Bike ride encourages greener habits, small changes

Kristin Harty Barkley

CUMBERLAND ­— Mike Snyder and Helena Woodvine didn’t ask for pledges of money when they set out on their 2,700-mile bicycle trek from Scotland to Greece in September.

They asked for pledges of “resilience,” asking supporters to make small changes in their lives to benefit the environment.

Reduce consumption, for example, and recycle waste. Be energy smart. Eat as local as you can.

“It doesn’t have to be about self-sacrifice,” said Snyder, 28, a Beall High School graduate who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. “This whole idea that we have to suffer to be environmental just flies in the face of this concept.”

Snyder and Woodvine, who completed their “Arran to Athens Ride for Resilience” on Nov. 12, spoke to a sociology class at Allegany College of Maryland Monday afternoon, then later to the Frostburg Rotary Club.

Talk about resilience.

The pair rode about 50 miles a day, spending eight or nine hours on their bicycles before “wild camping” at night, setting up a small tent in a park or patch of woods along the way. They sometimes went for days without taking showers.

“We wanted to do this as cheaply as possible, partly because neither of us have any money,” said Woodvine, who met Snyder at the University of Edinburgh.

Snyder, who received an Ambassadorial Scholarship from Rotary International in 2007, completed a master’s degree in environmental sustainability there, and has been working for an environmental non-profit agency in Edinburgh.

It took the pair nine weeks to go the distance. In Belgium, they bought strawberries out of vending machines and got stuck in traffic jams — of bicycles.

“There are bicycles absolutely everywhere,” Snyder said. “And rush hour is bicycle hour, and literally the streets are choked with bicycles. You don’t see many cars in the cities at all anymore.”

In Italy, they cowered under a bridge overnight while an electrical storm raged, blowing away their tent and drenching their belongings. Throughout, they posted blogs on a Web site devoted to environmental sustainability and resilience, a related concept that refers to the “capacity of a system to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of unforeseen changes, even catastrophic incidents.”

Making simple changes at the local level is the best way to get moving in the right direction, Snyder and Woodvine believe.

“We all like the way we live. We don’t want to have a lower standard of living,” Woodvine said. “But we know that we have to use less energy. So we’ve been looking at ways that we can consume less, localize food. ... We want to show the people that we’re touching how they can make small changes themselves.”

Students in Cherie Snyder’s Social Problems class at ACM were asked to choose from a list of 10 ‘resilience pledges’ in preparation for Monday’s presentation. Cherie Snyder is Michael Snyder’s mother.

“When your Mom first told us about this assignment, it was like, arghh, one more thing we gotta do,” said student April Rounds. “But when I got on and actually looked at it, this is doable. ... That’s where it needs to start, is on a personal level, and then as you share, it can grow to a global level.”

Contact Kristin Harty at kharty@times-news.com.