I want to start off this post with an overdue thank you to the Celsias team as my lead sponsors in Ride to Sustain, I couldn't ask for a more supportive group to make this adventure possible.

In preparation for a pre-ride interview with Bill McKibben on July 2nd, I have been reading his recent book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He makes a point that, while incredibly obvious in retrospect I have to admit was novel to me.

By nearly universal standards today the health of a company or a country is represented by its rate of growth: in product production, sales, etc. Through the last few centuries this concept has served us well, increasing quality of life (at least for the majority of those reading this post) in a manner of which Adam Smith would be proud.

However, unabaited and eternal growth only serves humanity in a world of infinite resources. In a finite world, such as the one we live in, health in this traditional economic sense can exist only in spite of massive hemorrhaging of the vital resources on which that cold economic standard relies. We may debate when this will become a critical issue with respect to individual resources; oil and water being favorite examples, but no rational person can deny that sooner or later this squandering of finite resources will cut our economic feet out from under us.

Exponential and unsustainable economic growth has also become the ultimate threat to biodiversity on earth. Through our greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, overfishing, habitat distruction, other forms of regional pollution and general prostitution of the earth, we are poised to drive roughly one third of the species on earth into extinction within the next century alone.

This is leading me to fear that my efforts in organizing this project, and those of many others may only serve to be band-aids on bullet wounds; minor fixes that serve to reduce our guilt regarding the gluttonous, consumption driven lifestyles so many of us (I definitely fall into this category) lead, and in the end act at best to serve the natural world a slower, more agonizing and public death and at worst to accelerate the fatality.

It is certainly unreasonable to ask people to try less hard to succeed, not to seek a better lifestyle... but staring us in the face is the fact that for even the 6.5 billion people that are alive today to achieve an americanized level of consumption (not that they'd all want to, but bear with me), would require the natural resources given current technology of not 1, 2 or 3 planet earths, but FIVE! Not to mention that by the time many of these people achieve that quality of life near the middle of this century we will have 8-10 billion people on this earth.

I do not have a solution. But I have not finished Mr. McKibben's book, and I'm sure hoping he does... I'll be sure to ask him about it next week.

Note: Interview/itinerary suggestions for the trip can be emailed to me.