For the last two years, 2023 and 2024, something regretful happened that we would like to share, take responsibility for, publicly apologize for, and discuss how we want to work towards building an EBT (Ecotopia Biketour) community where these kinds of situations won’t happen again.
The 2024 crisis started when the EBT had planned to visit a project, and only a few days in advance (because our own fault) realized the project would require all participants to register with their legal name and join their association. As some people on tour pointed out at the time, this would make this part of the tour inaccessible to those of us who are illegalized or undocumented, who are trans and don’t want to be outed, those who need to hide their identity for repression reasons, and anyone who values their privacy. A tour with anti-racist and anti-oppression politics should not ask its participants to comply with policies like this.
Unfortunately, the people who saw the injustice and warned the rest of the tour for going against its own values weren’t listened to. What should have been an explanation of how requiring someone to give information about one’s legal status is discriminatory, or even a simple veto on the decision, turned into a long meeting where people had to defend their veto position and needed to fight to be heard. In the end, the group agreed to skip the project reluctantly, some people even mocking the discussion of values with no one correcting them, and the people who spoke up for the values felt alienated by the group for a long time. This feeling of exclusion has continued up until this day, also because of the slow response of the people facilitating this year’s tour.
The orga of 2024 barely responded to the situation. [See the section “What is orga?” below for an explanation what we mean by “orga”]
Orga 2025 was slow to address the situation as well. A person who spoke up during the ‘24 crisis had to ask repeatedly for the crisis to be recognized and it took much effort and emotional work from them before the ‘25 orga started processing the crisis and thinking of what we could put in place for such situations to be prevented in the future. We only started this process during the winter meeting. Even then, our response was slow and insufficient. The person had to repeatedly bring up the crisis (and the fact that the situation indeed, was a crisis) and advocate for solutions.
We would like to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. Ecotopia strives to be a community where racism, nationalism, transphobia, and police violence are challenged, and in this situation, we perpetuated these oppressions. People who spoke up against this weren’t listened to, partly because of their marginalized position as people facing antislavic racism, and were socially punished for their solidarity.
We regret deeply that this happened in the Ecotopia community. A situation where the group wants to visit a project that possibly requires disclosing one’s identity should never have arisen on the Biketour, we should have listened to the people bringing up the concerns, we should have respected their vetoes and not require more discussion. We should have responded quicker and more decisive and more complete during the 2025 orga period.
We all are influenced in some way by the societal oppressive structures and hierarchies and it’s on those who oppress and hold privileged to put in the effort to unlearn these oppressions. We wish that support with the unlearning from people who better understand the oppression would be met with gratitude and appreciation. Looking at Ecotopia in particular, EBT is much more accessible the more privileges you have. People who can take time off, obtain gear, do legally grey area activities such as wildcamping and dumpster diving, speak activist English find it easier to join the bike tour. We should take care so the marginalizations coming from society are addressed and reduced on the Biketour. We hope we will achieve this, with hard work, on future Biketours.
As organizers and participants of the Biketour, we shouldn’t only feel responsible for the route, trailers, and projects. We should feel responsible for the well being of the participants. This also means upholding the values we claim to represent.
In 2023 we also failed to provide a safer environment for participants. The problem included a person repeatedly bossing others around, sharing their transphobic views, and being loud and drunk while others wanted to sleep. The rest of the group had talked to the person to make them realize the harm they caused and give them a possibility to change their behavior, to no success. This situation went unaddressed for a long time, and it took weeks before this person was kicked out of the tour. We recognize this is not the optimal solution, but given limited capacities it was far better solution than letting the situation continue.
We would like to express our regrets and our apologies to the people who were harmed during the tour of 2023. We acknowledge it as sad and also regretful that these words come only years later, while obviously they’d carry more meaning when things were fresh.
We recognize that we have made violence and oppression easier because of the lack of structures in place to uphold our values and partly through orga’s “hands off” approach. Meaning, that orga has seen it self as responsible for preparing the tour, but not for what happens during it, passing on the power solemnly to the hands of the current participants of the tour. Our reaction to the problems of 23 and 24 was reluctant, extremely delayed, mostly theoretical and has relied on very small amount of people desperate to push the cases, a dynamic that continues to this day (september ’25). Our response was mostly symbolic and people who have been hurt were ignored and unaddressed. We would like to apologize for this and take public accountability for it. We deeply regret the situation and will strive to do better in the future.
These crises are not isolated incidents. Harmful situations keep happening on the tour. We believe this shows there is a problem with how we organize. This needs to change. We all want a tour in line with our values, where oppressive behavior is addressed , where pointing out oppression is appreciated, where solidarity is rewarded. If you are reading this as someone who feels affinity with the Ecotopia community, we assume you want this too. Lets build this tour together!
We are aware that a safe space for everyone at the same time doesn’t exist. Oppression is a complex multilayered weird monster and it is not as easy as that to just say we don’t tolerate sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and so on. A space can be safe for white queers and at the same time black people would face racism. There is no magic recipe. This is no excuse for oppression to happen, obviously.
Over the years we have met similar problems again and again. We have imagined different strategies to tackle them that worked more or less well. With the always changing group, this work has to be done constantly.
https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/concepts/awareness
https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/2017/dealing-with-persistent-oppressive-behaviour-on-the-biketour
Orga ’25 has taken some steps to improve the situation. These actions aren’t enough. The problems over the years show us that the problems run deep. The changes should be more than corrections on an otherwise ideal course. We are committed to making the fundamental changes that are necessary to avoid crises as before.
Here follow some things orga has done to improve things.
- Part of the 24 crisis was that an important meeting wasn’t well facilitated so the people with important information were overshadowed by the preferences of the majority. During this meeting, the vetoes to visit this project weren’t heard, which shouldn’t happen during consensus decision making. To improve this aspect, we put together a booklet on consensus decision making and a booklet on meeting facilitation. We emphasize the importance of the facilitation skills and aim to build these up more in our community.
- We collected and now offer tools for building emotional skills of the participants to better recognize oppression, better communicate, and better understand their rights. Oppression is never the fault of the oppressed but building emotional self defense skills is helpful for everyone. It can also avoid small problems becoming big, and give people tools to organize themselves against the oppressor.
- During the winter meeting, and later online, we had many meetings and sessions reflecting on the 24 crisis and how to move forward.
- We proposed the group dynamics team as a rota task, and hope to experiment with it during this year’s bike tour.
- We started an antiracism reading circle. We read Me and White Supremacy, to reflect on our white supremacy in general, and organized many more specific sessions that are relevant to the Biketour. In particular we organized a session on being illegalized/undocumented, and on anti-slavic racism.
We also want this post to be a step towards repair. In the next years we want to improve how we organize, continue to build skills, and create a tour that upholds its values.
Our capitalistic, patriarchal, neoliberal, and racist society influences how we relate to each other. Its hard work to undo this, even very locally as in our own biketour community. Building the skills and learning the tools necessary to counter this corruption on our communities and relationships is also extremely valuable in itself. Its also necessary for countering the rise of fascism, xenophobia and transphobia we see all around us. Even creeping into our own communities, as we can see from 2024. We consider the Biketour as a place to develop ourselves in this way, and bring the skills and tools to our other communities as well.
This can mean many things in practice. We feel the gravity of the harm we’ve caused and have been complicit in and we are looking forward to building the skills and learning the tools to repair it, to build a bike tour that lives up to its values. You’re all invited to build the tour with us!
What is orga?
We use the word “orga” in the sense of “organizers” (not “organization”) to refer to people who are involved in the planning of a Biketour. Orga could be described as a semi-closed group of people that changes every year that plans the next tour, and how the orga is created also differs year by year. But because the way the Biketour is organized is very fluid, with people taking on different amounts of tasks and joining and leaving at different times, there is no clear definition about who is part of orga and who isn’t.
Because the orga changes, the particular people who happen to be in orga at the moment may not be the same people who were there during a crisis. However, current orga has responsibility for preventing future crisis.
In the past, the Biketour has often been prepared by one or two “coordinators”. They were keeping an overview over the preparation process and did most of the work. Sometimes there were additional structures like regional coordinators for different parts of the route. Often, we applied for funding to pay the coordinators to be able to work on the preparation full-time.
Usually, it was hard to find anyone who would be willing to take on the huge responsibility of becoming a coordinator. In 2013 though, when the tour was planned to start in Berlin, we received more than 10 applications and had to select two of them, as that was a limitation imposed by the funding that we had applied for. Because this created dynamics quite similar to the capitalist competitive labour market, and because the concept of having two coordinators anyways contradicts the way we usually do things on the Biketour (where we try to share all responsibilities among everyone), a proposal was brought up to get rid of the two funded coordinator positions and instead try to prepare the tour as an open group where many people take on little tasks de-centrally and coordinate with each other online.
In 2015, this approach of an open preparation group was tried for the first time, and it turned out to work not so well (one person did most of the work alone). We could think of two reasons for this: Either only few people have the time to prepare the Biketour in their free-time, or the Biketour community is not yet used to the new approach and first needs to learn that it is necessary to contribute before joining the tour. During the tour in 2015, it was very clearly communicated that everyone’s initiative is needed to organize 2016.
The vision of this approach was that the orga would be a preparation group that is open to anyone interested in contributing in any way. Orga would make decisions about the general frame of the tour (values, dates and places, equipment) in advance of the tour, and as soon as the tour starts participants would be handed this general frame and make day-to-day decisions within this frame among themselves.
The reality is a bit different than this. This year, there was no orga training at the start of orga and at the beginning everyone was invited to join. Later in the year, for security reasons orga set up restrictions and a structure for new people joining orga, which primarily included the person introducing themselves and current orga deciding if they wanted to invite the person. Orga has access to the registrations, to the website, emails, project information, and other sensitive info, which is why it’s not a completely open group anymore.
In recent years, we also noticed that a “hands off” approach by orga meant in practice that no one feels responsible for problems, such as abuse and oppression, that happen during the tour. The hierarchies that are created through societal oppressions aren’t necessarily countered and marginalized people feel unsafe.
A description of how it is now in practice: the role of the orga is to prepare the tour, but also during the the tour the orga keeps the longer term interests of the tour in mind. This includes keeping in mind participants who are not currently on the tour but plan to join later (orga will argue against changing the route for trivial reasons as upcoming participants will already have booked their travels), and maintaining a culture where bigotry and abusive behaviors aren’t tolerated. The orga is a nebulous concept, and who is part of orga is also nebulous. Concretely, orga members have access to edit the website and are part of a separate group chat.
This year, orga has struggled with the question of how we can build structures that can rebalance the hierarchies created through oppression. We have also reflected and continue to reflect what is the role or orga and what reponsibility does it carry. We would love to think through these questions on the tour together with the other Ecotopia community members. We think the group dynamics could be such a structure. We’re excited to try it out and see how we can improve things!
PS: It’s been almost 3 months that we are writing this blog post. The process of writing brought up disagreements and created heated discussions in our orga chat. We are trying to find a way of integrating all different opinions which is why sometimes things might sound contradictory.