avid readers of the blog (are you out there?) may have noticed my predilection for forms of transport that are not cars or planes. I really really love bikes, humanity’s most beautiful machines, and also harbour fond feelings for a number of other ways of getting around: ferries and trains, even the odd bus, walking and running. I would be willing to try kayaking again in the future too, and would simply love to go out sailing sometime too. Most of all, I get excited about the ways to combine these forms of transport together. There are so many ways of getting there! and I simply refuse to advance past my restricted driving license! (or maybe the correct term is ‘regress’ lol).

I’ve coined a term for this sort of travel, although I’m by no means the first person to have thought of it: low-carbon adventures. Politically, I believe firmly that living with less carbon emissions is something that is joyful and hopeful and fun; the deprivation view of adapting to and mitigating the inevitable climate changes happening already and into the future is something that mostly benefits the people profiting from the continued destruction of the planet.

Having simultaneously gotten quite into zine making, courtesy of the excellent Spectrolite programme and the encouragement of my friend Éimhín, I decided to make a zine about it! I’ve slowly worked on it over the last six weeks, writing and designing the pages, photographing and printing the cover, adding pen illustrations and scanning them in, then sewing the booklet together. It’s been very fun and also… very slow and labour intensive. But at the end of it I have a object I think is so cool and beautiful and I am very proud of.

Before I go on, perhaps you want to see this zine? Well you can! It’s on the zine page on this website, in PDF form and also as a printable download (pro-tip: the cover uses a lot of ink, so don’t print the cover if you don’t have much ink! and the whole thing is meant to be printed double-sided then folded in half into a booklet.) Most of the readers of this blog are well known to me and I have probably already given you a copy or one is on its way via the postal service. But if you would really like a physical copy and we don’t know each other, send me an email and we can work something out – I’m keen for this to have as many readers as possible. If I run out of copies I can always do a reprint! And I have many more ideas for future zines too, no spoilers but one features a fox.

Okay, now some more about the process and thinking behind this zine.

My friend Oscar has often challenged me to think about impact: what difference does the time or money I put into a project make? Frankly, this was quite slow because I was doing it in the evenings after my full time job and doing things I am not already good at (drawing and designing), often impractical (i.e. hand sewing the bindings) and somewhat expensive (getting a fancy RISO printed cover). I do not have any expectation that this alone will change our transport system which is so geared towards speed and consumption and fossil fuels – even if there is a practical-political action section in the zine.

However, I’m a big believer in different kinds of change. Sometimes you need to blow up pipelines. Other times you need to have intense conversations with people you disagree with. A lot of the time, my work looks like believing that writing for a relatively big group of people will make a difference in ways I can’t see. I wanted how to have a low-carbon adventure to be geared towards people who already believe in taking action against environmental destruction, but need some encouragement to use systems and resources already available to them to act towards the world we all want. And just talking about this zine has already led to some productive conversations – including one about a project to make non car/train travel in New Zealand more mainstream.

I was also really focused on the practical aspect of the zine: I love the idea that it could be taken on adventures or used to plan them. The document is meant to be written on and used. Again, I think I was interested in how this is different to a lot of my writing: in the pixelated land of the internet, there are few permanent things to return to, so I wanted something where the person who reads it is actively part of the writing. I love the idea that the zine can be customised by individual readers, not simply dictated by me, the author.

I definitely wouldn’t call myself an artist, as the internal drawings of the zine probably demonstrate. But in knowing from the beginning that I wanted this zine to be a physical object, I got to think about every aspect of it (except the digital uploads which Shreyas handled). What colour thread did I want to stitch with? How could I embrace the imperfections of the art and allow the zine to feel like me? How do you make lines and boxes on a page feel inviting? How could I make the writing seem lively working within the constraints of small, short pages? While I hope that the zine is used and shared lots, I’ve been thinking about how you have to value the process of doing something enough that the end product is worth it, even if you never receive endless glory/thanks and praise/widespread acclaim. Making this zine has been an opportunity to think about how I do, and want to do things: slowly, thoughtfully and invested with hope in the future and in other people.