Longer Distance Cycling for Interspecies Mobility Justice in Canada

This article explores how longer distance cycling can advance interspecies mobility justice, a theory of (im)mobilities and justice that includes other-than-human persons and habitats as worthy of our positive moral obligations. I argue that longer distance cycling can advance interspecies mobility justice by promoting socially inclusive and ecologically good cycling practices that redress the active travel poverty of marginalized and colonized populations, while replacing rather than augmenting auto roads with active travel routes that help humans respect other species. The article theorizes longer distance cycling not as some specific number of kilometres, but rather as the social production of cycling space across gentrified central cities, struggling inner suburbs, outer exurbs and rural countrysides. To explore this argument my analysis focuses on Canada, an extreme context for longer distance cycling. I offer a comparison of two case studies, situated on the country’s west and east coasts, Vancouver, British Columbia and Halifax, Nova Scotia, drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study of cycling practices and politics in Canada.