Women and Cycling
This blog is arriving slightly late but we promise you’ll enjoy reading it. While ago we’ve successfully attended the Sunday Cycle Picnic in London, an event trying to encourage woman to get on bikes. We screened Belleville Rendesvouz and wonderful film programme of vintage cycle films curated by Ray Pascoe. As this event was all about the ladies and their two wheeled companions, Magnificent Revolution welcomed our youngest female volunteer. Her name is Taeko and she may just become our technical support.
We were happy to attend this event as woman and cycling have some history. In history of female and male inequality the bicycle became a tool of autonomy. With the help of bicycle, woman could get them selves from A to B without the dependence on men. Bicycle meant freedom. With the bike came off the corsets and on came the bloomers.
And just to spice it up a bit at the end.. the first woman to go around the world on a bicycle was Annie Londoderry. She was paid by a water company to become a cycling billboard and to even take up same last name as the Londoderry Lithia Spring Water company. She took off around the world becoming a mobile advertisement. What an amazing accomplishment. Shame it was all in the name of advertising. 
Bicycle Picnic
| September 7, 2008 | ||
| 12:00 pm | to | 5:00 pm |
We were invited to put on a pedal powered cinema at the Sunday Cycle Picnic in London Fields. Curator from the BFI is putting together a programme of films that we’ll pedal power midday onwards till about 5pm. Ladies need a bit of encouragement to get on the two wheeled beasties and cycle picnic is creating an opportunity specifically for that. It’s a fact that more gents than ladies cycle. Cycling is often perceived as male dominated territory and it’s time for the ladies to end this tragic situation. We’ve come to help once more! If you need a bit of chic for the picnic then visit London Cycle Chic
Off The Grid
During our visit to climate camp we got to experience exactly how you run a camp like climate camp fo a week from renewable energy alone. The energy was a mix of wind, solar and of course bikes! Those contributing to the energy mix arrived with close to full battery banks of course charged from the sun and wind. We actually asked this question as we put ourselves in a sceptics shoes! Despite a full battery bank, during the camp itself every ray of sunlight and small blast of wind could not be wasted as keeping the batteries from hitting empty was pretty important. Without this 100% renewable energy (audited by yours truely) the camp and campagn could not opperate well, probably not at all.
Before our arrival the police had confiscating important generation equipment which included a turbine stand and some batteries. This left the camp with an unplanned energy deficite which needed to be compensated for.
At the camp energy meeting, energy for the different parts of the camp were prioritised to ensure those who needed energy most could be provided with it. Then the consumption of each part of the
camp was then added up and totals for each day calculated at 5kWh during the week and 34kWh on the weekend to take account of the extra energy required on the action day and subsequently to report about it live from the camp in the following day) For your interest 5kWh is:
- The equivilent of boiling your kettle over and over for an hour and a half, or
- The energy consumed by a single towerlight in 5 hours. This is a very conservative estimate while i investigate the actual towerlights used by the police. I have a photo on my phone which i am tying
to extract.
Either way, the police had at least 4 of these erected around the site. How many kWh does it take to keep an eye on a field of hippies? Assuming 8 hours of darkness a night and 4 towerlights over seven days this is 224kWh of fossil fuel created energy. The camp used a total of 94kW of renewable energy.
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