My Viennese grandparents inspired my love of travelling. My earliest memories are dotted with recollections of receiving oversized t-shirts From Russia, With Love, postcards etched by my grandfather and signed “Gran’ma”, and black-and-white photographic portraits of Papuan locals and Californian cousins. I had always wanted to follow in their footsteps, and when long university holidays gave me the time I began to jet off to India, Pakistan, Central Asia, Ethiopia, broadening my horizons and having a wonderful time.
My first awareness of the environment, and its fragility, also dates back to my early childhood. For term when I was eight, my class studied the rainforest in geography. The back wall of the classroom became the rainforest, covered in hand-drawn lemurs and lianas, while we learnt how that same rainforest was being cut down, the area of a football pitch each second. It became logical to me that destroying the planet wasn’t OK, and so I grew up with a value set that included a concept of humankind’s stewardship of the earth.
But it turned out that incorporating a love for jaunty trees and animals into my life was not as straightforward as it was to realise my desire to see the Himalayas and the Pamirs. I didn’t want to destroy the rainforest, but it’s difficult to trace the origin of the trees in your printer paper or the palm oil in your peanut butter. Moreover, it gradually became clearer to me that the most urgent environmental problem today – the one which has the potential to push millions of humans into famine and homelessness, and to wipe out more animals than any logging plantation – is climate change caused by human emissions. With a handful of years left to prevent runaway global warming, climate change is what we need to worry about today.
I continued to think of myself as an environmentalist, someone who cared about doing the right thing. As I left home, I decided to cycle, rather than drive; I became vegetarian, to avoid the large carbon emissions associated with producing meat; I recycled assiduously. I even made a half-hearted attempt to avoid flying, taking the train one summer holiday from Moscow to Uzbekistan (although this was undermined by returning home from Kyrgyzstan by plane).
But with time, I started to realise the moral hypocrisy of my position. I was an ‘environmentalist’, but my flying habits put me in the upper percentiles of emitters worldwide: one short-haul haul flight cancels out the environmental effect of being vegetarian for a year, while a transatlantic flight is twice as bad. I decided I couldn’t deal with that level of inconsistency: saying one thing while doing another, feeling smug about the environment while jet-setting. It was that realisation that led me to what was probably the defining decision of my past decade: the choice to give up flying.
