Plenty

The simple pleasure of riding your bike around town with a group of friends to congregate at several outdoor locations for refreshment and conversation requires, when you stop to think about it, a mind-boggling array of contributions from Mother Earth and your fellow human beings, starting (to pick a somewhat arbitrary starting point) with someone somewhere (no doubt underpaid, exploited, and subject to dangerous working conditions) extracting iron ore from the earth’s crust; someone else somewhere else (in no doubt equally awful circumstances) mining coal underground; groups of workers (hopefully unionized) working blast furnaces in huge factories to combine those raw materials into blocks of steel which someone else (also, let’s hope, unionized) runs through a machine to pierce and draw into hollow tubes, for an artisan in a factory in Taiwan to braze into a beautiful diamond-shaped frame that another skilled laborer paints and decals before boxing up and shipping in a giant container ship halfway around the world to an independent company where a reasonably well-paid employee (barely scraping by because they live in one of the most expensive communities in the nation) unboxes and installs a few parts also manufactured on the other side of the planet, then re-boxes for shipment via eighteen-wheeler truck some 1200 miles north, so it can be unpacked and taken into a home basement to be turned into rideable work of art thanks to precision components from all over the globe (and a beautiful bag manufactured right here in our fair city); and that doesn’t even begin to include all that goes into the clothes you’re wearing including the wool shirt whose wearing depends on the contribution of sheep, sheep-shearers, sheep-dogs (one assumes), garment workers, and a person selling stuff out of their attic on eBay, not to mention everything involved in all that concrete for a 10-story parking garage, plus whoever fabricated the aluminum cans with that delicious cold beer made by more humans and more nature; wow, thanks!