If Thoreau Had a Bicycle

Mark Cramer has not owned a car since 1995. In 2022, at 77 and just out of double hernia surgery, he set out to prove that this was liberation and not sacrifice.Over 39 bicycle day trips from his apartment just north of Paris, Cramer pedaled 1,062 kilometers through forests, river towpaths, and French towns using Thoreau’s essay 'Walking' as his method. No smartphone. No GPS. Paper maps only. For photographs, he depended on strangers willing to stop. For directions, he depended on whoever was nearby.Cramer taught 'Degrowth or Smart Growth?' at Sciences-Po Paris and has spent decades as a real-life practitioner of the steady-state economy he writes about. That background gives this cycling memoir a sharper edge than most bicycle travel books. When he rides through a forest bordered by a big box store, or through a beautiful town gutted by online commerce, or past a farm quietly building an alternative to the industrial food system, he knows exactly what he is looking at.The result is a slow travel book that works on several levels at once. It is a cycling adventure through the landscape outside Paris. It is a meditation on Thoreau, metabolic energy, and what it means to move through the world without manufactured power. And it is a quiet, well-argued case that the most worthwhile journey a person can take might start from their own front door.Endorsed by William Rossi, editor of Norton’s Walden, and by William Powers, author of the award-winning Twelve by Twelve. For fans of slow travel, environmental nonfiction, and Thoreau-inspired cycling memoir. 6