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(Note: This is a revision of the January, 2010 chapter of Second Wind: How bicycling around North America changed my life.  To read the rest of the book, buy a subscription for just $5.00!)

(Note to students: The links in this article are to supplemental background material, mostly Wikipedia entries.  Don't feel that you have to click a link unless you don't understand what I'm talking about or want to know more.  Point your mouse at a link to see where it leads, so you can decide whether to click it.)

A lot of people are more surprised to hear that I traveled alone than that I covered 7,000 miles on a bike.  They ask why I chose to do that and whether I got lonely.  I had plenty of time to think about the nature of solitude and independence and the pros and cons.

Solitude

It's not so much that I chose to go alone as that at the time I didn't know anyone who would want to come along, or whom I would want to have along.  I'm an introvert, and though I get along well with a variety of people in the short term, there are few people I can put up with (and who can put up with me) for days and weeks on end!  My friend Matt was a good prospect, and at one point between my first trip and my second we planned a tandem bike trip up to Winnipeg together, but he backed out.  I then decided I wanted the freedom to go where I wanted and do what I wanted, so I didn't look farther for a traveling companion.

Once I was on the road and comparing notes with other bike tourists, I started to realize that I was missing out on a lot of economies and conveniences that groups of travelers enjoy.  Hotel rooms and campgrounds are often priced with double occupancy assumed; even when they're not the second person always stays cheaper than the first.  Two-person tents are much more livable than one-person tents.  When buying food and supplies for just one person, you have fewer options, and they are priced higher.  With two or more people, one can cook while another pitches a tent.  I had a pretty monotonous and unpalatable diet of mostly cold food because I couldn't afford variety or justify cooking.

Doing what I wanted was a little overrated, too.  Like a lot of people, I get "tunnel vision" on long trips: I'm so focused on my destination of the moment that I have trouble getting interested in attractions along the way.  I'm still kicking myself for not even slowing down when I passed a chocolate factory on my first bike trip in 2002... it smelled so good, even if they hadn't had tours, I could have at least pressed my nose against the fence like Charlie Bucket.  I went on a tour of a potato-chip factory in Pennsylvania to make up for it, but I skipped the Okeefenokee Swamp Visitor Center and countless other attractions I might have visited if I'd had someone with me to just pose the question, "Should we stop?"

Then there's the companionship.  I had my cell phone, and I called people almost every evening and every weekend.  I'm grateful to my family and friends for putting up with my frequent calls -- having never been on the other end of the line from a traveler, I'm not sure what it's like.  Nowadays I probably would have been posting on Facebook from my phone, but at the time I was limited to voice calls, so I kept up with a core group of fewer than a dozen people.

Interdependence

So I wasn't lonely because I'm an introvert, and because I had my cell phone.  But beyond that, I wasn't actually alone.  I interacted with people every day at restaurants and stores and libraries, and cars passed me on the road, and even when there were no people I was alone with nature.  Nature can be a lot of company.

I've come believe that it's not actually possible for anyone to travel alone.  For example, although I had no one with me, I had millions of people supporting my cell phone network and paving my roads and maintaining my restrooms and campgrounds and distributing my food and bike parts.  Even if I hadn't -- if, say, I had been hiking alone through the untouched Canadian wilderness and not seeing a fellow human being for months -- I would still be dependent on plants and animals for my food and air.  On an even less obvious level, bacteria in my body outnumber my own cells by at least ten to one, helping my digestive and immune systems.  Bacteria as companions may sound like a stretch to you, but try living without them!

I came up with a prayer that I recited several times a day as I pedaled down the road, to remind myself of my constant companion:

Great Gaia,
living spirit of the Earth,
mother of us all:

Thank you for this beautiful day.

Thank you for the ground I walk on, which is your body.
Thank you for the water I drink, which is your blood.
Thank you for the air I breathe, which is your breath.
Thank you for the community of life that surrounds me and sustains me: this is your living pulse.
Thank you for the kind thoughts of friends and strangers: these are your thoughts.

Thank you for this beautiful day.

Not only did this prayer remind me that every breath and every sip of water reinforces my interdependence with the living world around me, it also helped to remind me that every day was beautiful (even days I would not have ventured out in, had I not been traveling), which always adjusted my attitude for the better.

The video above is a talk by Jane Poynter, one of the eight people who spent two years in Biosphere 2.  Her experiences have been far more dramatic than mine, and she makes my points better than I can!  If you find yourself zoning out when she starts talking about farming in Eritrea, be sure to skip forward to 13:00 for the ending, where she offers some simple examples of ways to let interdependence grow in your home and in your consciousness.

In the first part of the talk, Poynter explains the importance to science of their experiment, shutting themselves off from the larger world of life, and describes one of the several serious problems they encountered in doing so.  I'm aware of at least two other problems that she glosses over: the glass killed off most of the pollinators, so the people had to pollinate plants by hand; and stowaway "crazy ants" hijacked the ecosystem, killing anything that didn't serve their purposes, and ultimately breaching the enclosure (I used to have a better article describing this, but I can't find it now); with the result that this laboratory that was intended to sustain itself for 100 years barely lasted two.  As Poynter points out, this doesn't mean we can't create a biosphere independent of Earth's systems, it just means we have a lot more to learn.

What we do know is that if and when we leave Earth, we must necessarily bring Gaia with us.  To date, not one human being has ever left Earth's gravity field.  When we did walk on the moon, every bite of food and every Watt of energy was from Earth, along with the water and air and the agenda for practically every minute of the day.  We have a long way to go before we even have the option of being truly independent of our environment, let alone each other.

The illusion of independence

So when we say someone is independent, what we mean is that his or her means of support are not readily apparent.  An "independent" person is dependent on a wide network of people and creatures rather than on just a few.  A person who is "independently wealthy," for example, gets her income from a bureaucracy of bankers and brokers investing in hundreds of thousands of debtors unknown to her, while a "dependent child" relies on just one or two people he knows intimately.  Meanwhile, the people I knew in Fairfield, Iowa who had "no visible means of support" (i.e. no regular job) were some of the most connected people I've known.  Who is really more dependent, the person who depends a little bit on many people, or the one who depends heavily on a few?  The answer to this paradox is that the "independent" person is actually interdependent -- by having more connections, she is less dependent on any one connection and so gives the impression of being independent of all of them.

And yet, we imagine ourselves to be separate.  It's part of the American Way, and it's one of the distinctions between "Western" and "Eastern" philosophy.  No doubt we can trace it back to ancient Greece.  But it's just an illusion.  Not only did the Biosphere 2 experiment show that we cannot draw a clean boundary between ourselves and the rest of life, every branch of science I'm aware of indicates that we are connected to everything around us.  It's a teaching of most religions I'm aware of as well.  Yet we persist in trying to draw such boundaries.  Why?

Shortly before my trip, my mind was blown by a book by Derrick Jensen called The Culture of Make Believe.  After extensively cataloging the atrocities our culture has committed against other cultures, races, and species, Jensen concludes that it's our illusion of separateness that allows us to do such things.  If we could not imagine ourselves to be separate, he claims, we would see that hurting another hurts ourselves, and so we wouldn't be able to do it.  Why do we do it, then?  Because acting as though we're separate allows us to benefit at the expense of others!  We can hurt, exploit, and manipulate others and pretend it won't come back around to bite us later.  More than that, we can take any work that's objectionable to ourselves -- hard work, dirty work, dangerous or deadly work, upsetting or morally repugnant work -- and simply delegate it to other people who are more desperate to work than we are.  To name one salient example, consumers of butchered meat (myself included) delegate the raising of livestock to other people.  The farmers who care for the animals delegate the slaughtering to other people.  Those who do the slaughtering presumably don't think about the live animals.  This compartmentalization -- this illusion of separateness -- allows us to casually order the deaths of animals we would not want to kill ourselves.  The same applies to warfare and environmental destruction.

It's hard to prove whether Jensen's analysis is true or not, but it's a compelling explanation, and it really resonated with me in the months before my trip, such that I credited it in the sermon I gave right before the trip ("Saving the Word") and also the one I gave partway through ("...of Which We Are a Part").  In the former, I tried to find common ground between the environmentalist and fundamentalist warnings that the world is ending because of our sins, and the common ground is that interdependence is preferable to independence.  In the latter, I tried to define our community as the whole web of interconnectedness, including people who disagree with us -- not an easy sell just before a Presidential election!  In the first sermon I said I was going on the trip to look for lifeboats for a sinking ship; by the time I wrote the second I was unsatisfied with the sinking-ship metaphor; instead I said I was adding my thread to the web of existence.

The idea that separateness is a harmful illusion is not one that gets a lot of coverage in popular culture, so I was surprised to see it driven home by the blockbuster movie Avatar (right)... though not everyone saw it that way.  I wound up writing a long rebuttal to an influential critic who called the film racist, and many of my friends agreed more with her than with me.  To summarize what I wrote (and director James Cameron later affirmed), the aliens in the film do not so much represent another race as another worldview available to all of us, from whose perspective all life is connected, and our illusion of independence appears insane.  That's the word they use in the film: not foreign, not barbaric, not ignorant or mistaken or stupid, insane.

Insanity on the road

I passed through some places that demonstrated this insanity pretty clearly.  The Gulf Coast was the first.  I passed through in January 2005, 6 months before Hurricane Katrina, but it was already common knowledge that the first hurricane to hit New Orleans head-on would breach the levees and flood the city.  A lot of houses in that area are built to withstand flooding (left), but not winds and waves.  I watched a documentary on the local TV news a few days before I arrived in town which laid out more or less exactly what would happen 6 months later, and yet it was business as usual in the city during my visit.  We all know what a terrible disaster Katrina turned out to be, but what did New Orleans learn from it?  It's still a sitting duck for the next hurricane, much of the city is still underwater, and people still live there, as if just going through the motions of everyday life could prevent another disaster. 

Similarly, I snapped a photo of an offshore casino in Biloxi, Mississippi (left) which six months later was in tatters (right) and a year later was patched up and back in business.  It got off easy -- some of the offshore casinos broke their moorings, and the Waffle House I mentioned in my journal for the day was obliterated, along with some 90% of the buildings along that section of coast.  And now they're back, just the same as before.

I had a feeling that would happen, because when I neared Pensacola, Florida I saw the damage from the 2004 hurricane season, 6 months before.  (photos below left and right)  Pensacola got hammered that year -- I remember watching the news back in August, when I was still pedaling through Michigan, and thinking, "I'm going to ride through that?".  I had to detour around the city because every hotel room and campground for miles around was booked solid by construction crews.  The highway shoulders for miles in every direction were littered with asphalt shingles and vinyl siding that had blown right off of houses like leaves in the autumn.  And what were the construction crews replacing it with?  More asphalt shingles and vinyl siding, of course!  I asked fellow camper at a campground outside town -- a licensed tree surgeon from Kansas City who had come down "the day after the hurricane" to help and got mired in bureaucracy for months -- why on Earth the insurance agencies would pay to make repairs with materials that had proven not to stand up to the storms that were guaranteed to return every few years.  He said many of the houses are uninsurable -- the homeowners were paying out of pocket to patch their vacation homes back up!  I don't know if that's true, but it made an impression on me.

Even so, what I saw on the Gulf Coast only fits the popular definition of insanity, "doing the same thing and expecting different results."  Real insanity usually involves doing damage, not just withstanding it.  I didn't run into a good example of that until I reached Sudbury, Ontario.  When I rode into town, the place was overrun with gypsy moth caterpillars: every time I stopped my bike it got covered in caterpillars.  The whole town was covered in a gray gritty ash.  Then on my way out of town I passed the slag heaps of INCO (formerly International Nickel Company), looking for all the world like Isengard in The Two Towers (click for image), with their "superstack" rising proudly over the miles of devastation.  The satellite view below doesn't do the scene justice, because the vegetation in the valleys makes the hills look more alive than they are.  Those hills are all slag, mile after mile of discarded, radioactive mining waste.

It was without a doubt the most godforsaken place I've ever been, and right in the heart of pristine northern Ontario.  I couldn't help thinking of Treebeard's tear-choked words when he sees that the trees of Isengard have been uprooted and burned in forges: "Many of these trees were my friends. Creatures I had known from nut or acorn... They had voices of their own... There is no curse in Entish, Elvish, or the tongues of men for this treachery."  And why?  Why did we need that nickel so damned much that we had to turn some of the most beautiful land on Earth into a little patch of Hell?  Surely we put it to some crucial purpose for the good of humanity?  Nickel is useful stuff.  So I asked at INCO's "Dynamic Earth" museum (which says not a word about the environmental effects of mining, nor about the proven remediation technique of sprinkling slaked lime over the slag and waiting a few years) what all that nickel was used for, and I was told that at the time the mines were most active, it was used primarily for coinage and shell casings.

that's all I have to say about that.

What these examples have in common is that in each case, people thought we could do just one thing in isolation and dismissed the consequences, only to be bit in the ass by them.  New Orleans wasn't built underwater, but like most river towns, it flooded sometimes.  We built the levees to prevent flooding, but the levees are what caused the city to sink (left) and destroyed the wetlands that used to protect it from hurricanes... and then the levees themselves failed!

The Gulf Coast is gorgeous 11 months of the year, so we build for those months rather than for the inevitable hurricane.  If my fellow camper is to be believed, absentee owners only care about their properties during the winter months and leave them to sit unprotected during the hurricane season, like a child leaving toys out in the rain to rust.

And Sudbury?  The Canadian Copper Company made a lot of money off the Sudbury mines for a few decades and gave some of it to the Canadian government and some to the miners.  It must have seemed like a great deal at the time!  But now the company is called Vale Inco, based in Brazil, and Canada has to subsidize Sudbury to keep people there, and the landscape is ghastly and everything's covered in ash and the trees are being eaten alive by caterpillars.  It's hard to imagine a deal with the Devil going more wrong.  And then there's the slag remediation process, which was proven to work in 1972 and then not used.  If we would just make Vale Inco clean up its mess like a toddler, Sudbury wouldn't be a blight on the landscape, and the dust and caterpillars would go away.  I like to think that recent decades' requirement of environmental impact statements make this kind of disaster less likely, but here in the Midwest the pattern has been repeated again and again with factory farms that promise profit and jobs but deliver pollution and unsafe working conditions.

Fostering sanity in an insane immature culture

Where Derrick Jensen sees the illusion of separateness as a convenient but horrific cultural invention, another author I discovered after my trip sees it as a natural developmental stage.  Ken Wilber and the developmental psychologists he draws from characterize human development -- both in individuals and societies -- as a gradual expansion of the identity from including only the self to including the whole Universe.  In this model, as we develop we draw the imagined boundary between ourselves and other families, then other races, then other species, gradually widening the circle throughout our lifetimes.  But there's a notable exception to this general outward trend: in order to leave the family circle for the wider community, we have to first see our individual selves as separate from the family.  That is to say, independence is the stage between dependence and interdependence.  As harmful as the boundary between "us" and "them" may be, society is not to blame for our drawing it -- it's something we all have to do as we grow up.  It's not insanity, it's adolescence!

Well, that's a call to action, isn't it?  Our culture is dangerously immature, and destroying the world!  We have to shake people out of their adolescent attitude and help them grow up!  Unfortunately, as Avatar has demonstrated, most people are happy to consume the "spoonful of sugar" (James Cameron's term for the action and adventure in the film) and ignore the medicine/message.  And most of us don't have nearly as much influence as Cameron.  If a 9-figure blockbuster can't wake people up from their immature insanity, and the Pope issuing pronouncements has little impact on his own followers' behavior, and the United Nations with the President of the United States and ostensibly both houses of Congress on their side can't agree to stop sabotaging the climate, then what chance do the rest of us have?

For my part, I've found inspiration and hope in Permaculture -- both the cutting-edge, big picture stuff (video at right -- the best part is at the beginning) and the pragmatic local blueprints of Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden.  Hemenway points out that permaculture is not about self reliance, it's about promoting interdependence.  It's not about building a sulf-sufficient bunker to hole up in while the world around you goes to Hell, it's about actively engaging your environment and helping it to sustain itself as well as you.  My home permaculture project not only produced 36 crops in the first year while improving the soil, it has also done more than anything else to introduce me to the neighbors, who have freely offered their help.  Actions speak so much louder than words.  Once I get certified as a permaculture designer next summer, I hope to teach some classes and bring some other local gardeners around to this way of working with nature instead of against it, not because their way of gardening is immature and they need to grow up (that's never a persuasive message!), but simply because there's a better way.  Everybody wants a better way.

Gardening?  That's my answer?  Well, yes and no.  Permaculture is a philosophy for building a permanent (sustainable) culture; gardening is just the most obvious expression of it.  Once people see how it works in the garden, they start to see larger applications as well, so if I we can change gardens we can change people, and if we change people we can change the whole culture!

At any rate, that's where my experiment with independence has brought me... how about you?  Please comment below!