Human Powered Transportation:

Fossil Fuel-Free Travel Part I

“I really admire what you’re doing, but I could never do it” is a phrase I hear much more frequently since my family and I have decided to travel without burning fossil fuels, and reduce our carbon footprint. Some people add, that their love of travel, or busy lives would prohibit going without fossil fuels. Other friends, who recognize that my family and I are in fact traveling, with our home, without an engine, say “I’ve always wanted to travel, and have never done it because I worry too much about the environmental impact, but I just don’t know if a lifestyle change is for me.”

A little background, my family and I- me, my boyfriend, and our dog-live on a 28 foot sailboat. We don’t use the engine at all. It doesn't even work. We only sail to our destinations. We love to travel, but we also love the planet. We have three different head sails, and a main sail for all types of weather. We even made one of the sails ourselves. When the wind is too light or variable, we also have a sculling oar, which my grandparents let us build in their garage in coastal Washington. To get to and from our boat we have a kayak and a dingy, and to get around on shore we have bikes.

It is our firm belief that this kind of living isn’t just for people who live on boats and slowly travel to where ever they want. This kind of living, this kind of life change is for everyone. To those that say they really admire what we’re doing but could never do it, I say you can! I know because just five years ago I really admired all the environmental miles stones and lifestyle changes of people I knew personally and people from books and the internet, but I had no idea how to be them. In that same time frame I also got my first opportunities to travel, sometimes internationally.

To those who wouldn’t want to give that up, I understand. I didn’t. Whether you consider yourself a travel aficionado who can’t get enough of this gorgeous planet, an environmentalist who can’t figure out how to make travel work with your values, or even just a busy person with a busy life who falls in between and can’t imagine sacrificing some of your precious time, money, or sanity to find an alternative to fossil fuels. I have been all of you. And I have the answers.

It’s the Journey, Not the Destination

This fortune cookie wisdom, while generally true, is often hard for pragmatists to reconcile. It’s hard to enjoy, or find peace in, or learn from, “the journey” on a two hour commute when you also have to stop at the gym and the grocery store. No one enjoys that journey. The Dali Lama would probably not enjoy that journey. But what if you changed it? What if instead of stuck in traffic for two hours on the freeway, you switched your car in for a bike with panniers for a month? Panniers, for those who don’t speak bike, are those fancy bike bags that hang on either side of the tire. Or for those with a bigger grocery load, you could check out a bike trailer. Before you left you could check online, either on your city’s website, or on Google Maps, to get a good bike route. Many places have bikes lanes and dedicated bike paths that are separate from the street, and go through trees, next to rivers, etc. Are we getting to the peace and enjoyment yet? What about your errands though. No need to hit the gym, because you’re getting your workout biking around, and from all the money you’re saving on a gym membership as well as gas, maybe splurge and go to Whole Foods to get something fancy and tasty. Also, fun fact, Whole Foods tend to be in more bike-able neighborhoods, have more parks, and gardens, so it will be a pretty ride. Are we there yet?

What about other ways of commuting? I worked for a company that gave people incentives to run or walk to work, because it made them more healthy. My brother skateboards. I had a teacher who lived on a boat long before I did, who kayaked to work every morning. Those are just as much of a switch, just as physically demanding, and just as rewarding. Your health improves, you get some peaceful time in the morning, you save money, and you make a positive impact on the environment. The world, generally, but also those birds and bugs and deer and fish you see on your much more personal commute are being affected by your switch. Your neighbors in your neighborhood, the people who used to be breathing your emissions in traffic aren’t any longer, and neither are you.

You might be reluctant to give this experiment a try. However, in most cities bikes are actually faster. When I lived in Tucson, it would take my neighbors or co-workers two times as long to get to the same destination if we left at the same time with them driving and me biking. In downtown Portland, depending on the time of day, this has been pushed to three times as long. In both cities biking was also faster than public transportation, even in Portland which has a light rail.

What about the travelers though. How does the bike help? In the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” a salesman pitches bicycles as “the thing of the future”, and Paul Newman’s character buys one, only to be mocked by Robert Redford’s character: “Just keep thinking Butch, that’s what you’re good at.” They then make elaborate plans to travel to Bolivia, involving horse travel, trains, cars, and steam ships. They use the conventional routes of the day, which means they go north, to go south, to go east to get west. They leave the bike behind. Had they just ridden bikes from where they were, near the Mexican Border, they very likely would have gotten there faster, especially since Butch and Sundance were used to packing a light camping roll, and cooking over camp fires. But let’s talk about contemporary people. Biking is a very common way to travel and becoming even more common. Huge distances like the the continental US, or around Europe. Short hops, like a weekend trip to camp out of town. Even major outdoor retailers have supplies for bike camping and long bike trips. The longest trip I know of is the person who biked the longest road, the trans-American Highway, and when they reached the Darian Gap, the section in Columbia that has consistently refused to be tamed or paved, with a bike, they were able to traverse it and continue on to Tierra Del Fuego.

Another bonus of human powered transportation, is that you aren’t just zipping past the scenery like in a car or airplane. You’re right there close to it. You can smell the sea, you can taste the peach orchards, and you get close to the flowers, trees, and animals. Once, while bike riding along the Grand Canyon Rim Trail, a herd of elk crossed in front of me on my bike, and I almost hit the baby! In Tucson, I was biking and almost ran into a pig-like creature called a javelina once near sunset. My brother came to visit me in Washington and went kayaking around the estuary where we had our boat and was able to see seals, bald eagles, and herons which he had never seen before except in a zoo. Human powered forms of transportation are the way to get around if you really want to see an area. You discover more about a place, from wildlife to restaurants.

One might ask why, as a boater and a bike enthusiast, my family doesn’t have a pedal boat, or pedal dinghy, or pedal kayak. This is because these are not things that have had nearly as much development and demand as rowing craft. There are some pedal boats, typically on lakes and ponds, and some even like a combination of a bike and a catamaran. However these are for mostly calm, inland waters. With coastal waters that may have swell the kayaks and rowing dinghys are more stable. These are tried and true methods that are very old, and just as human powered however! There are many people who go on kayaking trips for a week or more, who tour the lake systems in Canada and camp, all under the power of their own arms.

In my travels, I’ve been consistently impressed and even amazed by the long, well maintained bike paths in beautiful places. Want to bike the Columbia River Gorge, or the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, the Rio Grande or the Mogollon Rim? The San Juan Mountains to go mountain biking in Telluride, or even skiing as that trail is maintained year round? What about biking to whale watch or watch bald eagles mate? All across just the US there are well maintained, beautiful bike routes with free maps. There was a group called Scouts for Equality that actually biked from Seattle to South Texas just on these routes to showcase their Boy Scout skills and protest the Boy Scout’s polices on denying gay membership.

Internationally, there are also great opportunities for human powered travel. Canada has what is called the Trans-Canada trail that is still partly under construction, but the 85% that is finished is open for use. It stretches west to east, from Vancouver Island to Nova Scotia, and is open to hikers, bikers, as well as canoes and kayaks for some portions. Europe is known for it’s great bike culture; the Tour de France started there after all. There are many great bicycling routes in the alps and the Mediterranean. There are also great ski routes in Europe, that traverse international borders. My boyfriend was once able to ski in the Alps for work for two weeks, in three different countries, and a coworker did a similar training in Norway. Human powered transportation doesn’t have to be weather dependant as long as you are prepared, because humans have been traveling under their own power for a long time and have developed many methods for doing so.

One of the best side effects for human powered travelers, when you are utilizing pedal power, or paddle power, or even just your legs to get around, you aren’t spending money on dead dinos to get you around. That means more money for your wallet (as well as healthier air for you to breathe into your lungs while you pedal). That means you might not feel so bad when you decide to take a long weekend to go for that bike ride, even though it’s unpaid. You aren’t spending money on gas after all, and you’re feeling healthier so you’ve been spending less money on medical expenses lately. Or maybe it’s money to treat yourself to a cup of fair trade coffee when you arrive.

Human powered transportation provides great exercise, great views, and great opportunity for cheaper local as well as international travel. It keeps you healthy while you help make the world around you healthy for you and your neighbors, both human, animal, and plant. And isn’t the point for traveling, of working at a job, of living in this world to generate something good, to form connections, and really make a positive difference?

The beauty of human powered transportation isn’t just in that you get somewhere, it is in how you get there. You change over time, you change the world around you, and in every sense it is human powered. You get stronger, and you have the power to make a difference in the environmental crisis we all face. That is human powered transportation.

This post is dedicated to the work of Phil Thiel who recently passed away. He was a Seattle based Naval Architect and activist who designed amazing pedal-powered boats.

Ariel Shultz is involved with a project called Sailing Dog Dry Goods which is a sail freight company that also seeks to highlight the issues of petroleum usage in transportation and to offer alternatives to it’s use.