Month: April 2018

In parts one and two I wrote about my environmental and moral decision to stop flying. After spending the best part of a decade without getting in a plane, I’m now trying a different approach, which I’m more confident I’ll be able to maintain long-term: taking occasional flights in a conscious way, initially every two years.

I tried out my first biennial flight this year, when I flew to Indonesia on holiday. (My travel blog is here). It was a difficult decision to book a flight again – but I gained new insights as soon as I re-entered a plane for the first time after so long.

To begin with, how amazing aeroplanes are at all: the first time my Airbus A380 accelerated down the runway, and then simply lifted into the air, I was struck all over again by the human ingenuity that makes it possible, and how fortunate we are even to have access to such incredible technology.

Less positively, I saw with an outsider’s eye how intimately flights are tied up with a globalised system of excessive consumption. It may be unremarkable to a regular flyer, but I was amazed afresh at the 200,000 passengers funnelled through Heathrow’s duty free shops daily, and the 85,000 people passing through Dubai Airport’s kilometre-long strip of shops – all with the purpose of selling as many goods (mostly unneeded) as possible.

But yet, this whole experience started to seem normal to me alarmingly quickly: so much so that I found myself taking an internal flight within Indonesia, from Surabaya to Makassar (albeit with a lot of internal strife). I re-experienced for myself the convenience of flights. Suddenly I had the possibility of crossing the vast Indonesian archipelago within hours, saving days in comparison to the flight-free route.

But I also realised how much of the travel experience I was missing out on by taking a plane. When I arrived in Makassar, the largest city on the island of Sulawesi, I expected to be able to feel how far I had travelled – the shift from Javan culture to a Makassar-Bugis mix, the change in climate and timezone, as well as the sheer distance. This is the experience I have had when travelling from London to, say, southern Spain, as rainy northern France gives way first to lush Mediterranean coast and eventually to the almost Moroccan palm-trees and sand dunes of Alicante. But instead, my arrival in Makassar was unremarkable. I had simply stepped from one busy Indonesian metropolis into another. I missed the gradual, fascinating transformation that I would have witnessed from a train carriage or a ship berth.

 

It is the environmental urgency which makes it vital that we take moral responsibility and wean ourselves off flying. It’s the convenience of quick hops – which I learned about anew in Indonesia –  which makes it hard to kick the habit. But as I also realised when I took that short flight to Makassar, other modes of transport don’t just mean a more hassle-free journey – they offer a much richer travel experience, one that doesn’t just whisk us to our destination but shows us what lies in between.

As part of encouraging people to fly less, I believe it’s vital to stress the rich and positive experience we can have when travelling overland. There’s a comparison to be made to the recent success of the vegan movement: over 500,000 British people have given up animal products, having become convinced it is the right thing to do from a moral perspective. They have changed their lifestyle, accepting the associated difficulties, in part because they feel that a vegan lifestyle offers benefits in and of itself – the potential for better health, and tasty, if different, food. Similarly, avoiding a flight is not just a loss, but allows us a different kind of travel experience.

We must address our travel habits in the same way as we’ve started to address our eating habits – and to come back to the data, the need to fly less is as pressing as the need to end our carnivory, if not more so. The urgency of reducing global emissions is overwhelming, and we all need to take action: we are not exonerated simply because society does not publicly judge us. But happily, reducing how much we fly does not mean we can never go on holiday again: even taking one less flight each year has a large effect.

Choosing to enjoy the view from the train, over the crowds and queue of the airport, offers a different experience. It’s time we got back in touch with the land we travel through, not just the cities we arrive in.

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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.

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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.

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.

Read the next blog in this sequence.

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