The 2016 Oxford University Press book The Greening of Everyday Life: Challenging Practices, Imagining Possibilities I contributed a chapter to on “Bicycling and the Politics of Recognition,” has received a kind review from environmental philosopher Robert Paehlke.
Paehlke writes,
Two chapters on mobility, Chapter 13 on automobility (John Meyer) and Chapter 14 on cycling (Yogi Hendlin) were particularly interesting to me…
Hendlin brilliantly conveys cycling’s ethos and challenges. Cars rule the roads ‘granting cycling little latitude to freely compete as a viable form of mobility’ (p. 232). Redesigning roads is a complex undertaking. I hold Copenhagen and Amsterdam in awe and my nephew’s wife is an environmental engineer doing cycle route design in Maryland. Hendlin shows the ways most cyclists in North America are still second class citizens – and why this may not be entirely a bad thing in terms of motivating needed change of many kinds…
Overall this volume is academically important because it grounds greening in theoretically-grounded case-based research. Simultaneously, it is also helpful to those considering the personal and political implications of greening their own everyday existence.
It’s gratifying to see this volume, which emerged from an invite-only conference at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, be recognized by our environmental political theory peers as a book bridging the theoretical and practical through applying theoretical analysis to environmental case studies.
If you haven’t read the book yet, do ask your library to acquire it!