"Bicycle nomads, Texas utopianism, and the post-petroleum era"

An interesting piece from Orion magazine:

"Send in the Clowns: Bicycle nomads, Texas utopianism, and the post-petroleum era"

Excerpt:

GIVEN THE UNSETTLING STATE OF THE WORLD, I’ve spent the last few years shopping around, as it were, for my own little handbasket to ride into hell. In New York City, at Critical Mass rallies and with radical bicycle gangs like Black Label, I’ve begun to discern the contours of a movement of mostly young people who believe that the American pursuit of happiness has taken a decidedly wrong turn somewhere on the interstate and gotten lost among the tract homes dotting the subdivisions of Eden. For the radical few, the bicycle is an important part of the solution. The bicycle, that technological throwback from the nineteenth century, is for them a literal and metaphorical organizing principle for a new vision of the world, one that stands not simply against the most obvious form of petro-consumption, the automobile, but that heralds and celebrates—in advance of its actual arrival, and with bright little bicycle bells and radical cheers—a new, post-petroleum era.

Click the link above for the whole article.