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.