Marc Kitteringham
I want to do it all myself. Sustainability and self-sufficiency have been on my mind for a while now. The culture of purchasing goods and services has disenchanted me from thethings I am interested in. Frankly I am tired of it. I’ve been caught in a miasma of crap that I don’t want or need and it is time to get out.
In 2014, when I decided to make bikes a big part of my life, I was excited about the possibilities that they would bring. I could see myself becoming a part of a community of sustainability-minded people, improving my communityand converting more and more people away from cars and towards bikes.
Since then, however, I got scooped up by the industry and a bit overwhelmed by the consumerism that surrounds it. Being in the bike world, I’ve noticed that we treat the bike as this highly exalted, fetishized and god-like thing. Carbon gets people quivering with excitement, colourways and handfeel are valid terms to describe “innovation” and consumers are left in the dust trying to follow new trends and standards of what a bike should be. Bikes all work the same way and do the same thing. They’re just bikes.
Looking forward, I want to be able to be a part of the bike world in a more sustainable way. . I want to be able to do more than my own maintenance. I want to eat, learn, make money, teach, play and live a life around bikes that is sustainable and self-sufficient.
The thing I like about bikes is that they are cheap, easy and accessible to everyone. Everybody I know can get a bike. I don’t know anybody my age who can actually afford to buy a car. A car is something that costs money to obtain, and costs money to keep. A bike doesn’t necessarily need to cost anything more than a few bucks per month for maintenance. Riding a bike to and from work is a pretty damn good way to be a better human on this earth.
But I do want so much more than just that. Bikes have made me more interested in working with my hands. I want to someday build my own bike from the ground up. I want to start with just a few bits of steel and a welder and create something that is rideable and fully my own. Every bit of the process can be done by hand. For so much of history it has been. If you needed a thing, you just built it, or made do without. I want to do that. I want to step outside of the consumption of the civilization that we’ve built and devote myself to self-sufficiency and a bit of self-discovery.
I have already begun growing my own food (well Kristen has), soon I want to start baking my own bread and making my own fuel out of that food. I would also like to eventually move to a bit of land that allows me to do this full-time. Living in an apartment does not lend itself to subsistence farming, I can only grow so many tomatoes on my balcony. Someday the goal I have in mind would be to have a small house on a large bit of land and to work that land so that I can live comfortable on my own. Plus it would be super cool to have a fat cargo bike as a tractor.
I'm going to give it a try. Let's see what happens.