Saturday was a perfect November day, sunny and warm. Almost too warm.
That was the message Clif Bar & Co. put out over the weekend, bringing its “2 Mile Challenge” to the EMU on Saturday while the Ducks were preparing for their big game across the river. This latest leg of the company’s Natural Energy Tour encouraged people to bike rather than drive in order to combat global warming. The University was the 15th and final stop of the 2 Mile Challenge on college campuses covering seven western states.
The Clif Bar mobile crew conducted its cross-country tour in a 1959 GMC bus that runs on climate-neutral biodiesel. It is the ultra example of recycling, as the refurbished bus has three million miles on its body, yet it never once failed its crew.
Clif Bar owner and founder Gary Erickson explained the premise behind the Challenge.
“Forty percent of urban trips in the United States are two miles or less, but people use their cars nearly 90 percent of the time. If we simply rode bikes for those two-mile trips, we’d get in shape, unclog our roads and spare the planet from millions of tons of car-belching carbon emissions, the leading cause of global climate change.”
Eugene was the natural place for the finale of the 2 Mile Challenge. Many consider the city a cycling mecca, and groups like the League of American Bicyclists have named Eugene among the nation’s best cycling towns. Clif Bar representative Lauren Rerucha said this reputation was “definitely a factor” in deciding to include Eugene in their tour.
“It’s why we picked Eugene out of so many campuses in the country,” she said.
And the University community didn’t disappoint. A steady stream of people stopped at the biodiesel bus to check things out as they passed along University Street, even though the biggest football game of the season was simultaneously gearing up at Autzen. Attendees agreed that this was the right place for Clif Bar to end its tour.
“Eugene’s the perfect city for this,” University student and biker Krista Hansen said.
University staff member Shawn Kahl said Eugene has the “strong community and cycling network” to make such an event successful.
With such an extensive cycling community already existing here, there may not even seem to be a need for a promotional event such as the 2 Mile Challenge. But Mike Parziale of the Clif Bar mobile marketing team noted that Eugene is not quite the bike-centric town residents consider it to be.
“The U.S. owns more bikes per capita than everyone else, we just don’t use them,” he said.
The minds behind the 2 Mile Challenge think college students are just the ones to change this mindset. As Parziale said, college age is a natural time to push a shift to cycling, because “everything you need is within two miles.”
He believes that once more students get involved they could become ambassadors to spread the word even more.
Nowhere was this more apparent than with Ross Hiatt, on hand at the event with a contingent from the University’s Outdoor Program. He is an environmental studies major at the University and the Environmental and Sustainability Coordinator for the OP. His message was simple: “Ride bikes. It’s silly to drive a car.” Hiatt agreed with Parziale on the importance of influencing today’s college students, because they are “the beginners of a new paradigm shift.”
University student Dustin Moore provides an example of this shift. His family has been without a car for much of his life because his parents “thought it would simplify (their) life.”
Now, after so many years of biking around town, he is “so used to it that (he doesn’t) even notice it anymore.”
Clif Bar’s hope is that its ongoing Natural Energy Tour will make situations like Moore’s more the norm. It is a part of the company’s ultimate goal to increase sustainability, which its Web site calls “the core of our reason for existing.” Events like the 2 Mile Challenge work to achieve that goal, and as Parziale said, “programs like this are what we’re really passionate about.”
In connection with this event, Clif Bar donated $5,000 to the University for student cyclists’ needs, to be used as the school sees fit. Other schools have allocated the money toward additional bike racks or bike paths on campus. The University is one of five 2 Mile Challenge stops to receive such a donation.