“1001 Voices on Climate Change,” by Devi Lockwood

Devi Lockwood set out to bicycle around the world in 2014 at the age of twenty-two shortly after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard with the goal of collecting stories on climate change.  She endured for nearly two years until an amoeba turned up in her intestines in Cambodia at about the same time she began to suffer panic attacks following a harrowing van ride. She regretfully curtailed her travels, feeling like a “failure,” and returned home to New Hampshire to regain herself.

She had already gathered plenty of material for a book, largely thanks to a sign she carried that read “Tell me a story about climate change“ on one side and “Tell me a story about water“ on the other.  But she sought more material, resuming her travels for another couple of years, but unfortunately not by bicycle. 

Although the first half of the book is laced with almost enough incidents of cycle touring and endorsements of the bicycle as an ideal means to connect with people to qualify the book as a travel book, there is no indication on the cover of the book in words or in design that this is a book that would appeal to cyclists. Rather than inserting a bicycle anywhere on the cover to lure those with a bent for the bicycle, the cover is entirely blotted with an array of water drops, including one that forms the “O” in “Voices,” emphasizing the book’s theme of water.

She is a strong advocate of the bike, paying tribute to it in many ways, including saving her final thanks in her two pages of acknowledgements at the end of the book to her grandfather for teaching her to ride a bike.  It is well-nigh inexplicable that she would abandon the bike after it being her featured means of transport in New Zealand, Australia and Southeast Asia for nearly two years. Not even when she resumes her travels in China, a former stronghold of the bicycle, does she take advantage of it to get around, nor in Denmark either, where the bicycle is a dominant feature.  

After writing so much about how the bicycle drew people to her and how she loved being outside all day with “no windshield, just immersion,” the no-bike second half of the book came as a disappointment.  It was hard to fathom that she could lose her loyalty to the bike after expressing such devotion to it,  and didn’t at least rent or borrow a bike in her further travels.  The bike as a means to combat climate change could have been a prominent theme of the book.  She shouldn’t have let a page pass without demonstrating the utility and wisdom of riding a bike, not only for the good of the planet, but for one’s personal well-being.

She gives no reason for abandoning the bike as a means of immersing herself into the many countries she later travels including Morocco and Turkey and Peru and Scandinavia.  It wasn’t because of any frights she had while cycling.  Those only occurred when she was off the bike, the worst when monsoon rains in Laos forced her to take a fourteen-hour van ride to cross into Cambodia.  She was crammed in the back seat next to an American who she accused of “mansplaining” for a condescending remark he made.  He responded by calling her a “feminazi cunt” and tried to strangle her when the trip ended in Phnom Penh.  The driver was no help, as he had earlier thrown a can of coke at her head irritated that she checked on her bike at every stop when more cargo was placed on top of it.

She had another unpleasant, but more benign, experience earlier when traveling by cargo ship.  While in New Zealand she met Chris Watson,  the author of the book “Beyond Flying,” a collection of essays discouraging travel by air, who tells her that “flying is by far the worst thing that many of us do for the planet.”  That convinces her to cover the 1,200 miles across the Tasman Sea to Australia by boat and to try to avoid flying for the rest of her trip.  She launches a kickstarter campaign to pay for her expensive passage on a cargo ship and raises the funds in “a day and one hour.”  She’s the lone female, which was unsettling at times.  

She manages a couple more legs on sailboats but after four months of trying to find passage to Thailand by sea gives up and flies. The ease of flight is hard to avoid, even for someone committed to doing as little harm to the planet as possible.  Later in the book she admits to flying from New York to San Francisco without any explanation for not taking advantage of Amtrak.  It may not be as egregious as flying, but she also reveals that she went to a Starbucks in Instanbul forgoing the countless local coffee establishments.

The book was published by Tiller Press, an off-shoot of Simon and Schuster, that specializes in non-fiction on “real-world problems.”  She and her agent spent quite a spell trying to find a publisher, commenting that it felt like they suffered “1,001 rejections,” mostly on the grounds that books about climate change don’t sell.

She does make her book readable, not bogged down by statistics, but rather anecdotal evidence that the climate is changing from the “1,001” people she meets during her travels who respond to her sign.  Most of the stories are about how much hotter it has become and how water is becoming scarce or in the case of the island republic of Tuvalu, raising the ocean level threatening its survival.  

She begins the book in Tuvalu at the suggestion of “my then girl-friend,” the first of several mentions of her sexuality.  She does no biking on these nine coral atolls that comprise ten square miles and receives just 150 visitors a year, some who merely stop in to add to their list of countries visited. It’s highest point is thirteen feet above sea level, which is gradually becoming less elevated as the ocean inches upward. The stories of water there are not only of the sea rising but the loss of well water that used to supply the islanders their drinking and bathing needs. The only non-salt water now available to the islanders is from rain, which everyone assiduously collects. She stayed with a family, as she often does, sometimes through the cycling “Warmshowers” community.  To shower she snuck into a Telecom building at night along with one of the family members who worked there.

Rain was another of her water stories from a woman who’d arrived in Sydney in 2002 during a severe drought.  A torrential downfall brought everyone out, even office workers in suits and dresses, to dance with hands up to the sky so thrilled to have water.  A couple people respond to the water question with stories of tears.  A 70-year old woman told her, “My biggest water story at the moment is shedding tears when I heard my grandson play the piano as part of a symphony.”  Another woman recalls giving birth, breaking water and ending the birth with tears, “my fourth water.”

The sign Lockwood wears around her neck became such a part of her at times she’d forget about its presence.  Once as she was sitting under a tree reading she was startled by a woman asking “what is that all about” referring to her sign.  She tells her a story of gently washing her just-deceased mother.  Her water question struck a non-climate change chord with many.   Another was about a guy’s younger brother who died from a pot of boiling water falling on him, the water having to be boiled to purify to make it drinkable.

She is told multiple times that it’s not advisable for a woman to travel alone. She knows that plenty do and that she does it not only for herself but for “all the women who are unable to do so.”  She bikes for several weeks in Australia with a Belgian woman she met through Facebook who is less leery of stealth camping than she is.  Their time together gives her greater confidence to stealth camp on her own, coming to prefer it to staying in Australian caravan parks, as she found them to be “hostile places for a solo female.”  

If this had been a true travel book she would have devoted more than two paragraphs to her time with the Belgian.  She didn’t even credit her with a water or climate story. Her many descriptions of sunsets and sunrises in the first half of the book were however symptomatic of a travel book.  There were thirty-one in the first 159 pages, but only four in the second half when she didn’t travel so much as fly to environmental conferences.  She had been so attentive to the sun’s comings and goings, as one is who is outdoors all day, she used the sunset as a metaphor for her reaction to the abundant use of vowels in the Tuvalu language.  She wrote, “The vowels in this language taste as delicious in my mouth as sunsets are bright.”  One sunset was so stunning she wanted to throw herself into it.

How much of a difference this book will make is hard to say, maybe no more than the messages she wrote on telephone poles and highway guardrails as she cycled—“Just play” / “Slow is beautiful” / “Read more poetry”.  She was just happy to give voice to so many, hoping it could inspire others to think about the issues they raised.  Only one library in the Chicago system has acquired it—the Chinatown branch.  But like every pedal stroke it is a motion forward.