Bringing the Wild and Scenic Film Festival On Tour with the Pleasant Revolution will serve to broaden the regional platform for local environmental advocacy and allow for teams of like minded people to become more involved and aware of the diversity of environmental projects taking place.  The bike route will stretch from Vancouver to Mexico, much of which is considered Salmon Country – areas of rivers in need of protection to save the remaining population of salmon endangered by the damming and pollution of important water systems.

During the months of May through November we will be hosting from 15 to 20 Bicycle Music and Film Festivals and showing a variety of different environmental films at each stop. Are you one of those people who can’t sit through a movie? Well, you will be the perfect volunteer pedal-powerer for the bike-in movies and pedal-powered film projector we will be premiering.  Maybe Rock the Bike will surprise us with a pedal-powered popcorn maker to go along with those delicious smoothies!! Expect to taste the work of a finely bike-blended smoothie on this year’s tour!

More tour info to come!! Be sure to check out the magic of last year’s Pleasant Revolution 2010 European Tour… and please be in touch if you want to bring the magic to your town.

A documentary by Jonathan Grevsan

Our photo stream..

Cool article about Europe tour posted by one of our sponsors – YUBA bikes

Make sure not to “pass” on Passau..

CelloJoe and Kelly got to Passau a couple days before the rest of the group as they traveled along the Inn river bicycle path. Kelly had dislocated her shoulder while stretching with Joey, so they took a train to Passau from Bad Aibling. Joey got right to work the morning after they arrived by going to the Rathaus (city hall) and speaking with Rita Loher-Bronold from the Kultur Department about the city sponsoring a show. What a great decision to simply ask for help…the city hooked the Pleasant Revolution UP!

They gave us permits to play right in the heart of the town at two locations, provided us with a sumptuous meal at a traditional Bavarian restaurant, and put up our entire crew (17 people!) with hotel accommodations at a cyclists hotel called the Rotel Inn.

Some of the group went to see the largest organ in the world in the main cathedral of Passau. It has almost 18,000 pipes! It was amazing and sounded like alien music sometimes.

Local Bike Activists Bernd Sluka and Boris Burket helped with the organizing and were able to get our show announced on the radio and in the Passau Neue Press paper. And all of this happened in two days!

Check out some videos and pictures of our time in Passau, Germany:

CelloJoe’s beast of burden

Boris Burket, our city liason

the ginger ninjas!

Thomas is such a rockstar! look at that hair!

justin renfrow, buck magic’s friend from boston joins the group…no rehearsal required

kipchoge spencer singin his heart out..

amanda mora jones and band at the Kloistergarten

amanda mora jones at the Kloistergarten

heather normandale at the Kloistergarten

ginger ninjas at the Kloistergarten

acroyoga at the park

-Heather Normandale, Pleasant Revolution, June 11, 2010

“Kipchoge Spencer was somewhere in Mexico, and so was I. We had that going for us. But other than knowing that Spencer and his rock band, the Ginger Ninjas, were riding bicycles across the state of Jalisco, I was clueless, and attempts to learn more—text messages sent, blogs scrutinized, a publicist interrogated by cell phone—hadn’t produced any concrete leads. I hired a taxi in Guadalajara. The driver took me four hours west to the town of Mascota. No Ninjas. I reached for my phone once again and then had a better idea: rolling down the taxi window, I waved to a passerby. “¿Visto usted los gringos en bicicletas?” I asked. “Si,” he responded, pointing straight ahead. Two minutes later I was shaking hands with Spencer.”

Read the rest of the article at Stanford Magazine.

We went to a hot springs out in the woods frequented by Guadalajaran weekenders. Here too, the garbage was everywhere, bottles and plastic bags in the bushes, dirty diapers on river’s edge, toilet paper gardens within sight of the camping areas. Such a beautiful place (the whole river flowed hot from the vocanic mountains above) and so much human disregard for it. Ecologically, litter has never been one of my bigger concerns; I see it generally as more of a nuisance to our own human experience of beauty than as an actual ecological threat. But here I started to see it as an indicator for Mexican concern for the environment, or lack of it. You wouldn’t trash your mom’s house, out of respect for her. If you’d throw your garbage in the woods, there’s a basic lack of respect for mother Earth, and it might be difficult to motivate you to change any of your other habits out of ecological concern

We picked a bunch of it up, as much for our own aesthetic experience of the area as for any altruistic urges, but it came in mountains, too much work for any do-gooder crew. Or was it? On Monday morning, the city folk had all left and here comes the garbage pickers, 4 or 5 people walking through the area with big bags and throwing them in the back of a pickup.

Descending towards the coast from the mountain city of Tepic, we found ourselves on a low-traffic highway through a temperate forest. Here too, depite lack of people, there was plenty of litter in the ditches. I came around the corner of a particularly divine tributary valley and saw that the downstream edge was literally full of garbage, not a car’s worth or even a house’s worth, but more like the gargabe truck came and dumped its load. Thinking about it on the descent, I realized that this was basically our garbage, garbage we had thrown “away” in a seemingly proper receptacle and that had been collected and taken here, or somewhere else out in the woods, and “littered.”

So we’ve been trying to minimize our use of throwawayables. This is hard in today’s world, where plastic is cheaper than soapy water (and easier, too). The Mexican street vendor (like the American drive-up teenager) wants to give you a foam plate, plastic fork, foam cup, plastic straw, chlorine bleached virgin paper napkin, and a plastic bag or two to put it all in. This is 100 million year old plastic that will serve your eating needs for 2–10 minutes before entering the mysterious waste stream, where the one the you can be sure of is that it won’t go “away” after all. (Have you heard of the Pacific Ocean’s floating island of plastic that’s twice as big as the United States and has 6 times more plastic than plankton?) So we decided there should be a tax.

True to one of the tenets of the Pleasant Revolution—wherein: it might be hard to change the system but at least you can change yourself— we realized we wouldn’t be able to create a Mexican plastic tax overnight, but that we could tax ourselves. So now, in theory, when one of us uses anything disposable, we have to contribute 5 pesos to the group fund. At the least, this has led to a much higher level of thought around garbage and disposables, and a dramatic decrease in its consumption. We’ll tell you how it goes.

By David Kupfer

The Pleasant Revolution is all about promotion, promotion of adventure, person to person cultural exchanges, bicycle values, freedoms found by biking, bike powered music, backwoods California rock and roll. So many kids and adults were and are inspired by the music and the message and the mission that is impossible to calculate the impact the tour has been having. As oil resources dwindle and prices head upward it is important to have a visual reminder that there are alternatives to be found from the fossil fuelishness that modern technological society has passed onto us.

I found the Pleasant Revolution to be beset with magic, providence, serendipity, and kismet. Atypical of most travel agendas, there is not an extremely structured schedule to the journey until of course gigs and performances are set up, but these are never firm until the band arrives into town. Because of this the route is always varied and full of surprises and curves in the road. Wherever we go, we bring the energy, inspiration, and enthusiasm of the music and proactive purpose of the tour with us. Manifesting the destiny tends to be an ongoing theme.

After biking down from Mazatlan, Bear Dyken, his partner Somer Moon (both of Clan Dyken), and I united with the Pleasant Revolution in the sunny beachside coastal town of Sayulita, where the band had numerous gigs in local restaurants and cafes. As has been the case at all subsequent venues, they were well received and embraced by the community. Sayulita is a small town 40 miles from Puerto Vallarta that has a pedestrian, peaceful vibration to it. A surfer town, it unfortunately has been discovered by wealthy westerners, and the cost of real estate and a decent latte has skyrocketed. On the positive side, the streets are now paved and there are a lot of dining choices. As well, the town has a certain international feel. The band played at Cafe Biciclette and an Italian Pizza house, as well as on the town’s central plaza. We enjoyed the hospitality of the Canadian Vincent, who let us stay at his father’s villa in nearby San Pancho, and Natalie, proprietor of Pachamama, a jewelery and clothing store just next to the beach. Above her store, she has a magnificent place overlooking the ocean that provided us with ample space to regroup. Dante and Toby borrowed surfboards and enjoyed the waves. On Friday, January 25, we all departed this glorious beach town for the road and the mountains to the east.

We were joined by Chaba, an LA-born Mexican, who with his dreads, didgerdidoo and hippie free spirited tendencies was an excellent candidate to sign on to team Pleasant Revolution. Avoiding the main highway, we rounded Punta Mita where there is an incredible real estate boom occuring, and we are not talking low income housing, but rather upper end Four Seasons Hotel/Jack Nicklaus Golf Course/Gated luxery estates. The beach was fenced off for miles and miles. Rounding the point, Puerto Vallarta came into view, with its beach front condos, high rises and smog, and there was a collective sigh that we were all close to an urban jungle. Fortunately, we avoided the heart of PV and just north of the city trekked inland toward the town of San Jose. Kipchoge had an Xtracycle board meeting and for nearly three hours was on his cell phone while we all biked together through the throngs of commute buses, vans and cars heading out of the expanse of Puerto Vallarta and into the surrounding villages.

Our troup arrived into San Jose del Valle as the sun was setting. While several of us explored camping options, the locals were entertained by Joey’s drumming on his kit attached to his handlebars and Toby’s juggling and hackey sack abilities. Bear pulled out his guitar and played a few tunes as well. After a dinner of high quality street tacos, we were led by a local kid to a soccer field where we spent the night. The next morning we awoke before dawn and began biking east. Because a bridge was out east of San Juan del Abajo, we had to backtrack a little and then take some quite pastoral country roads through many farm fields, including some acreage of corn farmed by Monsanto. This rural dirt road route was a sharp contrast from the congested, exhaust laden main highway we were on the previous day outside of Puerto Vallarta. A local stopped me and offered me a slice of his breakfast, watermelon. His grandkids laughed uncontrollably when I told him the troup’s goal was Chiapas (still a couple thousand miles south). We continued on country roads until we came to our lunch stop, the small town of Las Palmas. We kicked back for a siesta in the town square, napping on bits of lawn between the rose bushes and trees. Items like fresh pineapple, watermelon, mangos, and avocados were consumed and are plentiful in this region.

I should note that we have learned about Mexico’s many challenges related to political corruption, growth, pollution, education, mental and physical health of its people. (Obesity rates are now just as high as in the US and the average diet seems to contain a lot of sugar, empty carbs, and coca cola) But shining above all of these issues is the heart of the Mexicans and time after time we have been touched by the positive spirit of generosity, goodwill, and sharing. Our appreciation of these characteristics and the deep sense of family and community have been deepened by our time off the beaten track hanging with the common people.

After our lunch of fruit, bread and ice cream bars in Los Palmas, we continued to gain serious elevation, heading into the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains where gold was discovered centuries ago. As we went up and up, the sun was rapidly falling and we faced uncertain camping options. The route we had chosen was a recently completed highway that was not frequented by large trucks nor many drivers between PV and points east. The golden positive orb that surrounds the Pleasant Revolution again deliverred us from an uncertain fate when a man in a new large truck with two women drove up to us and invited us to his country ranch house to stay the night. It turns out Hector was responsible for the road we were on. As a civil engineer, he helped to design it. He owned an old miner’s inn as a country place only 100 feet from Rio San Sebastian that was easily able to house us all, plus he had just purchased 5 watermelons and many pounds of farm raised tilapia fish which he proceeded to fry up. We were so taken with the magic of meeting him and his place that was an ecological preserve that we took him up on his offer to stay over a day and explore the river San Sebastian and surrounding lands. The next day was spent hiking along the river, rehearsing, enjoying the pristine nature of the region, cooking, and preparing for the inevitable climb into the mountains.

Next morning pre dawn we got up and thereafter took off, heading up into the steep mountains. It was obvious why it took such a long time before a major road was put through these mountains–much rock and earth materials remained adjcent to the road that was in fact still being worked on. Sweat was pouring out of us so we took a midday break in the small roadside town of La Estancia. After a mini siesta we continued our journey upward, past the turnoff for San Sebastian and up, up, up thousands of feet to the pass. We were blessed by several clean springs along the way that allowed us to refresh ourselves and cool off. So steep was the road that Kipchoge said that even in his lowest gear he had to standup to pedal, a first for the journey. Understand too that some of us had loads on our bikes in excess of 150 pounds. When the summit was finally ascended there was much celebration and ceremony. The immediate downhill thereafter was one of the more notably glorious glides experienced by the bikers. Easing through a pine forest with barely any traffic, we rolled into a high elevation agriculture valley that reminded me of the Capay Valley near Sacramento. Extremely pituresque, very out of the way, we sped through toward the valley’s edge to the small, attractive town of Mascota, where after pizza, we settled down for the night in the city park.

It is safe to say that had we not slept in that park and were woken up by Pilgrims walking to a special celebration in nearby Talpa, we may never have diverted our journey to the very beautiful and out of the way town of Talpa de Allende. But I am getting ahead of myself. The next day in Mascota, we hung out in the town square making music and a scene which is the natural tendency of this group. We were joined there by writer Jamie Vlajos who had just flown in from Oakland and taxi’d up from Guadalajara for a 4 day stay with us in order to write a piece for Stanford’s alumni magazine. Back to the Pilgrims, it turned out that every year around Mardi Gras there is a pilgrimage of devotees to the Catholic faith to the small town of Talpa to celebrate the anniversary of a miracle from 400 years ago when a wooden statue of the virgin mary was miraculously repaired after a strike of lightening. Go figure. Today it represents a good time for pagans and Catholics alike. People come to test their faith by making a long journey by foot and others use it as a fine occasion to party.

We chose to journey on our bikes on the Pilgrim’s path, which had its drawbacks due to the steep terrain and the rutted road. However it was away from the road and cars, a feature that appealed to the group. Unfortunately, Joey’s xtracycle frame broke during this bit of the journey, finally succumbing to thousands of miles of on and off-road cello and gear hauling. Fortunately, Dante’s extremely useful abilities were called into action and he used a horseshoe that he had found earlier in the journey, breaking it into parts and shoving two broken off horseshoe ends inside the hollow frame. Because the horseshoe was arched, it would not come out. He complemented that with a strap tied around whole thing keep it from sliding out and two little hose clamps. (Fixed via welds the following day in Talpa by a father and son team who worked toether reparing it for the sum of 50 pesos, about five dollars.) This delay both allowed for some to take a swim in the reservoir and a night out camping in the forested woods along the Pilgrim path next to a fresh orange juice stand run by an elderly couple who were enchanted by our presence and entertained well into the night as a consequence of Kipchoge, Eco, Bear, Toby pulling their guitars out and playing a wide variety of tunes. This sort of spontaneous musical outpouring is what the journey is made of, and it served to inspire the passing Pilgrims who were headed on to Talpa for the festivities.

We came to learn that Pilgrims don’t necessarily sleep so late into the night and in the early hours of the morning some folks came by the juice (and now hot tea) stand; talking loudly and occasionally blowing off a bottle rocket or M-80 explosion, their passing was impossible to ignore. What loud explosions in the middle of the night have to do with a Pilgrim’s trek we were not so sure of, but needless to say, when we got up the next morning we were greeted by even more Pilgrims heading to Talpa. We headed in the same direction after breakfast, making a steep ascension after rejoining the concrete highway before a grand 600 ft plunge into the valley where Talpa is located. Heading into the center of town we passed a parade of folks in traditional garb with a band parading into the town square. This being an out of the way town and obscure little religious festival, with only several exceptions, we were the only white people in town. Shortly after we arrived there was a true battle of the bands with several Banda bands playing simultaneously for hours and hours.

The GinjaNinja Talpa town square performance began at 1030 p.m. By the time the Ginjer Ninjas started up, the last two remaining bands were a bit weary. Gradually, the crowds from the other two bands made their way over to the bike powered performance. By 11:00 p.m. the plaza had only the not so average white band performing playing to 300 mostly young people from the town. Most pilgrims had gone back to their hotels by then. The band played on until midnight, when the local police gently pushed their way to the front of the crowd. The cops were mellow, I even ended up playing a little frisbee with the guy in charge. He was a jovial sort of fellow. Throughout Mexico there are police walking around fondling their guns and machine guns. It is a macho police state sort of thing. But the cops in Talpa were cool. And the band definitely made a splash. The next night, February 1, the band played a private party with a local Talpa rock band, Kinder, opening. They played an awesome cover of Pink Floyd’s “Hey Teacher…”

Leaving Talpa February 2, we had to backtrack to the main highway, but because of the extremely steep nature of the road and the blazing heat, we all hitch hiked to the top of the mountain pass. 12 people plus bikes loaded with instruments, speakers, and equipment hitching a ride might seem daunting, but it took just about an hour for all of us to get rides the three kilometers to the road’s highest point. In fact a police truck carried the last of us, proving that public service comes in many forms. Our biking that day was highlighted by a roadside lunch that featured dried venison for all the meat eaters. I am certain this journey would not be possible were it not for all the roadside fruit sellers and al fresco diners. The fresh homemade tortillas we enjoyed were indescribably tasty, and the families that run these enterprises are kind and hospitable.

That night we had a camp out that featured a spontaneous sing along whose theme was the journey of the Pleasant Revolution. There is something magic about being on the road with a bunch of talented, creative, funny musical types. Needless to say there were some memorable lines and phrasing. Regretably none were memorable enough for me to recollect them at this time. The next day was another travel day, with the group staggered out on the highway. Everyone was pacing themselves, enjoying the glorious downhill runs and steadily pedaling up the mountain slopes. That night we ran out of steam in a small town that had a resident provide us his farmyard for camping. We resolved for the following day to put the pedal to the metal and try to make it to the hot springs beyond Tala that were 30 kilometers outside of Guadalajara. The next morning we awoke predawn to frosty ice on our sleeping bags. It has not rained on this journey since the revolution arrived in Mexico, but this surely was the coldest morning we had experienced. After sucking down some cowboy coffee and a little breakfast, we were on our way.

This was a 77k day to Las Tortugas Hot Springs, and the troupe was stoked with the idea of soaking in hot water, so as we passed through the town of Ameca, we stopped only for some fresh watermelon and pineapple and jicima. Just outside town several of us stopped at a bus stop and a little fire had been built by some folks in a car who gave us some tortillas, tomatoes, eggs, and coal. Just because they wanted to. Again, the kindness of strangers in Mexico. We had to ponder if a band of 12 Mexicans were biking through Northern California, would they be made as welcome and be gifted as we have been?

After getting back on the roadway—which started to narrow, prompting the group to bunch up for safety and security—we were joined by the film crew the tour had stumbled upon in Todos Santos. Sergio Morkin is an Argentinian and he directed the award winning documentary “Oscar” about a Buenes Aires grafitti artist. He filmed 300 hours for that effort, editing it down to one hour. So Sergio has been almost ever present since then, capturing our soaks in the hot springs, biking into Guadalajara, concerts, midnight bike rides, why he even filmed me waking up at my campsite at the hot springs. Paparazi wherever you turn on the Pleasant Revolution. His film crew, Oscar and Eric Ruiz, are providing all the backup support with sound, driving, and lighting. Note that even with the van trailing us, Kipchoge does not give up his 60 pound speaker he is carrying on his bike. In fact he is so principled he will not allow the filmmaker to carry any of the supplies needed for the tour, and has demanded that that Sergio travel with his camera by bike with the Pleasant Revolution for at least a week.

The hot springs were not your typical. For one, it was a hot river, not a spring per se. We didn’t find the source, it was reportedly 5k upstream. Also, when we arrived late Sunday, hundreds of cars were leaving, creating a virtual dust storm welcome for us. We didn’t care, as having biked 77 kilometers, we were so zonked out that a little dust was not going to slow us. Because the springs are just a half hour from the thriving metropolis of 4 million Guadalarans, they suffer from a bit of overuse. And trash. did I mention trash yet on this blog? Mexico has a lot of trash. We picked up a lot of trash while we were there. I myself stumbled on a used disposable diaper at the river’s edge just after we arrived. There was trash in the river. Not your typical hot spring. Despite that, we stayed an extra day there and relaxed and soaked and played music and attracted attention.

Attracting attention tends to be what the Pleasant Revolution does well. And whether it’s the pedal powered sound system or the long distance bike journey or the funny looking Xtracycle adorned bikes or the folding solar panels, all these things attract attention to issues, concerns, and solutions that get to the heart of the Pleasant Revolution’s purpose.

February 5 we entered Guadalajara from the east, past fenced and guarded upscale housing divisions, through an industrial area and into the heart of the city. We received a police escort for the final few miles. The band made the scene in the city, performing in several coffeehouses, bars, public parks and organic restaurants. Very well received by audiences, the Ginjer Ninjas also enjoyed a flurry of media attention. There were photos and articles in several local papers, radio interviews on the University’s radio station, and Kipchoge was interviewed on a popular television show as well. For me the highlight was the big bike ride we took with 300 other bikers, a Critical Mass sort of display that has happened for the past 36 weeks on wednesday nights 11:00 pm. The only problem is that as a public demonstration, it sort of fails as at that hour no one is out to see all the bikers. But progress for bikers rights is slowly being made.

8 am on Sunday the 10th of February we all went biking with the Mayor of Guadalajara. He was up early that morning to commemorate a new park that had opened next to the bike boulevard that happens once a week. There are 15 kilometers on 3 main boulevards in the City that from 8 am to 2 pm on sundays are open to bikes exclusively. This has turned these major roads into veritable bike freeways. Unfortunately, that is about it when it comes to bike paths in the town. There are 4 million people and 1.3 million cars in Guadalajara, with 300 new cars added onto the roads EVERY DAY! We found biking in the city to be a bit dangerous with no paths to be found anywhere, and the subway (which has just one line) does not allow you to take your bike aboard. So in the midst of conversing and biking with the the bike aware Mayor, Kipchoge was able to appeal to him to consider being involved in a meeting of Mexican Mayors K is organizing to further bike resources in cities in the nation. Kipchoge also sucessfully connected the local bike advocates up directly in person during the bike ride, and the activists were quite grateful as they has been trying to meet up with the Mayor for months and months to discuss issues related to bike paths and resources. The Mayor did have a good sense as to innovative bike programs in Bogota and Portland, OR the latter being a sister city for Guadalajara. However, the town has a long way to go before it could be classified as a Green City, as water quality is quite bad, as are air quality, traffic, and urban reforestation. In addition the green belt on the west side of the city is being parceled off into high end housing subdivisions.

We found one of the headquarters of green activism to be a fine small restaurant coffeehouse local organic food cafe gallery called La Selva Cafe. The place was teaming with Guadalajaran bike activists when the band played there after the bike ride with the Mayor. It is owned and run by Etienne von Bertrab who is an eco activist as well as a professor in political ecology at the Jesuit College in town. He was quite generous with the band who ended up performing for nearly 4 hours in total, including great performances by Somer, Tobin, and Cello Joe. After 5 performances in 5 days, last week the band took a well deserved break and rehearsal time to work in the new bass player.

The Pleasant Revolution is now off to Mexico City. I have had to return to California for pressing family reasons and Bear Dyken and Somer Moon have left the tour as has Laura the radio journalist. The good band news is that drummer Brock was able to talk his old band buddy bassist from Florida Jared into joining the Pleasant Revolution, and this talented musician hit the ground running last weekend immediately after arriving. And the good bike news is that current Mexico City government, headed up by Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has shown admirable leadership in beginning to transform Mexico City into a more hospitable environment for bicyclists and public transport riders. Late last month, Tanya Muller, director of urban reforestation, parks and bike paths for the mayor’s office, announced that the city government has committed to build 186 miles (300 kilometers) of bike paths, or ciclovías, complemented by weekly street closings to vehicle traffic (not unlike what Guadalajara does), by 2012. It’s an ambitious goal, and the city will have to build 37 miles (50 km) of paths every year for the next five years. The city will also construct a series of bike parking lots, watched by security guards, adjacent to Metro station hubs and in the financial district. This is the model that other cities in Mexico will hopefully be held to, efforts to improve the sustainability of the cities and the quality of life of their inhabitants so that they goes back to being more human, rather then auto friendly. And that is, to be sure, a theme of the Pleasant Revolution.

Links I mentioned:
-xtracycle.com
-the Ginger Ninjas myspace page www.myspace.com/gingermyninja
-the Dick Cheney (needs more love) music video
– “Selling the Revolution” the making of Xtracycle movie from 2001
– Worldbike
– Treehugger Video Contest entry: how I personally try to deal with Global warming
– the Stokemonkey human-electric hybrid assist for Xtracycle
– get our music at cdbaby
– MC Fossil Fool the bike rapper
– Riding from the North Pole to the South Pole (almost) off-road by Xtracycle

What work do you do? What’s your job title?
I’m lead singer of the Ginger Ninjas, president of Xtracycle Inc, coinstigator of the Pleasant Revolution, and co-founder of Worldbike.

What does your organization do? What, in a perfect world, would constitute “mission accomplished”?
The Ginger Ninjas play mind-shaking love groove folkfunk explosive mountain roots music for a pleasant revolution, to open and thereby ready a diverse conglomeration of bodies and heads for the subsequent insertion of a universal and rebellious message of love, hope, pain, and bicycles. As a typically tortured artist, I think it’s fair to say that mission accomplishment is always and never.

Xtracycle invented and makes car-trip-replacing, life-enhancing sport utility bicycles, long bikes, and the FreeRadical Hitchless Trailer—for toting your kids to school, loading up with groceries, or an off-road camping trip to the hills, while diggin’ rather than illin’ your surroundings. Acts like a bike but works like a truck.

People get an Xtracycle for a specific chore, but it makes it possible to live a whole lifestyle that’s more sustainable while getting in better shape and being more adventurous. Marketers try to sell us on an ideal of comfort: “You’ve worked hard. You deserve to drive a leather-interior (eco) car with the air conditioner on.” We’re saying you deserve to experience life more fully by getting in touch with the elements and your own self-sufficiency.

Mission accomplished is when the globally ubiquitous sport utility bicycle enables people to ride more often for more reasons, leaving the car parked for days or weeks, and aspiring entrepreneurs see green-enterprise building as the only worthwhile capitalist endeavor.

We started the Worldbike non-profit to reach the people who most need but can least afford a utilitarian bike. We’re currently working in Kenya, modifying existing bicycles with a locally produced version of our cargo extension. By documenting the increased earning power and improved quality of life of Kenyans with simple load-carrying bikes, we plan to make the case for major investment in this simple technology all around the developing world.

Mission accomplished is when everyone everywhere has access to affordable, reliable, ecological, inspiring transportation, and the developing world has leapfrogged straight over the backs of the 20th-century-oily-military-industrial-greed-fueled-stupid-ass-soulless sprawlfest otherwise known as car-culture that rules the current so-called “developed” world landscape into a wondrous green paradigm of smokestackless factories, broken-down dams and urbanism tailored to the needs and dreams of pedestrians and cyclists, i.e. humans.

The Pleasant Revolution blog wraps all of this into a messy bundle by showing the nitty gritty struggles and triumphs of our own experience with this new way of bicycle-enabled living. It’s an eco-hedonist, positivist take on the work and play that unfolds when we realize that saving the world can become the funnest fun you could ever have.

Mission accomplished is when mass pop culture realizes riding your bike to work is the coolest way to get there and the culture that the United States exports to the rest of the world shows that even wealthy American Baywatch babes like Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff choose to ride bikes for transportation. The next step in this mission will be me giving Cameron Diaz a ride to the Oscars on the back of my bike, passing Leo in his Prius, who’s stuck behind a fustercluck of limos.

What do you really do, on a day-to-day basis? What are you working on at the moment?
Write songs, ride my bike, make up sticker slogans for the pleasant revolution, talk to distributors, scheme new ways to introduce a new category of transportation to a populace that’s just on the cusp of realizing it needs it. Right now I’m working on a music video for our single “Dick Cheney” and fundraising for our next expedition: My band has plans to tour through Mexico, by bicycle, carrying our equipment on back, bringing a message of North American sustainable development solidarity, and making a film about our attempts to simultaneously organize a Latin American mayoral appropriate transportation summit.

What long and winding road led you to your current position?
I grew up in the woods with a logger dad and adventure journalist mom. I loved the woods.

In high school I made funny speeches about not using so many napkins at lunch. Just use your shirt sleeve, I said.

In college I knew I wanted to do something big for the world, but what? I wrote my thesis about Stanford University’s voracious energy appetite and its green, cost-saving cure. My friend Ross Evans was thinking about majoring in Product Design, and I wondered to him why anyone who cared about the world would want to make more stuff?

I went to work for Rocky Mountain Institute, entranced by their hopeful, non-confrontational message of have your cake and eat it too abundance. At first skeptical of their close workings with nasty corporations, I eventually realized that a for-profit company could be one of the most effective instruments for affecting the world.

It was right at the time of the internet bubble, and I decided to start an eco-Amazon.com that would combine the current used catalogs of all the indy booksellers in the country. After some research I realized someone already had. I called up my genius college buddy, Ross, to see how his work with bikes was going. He invited me to join him in marketing the new product he had designed in school, called the Xtracycle, and I did.

Which stereotype about environmentalists most fits you?
I have dirty sleeves.

Who’s the biggest pain in the ass you have to deal with?
Bike shop owners who won’t step out of the narrow American mindset of bicycle-as-toy to put energy towards championing the bicycle as liberating, peerless transportation tool.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?
Born in Eugene, Oregon. Currently living in a teensy little town called North San Juan, in the Sierra foothills of Northern California.

What has been the worst moment in your professional life to date?
I took it pretty hard when early on three of our first four interns all quit on the same day. Since then, I’ve learned to accept the comings and goings of collaborators as a healthy part of a growing organization. I’ve also come to believe that nothing in particular spells “the end of the world,” for any of my endeavors as long as my own desire to persist persists.

What’s been the best?
A few years ago I began untangling my own personal happiness from my concern for the world’s dire straights. I let go of the idea that I needed to spend every waking moment fighting for every conceivable important-seeming cause. It became clear that many of the most intensely committed activists either have no fun or burnout or both and that much of the joy of being human comes from acting like one.

It’s so easy to slip into the savior mindset: “let me just put real life living on hold until the world is fixed and THEN I can start to enjoy it.” I stopped taking every global injustice personally and a great weight was lifted.

I don’t care any less, I just have a lot more acceptance—this is the way the world IS right now. Accepting what is is part of loving what is, and that love feels key to enjoying the world while trying to help it. The strength I get from this love affair gets used in all my work, and is as crucial as food.

What environmental offense has infuriated you the most?
I don’t support the concept of fury. It’d be a big lie to say I don’t get pissed off at anything, but the truth is I don’t want to feed that state of being/behavior. Am I really going to get angry every time I see a Hummer? No, because the truth is: I don’t like the way anger makes my body feel; I think anger is often a convenient and wrongheaded way of scapegoating someone or something else; anger interferes with the path of becoming a more loving person; and what’s it really going to accomplish?

Who is your environmental hero?
Whoever inspires optimism at any given moment. Past heroes of the day include: Amory and Hunter Lovins, for pointing out that environmentalism doesn’t have to be ideological (read: right-wingers can play, too), we can use the market to solve problems on a grand scale, buildings can be more beautiful, healthy, green, fun, inspiring, and even cheaper, all at the same time; Dana Meadows, peerless environmental columnist, for re-iterating the Seven Sustainable Wonders of the World; Paul Hawken, for inspiring business people to re-think the purpose and potential of their work; my mom for taking me down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon when I was eleven and letting me go wild; my dad and his best friend Steve Whatcott, a wild bow-hunting, timber-cutting, Vietnam fighting jack Mormon, for teaching me how to love the woods and proving that loggers vs enviros vs owls vs jobs is bullshit; YES! Magazine for pioneering the idea of good news; Julia Butterfly for inspiring so many hungry-to-do-something kids and grownups with the idea that what you do counts, for comfortably and lovingly speaking truth to powerful men in suits, and for shopping at the thrift store while maintaining a look more cover girl than hippy; Al Gore, whose pre-election book made me rejoice that any politician could so deeply understand, even as the in-office let-down fostered nearly complete political disillusionment; lately Bill McDonough for his mega vision of waste equals food and his mega connections in Chinese government that means his work will likely be implemented, soon and huge (he’s designing several multi-million person cities in China, from scratch, now); and Hayduke and all the other fearless activists who are willing to sit, strike, chain-up, tie-down, throw pies and otherwise disobey in defense of Mother Earth.

Who is your environmental nightmare?
Whoever it was that came up with the creepy idea that consuming creates happiness. In a sense, every human culture that accepts, believes, advertises, or otherwise inculcates the idea that material growth and wealth are the end-all be-all.

Pointing fingers at individuals, leaders, organizations, or even nations has become the most convenient way of denying our own personal responsibility as well as avoiding that sucking feeling we get when we pause to wonder if human beings are just too sick to stop. I guess God did it. But we can re-do it, at least that’s the inspiration behind the Pleasant Revolution.

For the pragmatic environmentalist, what should be the focus — political action designed to change policy, or individual action designed to change lifestyle?
I constantly find great comfort in knowing that most of the world’s problems are being addressed by a deeply motivated, capable, ambitious, ballsy, driven someone somewhere. There are number-crunching new-millennium global-warming geeks drilling holes in Antarctic ice and animal-loving oceanographers trying to keep the Navy from blasting whales with secret noises and rubber booted volunteers competing to fill the most bags of trash at my local river and spiderpeople dangling Wall Street Buildings with headline-grabbing comeuppances and and and…

Wow, I don’t have to fix everything all by myself! Instead, I can focus my fixing energies on the nexus of two things: what I’m gifted at and what I love to do. (I’m also compelled to work on things that no one else seems to be doing.) Which is to say: The truly pragmatic greenie must put her own well-being and happiness right out in front, proudly. Martyrdom, extensive suffering, and burnout not allowed here! The essential work of political action and lifestyle shifting will continue to be done by lots of qualified folks; the real question is: what are YOU called to do in this world?

What’s your environmental vice?
Air travel. While I think the Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices is one of the coolest and most useful references in years, they got it a bit wrong on transportation. Their error was in comparing impact per mile of different forms of transportation. On the face of it, this seems logical—I need to shop the Galleria, it’s 50 miles away, what’s the most eco way? In the book, air travel breaks out similarly to driving alone in terms of destruction/mile. So if I JetBlue or Suzuki Samurai (alone) to the galleria I get an equivalent amount of eco-destruction points (guilt, footprint growth, Umbra spankings, etc). The problem is, if I’m gonna fly, I might as well skip the poseur galleria and hit the Mall of America. The point being, people go further afield by plane, flying a lot more miles than they would ever drive, so comparing the per mile impact is useful but not real-life.

The average American drives about 10,000 miles in a year—roughly the same distance as one San Francisco-London roundtrip. Cut your driving in half but still fly for vacation? I try not to, doing my damnedest to cultivate a connection to my biking-distance, train-accessible world. Yet, I still flew coast-to-coast twice this year.

How do you get around?
As Sticker Guy at Xtracycle, one of my first pieces of work was “God, grant me the courage to sell my car.” I think that was in 2001. Being a whitewater kayaker, touring musician, agitated social entrepreneur, and traveling salesman, and living 20 steep miles from town, I have plenty of reasons to own and use an automobile. And yet, car ownership felt so inconsistent with my work and values that I wanted to try doing without.

Working on an MTV reality show about my attempts to lead a sustainable lifestyle this past summer, I finally got the courage. The prospect of selling the car in front of millions of impressionable kids—who normally only see car as 4-wheel sex toy freedom machine—put me over the edge.

I have three sport utility bicycles. One is a beautiful laid-back cruiser that I use in the city, often for carrying a guitar and passenger. The second is the trusty steed, an off-road machine I use daily to get to and from work by gravel road and mountain trail. I use it to grocery shop and to carry propane and the occasional chainsaw and for general mobility around my community. When my band tours by bicycle, I ride this one. The most recent addition to the fleet is an electrified Xtracycle that I’m testing out for its assistance in getting me and a load to town in back.

For motorized cultural expeditions and band travels we have a 1974 mid-sized sport utility school bus named Millie the Millennium Van. We converted her to run on straight vegetable oil (SVO) several years ago, and she also runs on bio-diesel. I have come to think of SVO as actually meaning “sometimes vegetable oil,” since it so far hasn’t proven to be the most reliable fuel choice out there, despite all its other lovely attributes. Meaning Millie also runs on petro-diesel. Millie’s loveliest features is perhaps the custom rack that allows any of the seven rearmost bikes to be unbuckled and ridded away in less than 29 seconds. This makes her a multi-modal queen, enabling parking in any corner of a city and expeditioning outward.

What are you reading these days?
McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle; A Single Pebble, a short novel by John Hersey about an American engineer looking for a dam site on the Yangtzee in the 1920s and finding instead the chasm that separates him from the Chinese river people; Byron Katie’s Loving What Is; Bob Dylan’s new autobiography, Ode Magazine, The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruíz; Sounds of Freedom, John Malkin’s interviews with socially motivated musicians; and I try to eventually read every Daily Grist though I sheepishly admit to a mass purge of more than 50 in a recent in-box massacre.

What’s your favorite meal?
Whatever local organic hedonistic feast someone who loves me just put on the table.

What’s your favorite place or ecosystem?
Way down in the crack at Deer Creek in the Grand Canyon, and my front porch.

What’s one thing the environmental movement is doing particularly well?
The movement is great at identifying what’s wrong, backing it up with science, and imagining and designing solutions.

What’s one thing the environmental movement is doing badly, and how could it be done better?
We’re too scared to throw out the bathwater and the baby, too eager to replace consumption with green consumption, as if Hummers are the problem and the Prius is the cure.

The entire structure of our built environment and culture needs shifting, and the people who care enough to join the Sierra Club or read Grist need to be engaged seriously and completely in this beautiful work. That is, they must be inspired to make environmental and social change their job, what they do everyday from 9-5 for a living, not just what informs their purchase, transport, and remodeling decisions. This requires shifting the discussion about what it means to be an environmentalist AND what it will really take to avoid global ecosystem collapse.

If you could institute by fiat one environmental reform, what would it be?
Require politicians who make anti-environmental votes to get Mohawks. And if they do it again, make their spouse get one, too. And so on, all the way to their grandmas.

What was your favorite band when you were 18? How about now?
Creedence, Jimmy Cliff, Beatles, Bob Marley. Manu Chao, Spearhead, Be Good Tanyas. And of course the Ginger Ninjas.

What’s your favorite TV show?
I think current television is so integral a part of the Wheel of Destruction and breeding the culture of insatiable desire that perhaps this question should not be asked in this forum. It’s like asking who’s your favorite dictator? What’s your favorite way to waste gas? Your favorite exploitative big box retailer? Your favorite SUV for short trips? And in so doing inadvertently using environmental activists to legitimize the very behavior that we think might not be good for the world (tune-in, feel empty, buy, tune-out, repeat).

It’s not that dictators might not have some good personality qualities, it’s that the idea of dictator is antithetical to our (at least my) ideas about open, progressive society. This isn’t a question of whether TV is “bad” or whether “we’re just human” or whether “some of it is actually good,” or about how we all “need some way to unwind,” and I don’t say it from a place of curmudgeonly self-righteousness. But I can’t help noticing that few-to-none of my happiest, least consumptive, most world-changing, fun-having friends even own a TV.

Perhaps it’s possible to imagine a sustainable world with TV, but it’s easier to imagine all that good-TV-watching time being plugged into some groovy cause somewhere. Unplug it and put it on eBay. Even better, get a fifty foot extension cord and some lighter fluid, call your neighbors, plug the TV back in and turn it on, go up on the roof, and just before you throw it off, light it on fire. The taller the building, the better the show.

If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?
Read/listen to my spoken word poem “How Much” and order the CD, burn it and send it to friends who care about peace, rivers, or love. It’s almost every idea I ever had about my/your responsibility for our predicament, why, and what to do about it, today, boiled down into an adult nursery rhyme. For the time challenged, skip the poem and just move close enough to your job so that you can ride your bike to work.

We met a man called Tim Harvey in Fairbanks a couple years ago. The band was on Alaska tour. Tim was on his way around the world — by human power. A couple Sundays ago when we were on tour in the Pacific Northwest, we passed by Tim again — on the last leg of the round-world jaunt back to Vancouver. He did a real inspiring interview on Canadian TV. Highly recommended for anyone chained to anything stationary.

“I wanna show the world that if I can make it around the Earth without any emissions, then surely almost anyone can make it to work or school.”