that is to ask, what is it that I get off on? It would be really arrogant for me to tell people what they should do, not only because I don’t know them, but I also don’t know their landbase. So when people ask me what to do, I always say ‘don’t ask me, you should go to the nearest river and ask that river because I don’t know how to live sustainable, but the river does, and the river will tell you if just listen to it. Then put that together with what you already love to do.’”

Endgame
A free lecture by Derrick Jensen
April 10th, 7:30 p.m.
Dubois Ballroom, NAU Campus

derrickjensen.org

This is Februrary’s column for The Noise. Obviously, this is unedited.

I was eight years old the first time I was confronted with vegetarianism. My mom had, apparently, just finished reading a book that opened her eyes to factory farms and the inhumane practices of the modern-day slaughterhouse. For a kid who had been eating meat virtually every day for the entirety of his short time on this planet, I was not cool with this arrangement and put up more of a fight than any other member of my family. Though not yet versed in punk rock, looking back, I had the same opinion of vegetarianism that Fat Mike had when he wrote the song “Vegetarian Mumbo Jumbo” (I don’t want to be a vegetarian/ why eat beans when you can have steak instead?). Anyone familiar with NOFX’s more recent albums knows that Mike has turned a 180 on the issue of vegetarianism, and so have I.

Needless to say, my 8-year-old bout with vegetarianism lasted almost 2 weeks. My mom admits today that she went about it all wrong. Many people, especially children, shouldn’t be expected to quit eating meat cold turkey (pun intended!). She also didn’t really know what to cook, and found the lifestyle too expensive. So before I knew it, I was biting into cheeseburgers again.

It wasn’t until the end of my undergrad days that I became more educated on the issue and began to consider a lifestyle change that would better serve my landbase, nonhuman animals, the poverty stricken masses, and the health of my own body. It’s important to mention that I do not have any moral objection against eating meat. I do, however, object to the systematic exploitation of the meat industry and the lies about this industry that I have been fed (literally) all my life. It might be easy for one to distort Darwin’s theory of evolution and claim, as Fat Mike did, “it’s survival of the fittest…and we’re winning,” but to fall into this logic is to avoid the issue all together and, therefore, justify the atrocious behavior of factory farms and the meat industry’s irresponsible use of land.

While biting into a side of beef, believing that humans are “winning” Darwin’s battle of survival is to buy into the story we tell ourselves about where our meat and animal products come from. While it is nice to believe our meat comes from family farms, where animals have acres and acres of grazing land, where livestock have access to sunlight, a variety of foods, and plenty of room to be autonomous creatures, by and large, this reality has become fantasy. Agribusiness is one of the most profitable sectors of the U.S. economy today and industrial meat production has whipped out all but a fraction of these family farms.

Further, if we are in evolutionary competition with nonhuman animals, this must mean that we are engaged in a relationship with these animals, which we are not. Rather, we are engaged in a relationship with Bashes, Safeway, Albertsons, and the fast food industry, which produce only shallow resemblances of a relationship with the food we consume.

Upon investigating the following statistics, I decided to become a vegetarian. Ninety percent of all U.S.-grown soy, 70% of all grain, and 80% of all corn is grown specifically for livestock consumption. I was living in Indiana when I first became versed in these issues. I remember driving back and forth on I-65, from college to my parent’s house, and looking out at what seemed like an endless sea of corn. I remember the fantasies I’ve been told of the noble farmer living off the land and growing vegetables for us to purchase at the grocery store. Upon learning that nearly all the corn I saw was owned by corporations and actually went to support the meat industry, I immediately realized how irresponsible it was to use land this way. This is, of course, nothing new and it is certainly not strictly relevant to the United States. After all, at the height of Ireland’s infamous potato famine 150 years ago, in which 1.5 million people perished, Ireland was actually exporting maize to Britain. More recently, during Somalia’s notorious famine a couple years ago, Somalia was exporting livestock and bananas to first world countries. Famine is a myth; there is plenty of food to go around. There is obviously a strong, and nearly invisible, disconnect between ideology and action when it comes to the food that we eat and how we obtain it.

I recently visited Dr. Doug Brown, an economics professor in Northern Arizona’s University’s School of Business. Though he had plans to ride his bike over to a colleague’s house, he opened his door to me, as well as my questions. I have to admit, I was a little nervous to be walking into a professor of economics office to discuss our cultures exploitation of animals, the unsustainability of the meat industry, and the economic sanity of vegetarianism. After all, I’d been taught that economists, like developers, were one of the driving forces that sought to convert the living into the dead in the name of profits. I was wrong; Dr. Brown “gets it.” He’s written several books on sustainability issues, and is in the process of writing a book on the work of Daniel Quinn. “Of course, I am not a meat eater,” he said before I asked my first question.

Dr. Brown first became a vegetarian in the early 70’s, when his wife was pregnant with their first child. The only doctor in town was a vegetarian, and he introduced Dr. Brown to the idea of eating lower on the food chain, thus promoting a healthy diet for pregnant mothers. From there, Dr. Brown read a few books such as Diet For a Small Planet, which introduced him to the notion that “we need to be concerned with how food is grown and what we eat.”

I asked him about the irresponsible use of land used to support the meat industry. “It is so wasteful that so much vegetable protein is used to feed livestock, when it could, in actuality, feed billions of people,” he said. The West uses a resource-intensive “two-layer” food system, in which food crops are fed to animals, then animals to people. With an average of seven pounds of vegetable protein needed to produce one pound of animal protein, the system requires 600 percent more food crops than plant-centered systems in which people consume vegetable protein directly. In this way, Dr. Brown described, “animals act as extremely inefficient protein converters.” I thought back to the fields of corn I had driven through in Indiana. I thought of all the wasted proteins and realized right away that there is virtually nothing sustainable about the meat industry.

Then we got on the topic of factory farms. Dr. Brown first became aware of factory farms upon taking a more educated look at his hometown of Marshalltown, Iowa, a town literally built on the pork industry, namely Swift Co. Again I thought back to my drive through Indiana and remembered a particular stretch of land where the stench of a nearby pig farm was so intense it makes your eyes water as you drive past (anyone living in Northern Indiana knows exactly the stretch of land I’m talking about). Swift Co., the bread and butter of Marshalltown, slaughters 16,000 hogs per day—that’s 4 million a year, producing 932 million pounds of pork a year for sale in the global economy.

For slaughterhouses world-wide, this is increasingly becoming the rule rather than the exception. A slaughterhouse of this size must obtain very large quantities of pork to substantiate an operation of this size. The days of your grandfather’s family farm are nearly over, welcome to the world of factory farms.

Most people are familiar with images of factory farms, whereby animals are packed into barns by the hundreds, sometimes thousands, with no access to sunlight. Most of these animals are packed in so tight that they don’t even have enough room to turn around. Dr. Brown spoke with passion against this exploitation. “It’s a tragedy. Animals being treated this way acts as an appendage of human domination, whereby these animals have no life, and exist for one purpose—food for people.” I thought of something I heard when I was a kid, that just because they’re not human doesn’t mean that their life isn’t as important to them as ours are to us. But this isn’t even accurate, because animals growing up under these conditions don’t know what it is like to have a life, to breath clean air, to eat tasty food, to live as autonomous creatures on this planet. “It’s just an incredible disrespect for the community of life,” said Dr. Brown. I knew right away that he was right; that as long as we have no connection to the food we eat or to the land where it is grown, we too do not know the true meaning of living as autonomous creatures on this planet. That producing meat on this kind of scale numbs us to any sense of connection or responsibility to the land.

If your sense of empathy doesn’t extend to these animals (and why should it if you don’t have to see the suffering…we’re “winning” remember?), than think of the impact this has on the surrounding communities. As I think back to the stench created by the hog farm on I-65 in Indiana, I wondered where all this animal waste went. Industrial scale factory farming produces as much as 12 million pounds of excrement. Modern factory farms have a sophisticated system of waste removal, but to make 12 million pounds of shit disappear would be a feat not even Harry Potter could manage. Invariably the air, water, and local cropland become contaminated. In an age where artificial growth hormones (such as RBGH) and antibiotics are pumped into the veins of livestock, the environmental and local health impacts of this contamination are becoming greater and more severe.

The truth is, it is becoming less and less safe to be a meat eater. Every other week, it seems that another shipment of industrial meat has been contaminated with e coli or Mad Cow or whatever the meat related disease du jour is. Factory farms produce unhealthy conditions, where animals easily fall prey to diseases. Feeding baby cows the blood of their deceased elders, for example, produces Mad Cow disease. The scary Orwellian future we’re all scared of is upon us, and it’s in our food. We might as well be talking about Soylent Green here. Every day we get closer to an epidemic that can’t be stopped. Scary, scary stuff.

Understanding the central role of animal production in global agribusiness, and developing a strategy to transform the Western food system are key challenges for progressives in the United States today. Indeed, the meat industry absolutely must be confronted if we are to face the kind of food, water, and farmable land shortages that are already starting to plague much of the world. We need to support activist efforts to shift consumer habits toward a plant-based diet and we need to be patient with those who haven’t yet made the shift toward vegetarianism. I get really tired of the elitist vegans and vegetarians who cast people off who have not yet accepted the reality of our situation. We need to work together and support local farmers whose practices are not exploitive.

Just as I do not have a moral objection against eating meat per se, Dr. Brown explains that the social and cultural idea that just because we can control and dominate nonhuman animals doesn’t make it right. And it’s degrading our ability to meaningfully interact with the real world.

Darwin, by the way, was a vegetarian.

Here is January’s column published in The Noise.

Right off the bat, I think it’s important to mention that I’m totally against New Year’s resolutions. It’s been my experience that the “New Year’s Resolution” functions as a great procrastinator, much like popping in a movie to stave off studying for a few hours. If someone expresses the desire to quite smoking, read more, or exercise, the use of the New Year’s Resolution™ forces them to wait, sometimes months at a time, for January 1st. I understand that dates and schedules are important to many people for many reasons, but if you’ve already “resolved” to do something to improve the quality of your life, just do it!

It doesn’t really matter now. By the time this issue hits the streets, the resolutions will already be in place; for many, like trying to take safety advice from a three-fingered shop teacher, these resolutions have probably already been dismissed. The smoker still knows that quitting is the best option, but after a stressful holiday with the in-laws, just “one more” pack might be justified. The one who vows to read more, if he was serious about it at all, probably hasn’t actually made any effort to obtain reading material. One resolution that does tend to stick, at least for the first couple of months, are those that vow to exercise more. After weeks of eating pie and lying around reminiscing with family and old friends, the belt gets tighter and the guilt gets heavier.

The best kind of exercise, that is, the most enduring and meaningful, coincides with a lifestyle change where exercise is merely integrated into everyday life. It’s very hard for most people to make extra time to go to a gym. And for those, like myself, who feel awkward alongside all the grunting and competition that characterize most gyms, simply getting up early to run probably isn’t going to happen either.

Insert bicycle propaganda here: The bicycle is probably the best invention of all time. Not only does it promote a healthy lifestyle, but it also provides a sense of freedom through simplicity, independence from car culture, interaction with one’s surroundings, and it’s just plain fun.

Being in the line of work I’m in, many might be shocked that I didn’t choose the printing press as the greatest invention. When you think about it though, the printing press was an inevitable invention. People simply have things to say and nobody can read each other’s handwriting. Plus, the bike is one of the few inventions that have maintained it’s basic design since the time it was first introduced in the mid 1800s. Further, many people might say, “Kyle, the invention of the wheel made the bike possible, so the wheel is the greatest invention.” Frankly, I’m tired of all this “wheel propaganda” that takes place in this culture. Yes, the bike utilizes the wheel, but nobody “invented” the wheel, humans just found it. The bicycle is genius because it utilizes the basic concepts of mobility that nature has already provided for us. There is a difference between “Hey look at this!” and “Hey look what I made out of this!”

In terms of the bikes design, we currently live in the greatest time period for riding. New riders have to decide if they want a road bike or a mountain bike, and consider the different kinds and the hundreds of variations in between. Never before has a bicycle been capable of going as fast as today’s road bikes. Similarly, never before has a bicycle been able to handle the rugged terrains that today’s mountain bikes have finessed. I’m not saying bicycles aren’t still improving; I am saying that there has never been a better time to start integrating the bicycle into your every day routine.

That’s the beauty of the bicycle. One doesn’t even have to view it as exercise. When something is embedded into one’s lifestyle, it isn’t internalized as something extra (like going to the gym or making a point to exercise). Ideally, if one bikes back and forth to school and work, it simply becomes a mode of transportation. The health benefits become integrated into this lifestyle.

I recently talked to Anthony Quintile, the owner of Absolute Bikes, and Ben Withey, a manager over at AZ Bikes. Mr. Quintile discussed many of the positive attributes of biking beyond the health benefits. “This is a great town for riding. If people ride more, they’ll be happier.” This isn’t just empty rhetoric either. In both bike shops, when I walked past customers and people working on bikes, everyone seemed to be in a good mood. These are people who zoom around town on their own power, who get to know their community because their not incased in steel, and they know all the short cuts and scenic rides.

I remember when I first started riding; I was shocked by how hard it was. Flagstaff has some killer hills, many of which, however, can be avoided by careful route planning. There was one hill I simply had to tackle every day, but I could set my watch to the progress I was making. The first couple days, I had to stand up on my bike in the highest gear, which was both embarrassing and discouraging. Little by little, however, I progressed to where only in a matter of a few months, I cruised up that hill without having to change my gears or stand up at all. It certainly made me feel good.

Admitting the addictive nature of riding, Mr. Whitey enjoys the simple, quiet, low maintenance lifestyle that riding a bike entails. “Every time you ride, you feel yourself getting stronger and progressing.” This undoubtedly builds confidence. In an age where over 350 million prescriptions of anti-depressants are filled each year, the independence, self-reliance, and simplicity provided by a riding a bike, has the potential to vastly improve the quality of life for virtually anybody willing to stick with it.

This brings me to the crux of any resolution, or lifestyle change characterized by a new activity: stick with it. Think back to when you were a child. Do you remember ever being remotely tired when you were riding your bike? I don’t either. This is because biking was the best available mode of transportation at the time. As we grew up, we have learned to embrace the easiest, quickest modes of transportation, without considering what might be the best in terms of health, environmental impact, and general well being. This is also a simple way of explaining our cultures definition of progress. This rendering of progress is an ideology in place to compliment a way of life that values the needs of economic systems over the needs of people and the natural world.

By becoming less dependent on petroleum, and embracing a lifestyle that emphasizes the happiness of people and the welfare of the natural world, bicyclists might begin to shift the paradigm and change the way we understand progress through simplicity rather than the complexities characterized by car culture and technology.

That said, those who first begin biking should be encouraged to stick with it. Withey emphasizes that new riders “be patient and ask questions.” Both Withey and Quintile highlight the importance of establishing a good relationship with your local bike shop. Quintile mentioned that malfunctions on the bike might easily discourage new riders. “If you find a good bike shop, you’ll be able to ensure that your bike is running well, which will make for a better riding experience.”

Here are a few tips for new riders, many of the ideas promoted here were provided by Anthony Quintile from Absolute Bikes, while your author provided the sarcasm:

1. Find a good bike shop that will answer all your questions and keep your bike running well. If you’re serious about riding don’t buy a cheap Wal-Mart bike.
2. Wear appropriate gear. This doesn’t mean you have to have Spandex to ride a bike, but loose clothing could get caught up in your bike chain.
3. Make sure you have the equipment and know-how to deal with a flat tire.
4. Make sure you have proper lighting/reflectors. The police have been cracking down on this lately.
5. Wear a helmet. Flagstaff is a pretty bike-friendly community, but that doesn’t mean people don’t get hit.
6. Ride smart. Learn hand signals. There are plenty of ways to avoid traffic or dangerous situations. With a little careful planning, your ride will be more enjoyable as well as safer.
7. Ride often and be patient with your progress. Feel sorry for all the suckers on the petroleum dole.