I’ve previously written about my journey to realising that international plane-trips were not compatible with seeing myself as an environmentalist. I resolved to put my money where my mouth was, and start weaning myself off flight.
First, I stopped flying in Europe: I took trains to Vienna and Brussels, and the occasional coach to Paris. As I learned to navigate the Deutsche Bahn website (in the days before loco2) and grew to love seat61.com, it turned out that it wasn’t such a big thing after all. European trains are enjoyable, not that much slower (especially factoring in many hours of getting to and queueing up in airports) and, with a little planning, perfectly affordable.
It was a bigger step, a couple of years later, to cut out international flights as well, which I did for six years. Without doubt, I had some of my best travel experiences in that time, including holidays in Mongolia, Iran, Kurdistan, and Algeria. Without flying, a lot of destinations were effectively ruled out, but I saw that as a price I was willing to pay.
I would go far as to say that we have a moral obligation to substantially reduce our carbon footprint. If you live in a developed economy, the chances are – unless you don’t have access to media or choose to disregard mainstream scientific opinion – that you understand the perils of catastrophic climate change. Yet we continue to pollute enormously.
I sometimes compare the situation to a corrupt economy, where police officers, petty officials, and even politicians regularly benefit financially from their immoral actions. If you are a corrupt police officer, you know that the bribes you take are not fair to the person paying them, and that they are seriously detrimental to your country’s long-term future. Yet because everyone behaves the same way, there is no pressure on you to change your ways and you continue unperturbed. But that’s not how your actions look to us in the UK, where we do not regularly bribe public officials – we would rightly condemn corrupt police officers, even when they act as part of a culture of impunity. As with corrupt officials, so with us: we may know that our individual environmental actions are not the right thing to do, that they are deeply harmful and imperil future generations, but we continue to fly and pollute, in part because society doesn’t judge us.
But the fact that our environmental misdeeds are not recognised by society for what they are should not take away our individual moral responsibility. Just as the corrupt police officer remains culpable, in spite of operating within an immoral environment, so too do we have a responsibility to treat the planet in a moral and responsible way, even if the short-term cost to us (e.g. a train ticket) is higher.
Hanging over my case so far is the question of practicality. Total abstention from flying is possible, but it is unlikely to work for all but the most committed, and so will not make the environmental difference that the planet needs. My own response has been to try out flying every two years: something I think I will be able to maintain in the long term without giving up. It also models for my friends and acquaintances what I see as the important principle of making conscious decisions about how much we fly – cutting down on flying is much better than doing nothing. In my next blog I talk about how taking only occasional flights is working for me – and the strange experience of returning to the air.