Planning for the 2016 Ecotopia Biketour has began, and we are on the lookout for projects, communities and places to visit in the Baltic States and neighbouring countries on the 2016 bike tour.
Ecotopia is a self-organised, international activist community that organizes a yearly biketour in different regions of Europe and has done so since 1990. The tour generally lasts 3 months over the summer, we carry everything on our bikes and trailers, and cook and eat communally. During the tour we visit projects of an environmental or social nature and contribute and learn from the places we visit. We also practice forms of activism and sustainable living. We follow a mainly vegan diet, practice non-hierarchical consensus decision making and encourage skill-sharing. Ecotopia Biketour is for anyone interested in travelling by bike, community life, DIY, environmentalism and experiential learning. Ecotopia Biketour 2016 will visit the Baltic states and neighbouring countries. Find out more on https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/.
Last summer we cycled from Denmark, through Sweden, briefly into Norway, and then across to Helsinki, Finland, visiting a wide range of projects on the way – such as permaculture farms, culture houses, social centres, transition network farms and ecovillages. We joined solidarity demonstrations, dug vegetables, built bird houses, fixed bikes and more, whilst learning about local struggles, making connections, skill-sharing and finding alternatives to capitalism and consumerism. We wrote a blog about our experiences and the places we visited, which can be found on the website,
We are an always changing group and, in the sense of political backgrounds, quite diverse. Usually our group includes everything from anarchists to employees of green NGOs to people who just like cycling. Traditionally, the whole range of experience levels concerning the community lifestyle that we try to follow can be found among us, from experienced activists to people for whom this is the first contact with non-hierarchical community living. We also bring different sets of skills with us, from farmers to experienced bike mechanics to professional mathematicians. We try to share our skills with each other and with the projects that we visit. We are usually a group of between 20 and 40 people from all over Europe at any one time, so are keen to use our willing and able mass as usefully as we can, be it by helping build stuff, film stuff, running workshops, fixing bikes, skills shares and more.
We are interested in keeping the level of diversity of places that we visit high, so we are looking for projects of the following kinds:
Political groups fighting against oppression, such as feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-ablist groups, groups working with migrants or groups fighting for workers’ rights
Self-organised projects, coops, DIY projects
Groups promoting cycling and other environmental activists
Self-sustainable and permaculture projects
Organisations for alternative education and alternative housing
If you know any projects or communities in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Belarus or Finland that might be interesting to us or to whom we might be interesting, contact us by writing to 2016@ecotopiabiketour.net. You’re welcome to forward this e-mail to other mailing lists as well.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
the Ecotopia Biketour Collective