Energy and Equity: A Eulogy to the Bicycle

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by Ivan Illich

El Rebozo Palapa Editorial

2014, booklet

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A country can be classified as overindustrialized when its social life is dominated by the transportation industry, which has come to determine its class privileges, to accentuate its time scarcity, and to tie its people more tightly to the tracks it has laid out for them. Beyond underequipment and overindustrialization, there is a place for the world of postindustrial effectiveness, where the industrial mode of production complements other autonomous forms of production.

Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance.

Part of our collection of beautiful booklets from El Rebozo Palapa Editorial, in Oaxaca, Mexico.