THERE ARE A few things that seem like magic to me. One is ice—when water freezes, suddenly you can glide across the surface of the earth. The fastest I’ve ever gone on my own unmodified power was on a pair of speed skates across a newly frozen lake. I didn’t even realize how fast I was flying till I fell and slid for what seemed like half a mile.
Almost as good: a bicycle. Yes, there’s some machinery intervening, with chains and gears and such, but basically you’re working just hard enough to overcome friction. With a rigid frame doing the work of holding you upright, you cover distance far more efficiently than you do when walking—more efficiently than most fish in the water or birds in the air. As a physiologist once explained to Scientific American, bicycles “turn humans into this hyperefficient terrestrial locomotor because they make being on land more like swimming.”
But the relatively new invention—the e-bike—goes one better. It’s an ordinary bicycle, until you need a bit more power and flick a switch. And then its small electric motor efficiently adds power to your pedal stroke, as much as you need. Essentially, it’s a bicycle without hills, which means that almost anyone—older, injured, overweight, out of shape—can ride one. If you work the kind of job where arriving with a ruddy glow might be a problem, it’s a bicycle without sweat. And if you need to haul something—kids, gallons of milk—it’s got the power.
Of course you could say the same thing about a car—you get up the hill just by depressing the angle of your ankle a tad. But a car won’t let you look so easily at the world on every side. It won’t let you stop easily to talk to a neighbor along the road. It won’t give you even a mild dose of the exertion that makes most people feel better. Oh, and a car takes up a lot of space on the road, and even if it has an electric motor it’s still using a fair amount of stuff. An e-bike accomplishes all this magic for less than a penny’s worth of electricity a mile. If you have a solar panel on your roof, you’re literally getting pushed uphill by the sun. You’re moving across the planet with very, very little damage.
I’m kind of sympathetic to those people who say Hallmark heaven—the resting on clouds with harps version—doesn’t sound like that much fun: Not enough struggle to keep things interesting, angels a bit too saccharine. But the e-bike seems pleasantly heavenly to me—some work when you need it, and some rest when you want it. Rest for you, and for the earth.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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