After several months of learning that it’s very hard to ask people to contribute to your zine when it is not possible for you to pay them, Low-Carbon Adventures 2: I Had a Low Carbon Adventure is here! 

The concept was to show how expansive the options are for having adventures, as day trips or over multiple days, all over Aotearoa and the world. I was aiming for a variety of transport methods and locations. I also didn’t want to be limited by my own experience, so I needed friends.

I am so, so grateful to the 7 contributors who aren’t me for writing something about their adventure, sending me photos and in some cases art. Here’s who they are (note: I wrote these bios not them!) and where they went:

Meike Pummer is a friend of Adam Currie’s, a tramper and geologist who sent in a contribution even though I had never met her at all! She tells the story of three weeks hitchhiking and walking up hills around Te Waipounamu. 

Denzel Chung is a PhD student from Malaysia via Manawatu. He currently lives in Lower Hutt, and writes about a trip in Malaysia’s last sleeper train. (He also wanted to write about the Doha transport system, low carbon transport in an oil capital but I told him he had to choose). 

Adam Currie is an activist and ball of enthusiasm who loves climate action, being outside and telling yarns. He writes about a kayaking, sailing and climbing trip around Purau in Banks Peninsula.

Isobel Ewing is a journalist from Aotearoa, currently living and working in Istanbul. I had also never met her but she generously responded to my out-of-the-blue email and wrote about cycling through Zanskar in northern India, as part of a bigger trip through Central Asia last year. She also made the film Inshallah with Georgia Merton, about cycling in northern Pakistan, which I highly recommend. 

Mika Hervel is a student and activist from Nelson (via Germany). He writes about Te Whanganui-a-Tara’s best day trip, the train station→ train station walk over the Paekakariki Escarpment with stunning views of the frothy coast. 

Liv Sisson is an author and fan of dancing and butterflies who currently lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. She writes about assembling her friends to bike to a music festival in Christchurch. She also did a stunning painting which is included as a print with physical copies! 

Helena Teichrib is a vegan cheese maker, reader and gardener who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, but grew up in Deutschland. She writes about a bike trip, facilitated by trains and ferries, through the Netherlands. And she contributed a lovely drawing of the futuristic development of my dreams: a vending machine for fruit! 

And I wrote about taking a series of buses into the Spiti Valley in 2017 (the oldest adventure, and actually very close to where Isobel was cycling) and a bike trip through Te Urewera with Shreyas at the start of 2025. 

I am still feeling stunned and grateful that all these amazing people were willing to write something for me! Hopefully that friend-energy really permeates the zine as you read it. 

This is the fourth big-scale zine I’ve done in the last year and it’s definitely gotten a bit easier because I know the process I like now. I noticed this last night as I set up folded covers, folded interiors, a cutting mat for trimming, a needle and thread for the binding, wax for threading the needle, bone folders to keep everything neat. I’m still planning to give lots of copies of this one away, and I’ve printed out lots of copies of the first zine for a reprint. I’m hoping to do at least one zinefest this year – I sort of feel like you need at least five zines for a zinefest so hopefully I can manage one more by the time that rolls around. 

Making zines is definitely an expensive endeavour in labour time + materials but it is so joyful that I think it’s completely worth it! Zinefests will hopefully be a way to get some more people some information about the zines, and maybe there will be some word of mouth effect too… I’m not that interested in being a marketing genius (and definitely not in making a profit, all of the zine costs I am paying for myself!). But I do still really want people to read it.

Mostly I’m just excited about framing responses to the very real climate crisis as something enjoyable and interesting and fun. We’re not giving up things — we’re gaining new and better ways to travel, and we can advocate for more. In that spirit, there’s a webpage of digital adventure resources which accompanies the zine, with some of the stuff that gets me jazzed on both a practical and emotional level. I’m hoping to periodically update this; while it’s really fun to make physical media, I think there’s a lot of be said for taking advantage of the scalability of the internet. I like having an online copy just so I can pull it up on my phone and show people which, it must be said, happens even more frequently than you might think. 

This zine includes maps! They’re sort of basic and mostly traced because I tried to draw my own maps and realised it was not going well. But I like the idea of spatially representing things and really want to make more fun maps — of favourite neigbourhoods, of people’s backyards, of river paths… maps are making me really excited! So there may be more map zines in the pipe ine, and maybe also some digital maps made in collaboration with Shreyas. I would LOVE it if readers of the zine want to add or draw their own routes on the maps, I’ve left lots of blank space intentionally. Like LCA1, it’s supposed to be something you can draw and write on and bring with you (that said, I haven’t seen anyone using LCA1 as a workbook but a gal can dream!).

In the first zine I really leaned in to my bad art and felt like it was really not good but I just had to roll with it. I think doing quite a lot of drawing (at least much more than previous years) through the low-carbon and portents zines has helped me think in a more visual manner, which is definitely something I’m working on, and the illustrations this time are maybe slightly better I still want to find a better way for doing hand-drawn pictures than having to print out, draw and re-scan the drawings but I’m not sure what that will be. I also want to make some zines with larger print – I love A5 as a size but if there’s a lot of writing on the page it’s really not that accessible. I kind of regret stylising low-carbon with a hyphen in between the words but we’re committed now.

Anyway, all that is sort of by-the-by. The main point is, the zine is here! Please read it! Let me know what you think!!!

P.S. More blog posts about topics that aren’t transport coming soon hopefully – I swear there’s lots of other ideas Shreyas and I are into that aren’t just about ways to move around!!