As Flying Rebounds, Here's the Plane-Free Case for Making a Difference Close to Home and Online

My defense of less-frequent flying in a world of yes or no - Part 2

Sep 14, 2022

Part 2 - flight-free impact on the home front

As I wrote in my previous post, after a 930-day break from boarding airplanes, I flew about 6,000 miles last week, from Bangor, Maine, to New York City to Reno, Nevada, and back. I gave a long-delayed lecture at the University of Nevada, Reno, and did some reporting on lithium mining.

I also did a lot of thinking about when flying makes sense and when staying home or connecting with the world online is a better choice.

Read part 1 if you missed it: My Journey From Platinum Pride to Happily Less-Frequent Flying.

Here are my core points, distilled:

1. Flying matters if climate is a top concern, but this activity is dwarfed by other sectors.

2. Innovations that can cut climate impacts of flying are being pursued but will take a long time to reach scale.

3. An interconnected planet can be a better planet, and nothing beats face-to-face interaction, but virtual connections can come close.

4. There's an enormous amount of progress to be made locally on climate, environment and energy goals that, when shared and added up, can lead to global progress.

I also solicited input from the Sustain What community, which you can join by subscribing here. You can find a rich mix of contributions toward the bottom of this post.

So let's dive in.

The case for aviation moderation

Most of what I wrote in part one makes the case for physically exploring this planet, with flying an essential means of doing so - certainly for me as a journalist, but also serving as a valuable pathway for anyone else eager to widen a network or leave one's comfort zone.

And yet... Here's the case for staying home or connecting through that screen we mostly hate. My conclusions grow out of two threads of my work - my Dot Earth blogging at The New York Times from 2007 through 2016 and my Sustain What webcasts through the Columbia Climate School, along with the many instances I've had over the decades connecting with people locally in ways that can reverberate more widely.

Here's just one example, from Dot Earth in 2009. A researcher of past Arctic climates, Andy Bunn at Western Washington University, had invited me to come along on their expedition drifting down a Siberian River. For practical and financial reasons there was no way, I said. But I added that they should take lots of pictures, record some audio diaries and we'd cobble what became a "postcard from the Pleistocene."

Read the post

The media could do a lot more of this, curating content coming from local sources rather than parachuting in and then flying out.

Online impact

It's safe to say that this Sustain What dispatch and the webcasts it grew out of wouldn't exist if it were not for the flying hiatus that began with the pandemic shutdown.

In February 2020, I'd made a West Coast trip to visit potential funders for my then-nascent Columbia Earth Institute (now Climate School) initiative on communication and sustainability and to attend and speak at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which took place that month in Seattle just as - unknown to nearly all - the virus behind the pandemic was filtering through that city and the country.

In the resulting months, the Sustain What video webcasts I initiated that March taught me how to engage with people all around this fast-forward planet in pursuit of solutions and to build a collaborative community as simultaneous crises played out.

The very first show, on March 15, 2020, is fun to watch, starting with me saying, "Hey, so I think I'm broadcasting... I'm not really sure, but you can let me know by sending a comment."

I go on to say, "I'm going to be using this portal ... to offer some clarity and build a community around ways to have social cohesion and impact even as we practice social distancing. I think we're in a moment when there's a great opportunity to use connectivity online to get some progress in the actual world."

In early April, as India entered lockdown, I introduced the wider world to a network of middle-class residents of the city of Bhopal who knew each other from efforts to expand plastic-waste reduction and recycling had swiftly turned their collaboration into a food distribution network for the city's poor, who lost their daily minimal income and faced a nutrition crisis.

With communities around the globe grappling with interlaced threats, from pathogens to climate risk to war, this is precisely the kind of agility and adaptability that needs to be spread far and wide. When we had the conversation, they were scattered across Bhopal, but our audience was from around the world.

One of my top goals remains finding ways to help communities, particularly those facing the biggest threats with the fewest resources, connect with the information, resources and expertise they need to thrive. The mix of hazards varies around the world and the United States, but there's huge potential for communities everywhere to come together periodically to "shake out" their vulnerabilities.

Hundreds of guests and more than 2.5 million viewers have since joined my weekday shows on tough issues, connecting from Iran to India, Kenya to the Alaskan Arctic, Indonesia to Guyana to Georgia. My "Sunday Sanity" sessions connected musicians, poets, storytellers and scientists from Lusaka, Zambia, to the Hudson River Valley. I'll be restarting those arts-focused Sunday webcasts as fall gives way to winter in my new home state of Maine.

Here we are 912 days later and I'm more convinced than ever that online engagement can build a better planet.

I'm still hoping more people pitch "friendly takeovers" of my Sustain What platform.

Click here to learn how and to pitch a show.

Frontiers and solutions close to home

I'd love to know your experience, but I've found that the more I've traveled the more I recognize patterns that resonate down the block. That adaptive network in Bhopal formed through the same kinds of relationships I saw around the Hudson River Valley through the last 32 years of my life and am seeing here in my new home in Downeast Maine, as well.

I can do meaningful work on these issues as easily here as on the road. And thanks to Elon Musk's Starlink system, I can connect to the world online reasonably well even though we, like tens of millions of Americans, have no high-speed wire or fiber link yet. (And of course about 2.9 billion people worldwide still have no Internet access at all.)

Our Starlink dish

Maine is full of potential for identifying and spreading more sustainable approaches to using living marine and terrestrial resources without using them up, as the marine biologist and climate activist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson likes to say.

I'm surrounded by a rich landscape of possibilities that don't require me to sit for hours in a sealed aluminum tube propelled by jet fuel (or whatever comes next).

Just one is the kelp farming spreading up and down the coast. Come along on my Sustain What journey ahead and you'll meet Sarah Redmond, the founder of Springtide Seaweed of Gouldsboro. I spent some time on the water with her last year and caught this magical moment when a dolphin popped by.

In the months and years ahead, I'll still be flying, but never again in "platinum pride" mode.

Fly consciously. Squeeze impact from those miles.

But look around your neighborhood with the same inquiring, solution-focused eyes, as well.

And always share what you learn, positive or negative.

And don't forget that national politics is also local politics. We're in Maine's second congressional district, which is trending conservative, and Representative Jared Golden, a moderate Democrat and Marine veteran, is in a tough race, pummeled by attack ads over reasonable votes for investments that will help struggling families across this state. Why fly to Washington to report on policy when we can work here?

Your turn

As I mentioned my first flying post invited readers to add their thoughts. Here's some of what has been posted so far on Facebook and elsewhere.

Diane MacEachern, an entrepreneur and author of "Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World," posted this on Facebook:

I'm personally limiting my flights to "essential" trips. I'm not flying for pleasure anymore, or just to see something because "it is there." I've done enough damage, honestly. I've been to 50+ countries on six continents so continuing to travel to places that require a flight seems fundamentally selfish to me at this point. There is no genuine way to offset flight emissions. They dump CO2 and other pollutants directly into the upper atmosphere and they will linger -- and cause damage -- for decades to come, decades we don't have if we're serious about stopping climate change. I will fly for family and friend emergencies, of course, or to do some of the citizen science research I've started. But my goal is to limit flying as much or more than I'm limiting other activities that generate greenhouse gases.

Susan Hopkins from Coos Bay, Oregon, posted this apt point on Facebook:

I stopped flying in 2012. Driving back down the Willamette Valley from Portland's airport, the incredible blue sky was half obscured by contrails. I resolved to end my part in it. Don't regret it. Rather than living 'broadly' all over the world, I love living 'deeply' where I have chosen to be.

Dan Thaler, a retired auto mechanic who now builds and passionately paddles kayaks, mostly in the Hudson River, added this on Facebook:

I'd love to see the airships, ala Ministry for the Future, for leisurely air travel.

In a submission to my Feedback form, David Bergman, an architect, professor, former pilot and self-described “eco-optimist,” pointed me to his superb blog post on this issue, titled, “I Used to Love Flying.” Among other insights he echoes Dan Thaler's vision of a world of efficient airships and proposes how the massive existing fleet of retired fuel-burning aircraft, and those still flying, could end up repurposed like this one constituting part of a hotel in a Costa Rican forest.

A Boeing 727 fuselage is part of Hotel Costa Verde in Costa Rica (photo by Gotanero,CC-BY-SA-4.0)

Richard Reiss, a k a @cityatlas on Twitter, posted a compelling Twitter thread on my first dispatch laying out the climate argument against flying. Currently a glitch on Bulletin is preventing me from embedding tweets but please do click and read and click the references! Here's a bit of what he says: "I think you're living a bit in the past, but it's difficult not to. Flight is only small-ish now (though bigger than most nations) because only relatively few of us on the planet do it, but like all businesses, it's predicated on growth.... Maybe there will be proportionately expensive zero carbon fuel, which would solve both problems...though could add an equity problem, too.... But the real limit on per capita choices seems like it will be energy; flying is energy intensive. One long flight is like running a blow dryer 24/7 all year. Until we get out of the energy bottleneck we might need any spare energy for carbon capture.... [O]ne more image, along with a factoid: prior to closing Indian Point, jet fuel at LGA and JFK was roughly equal in carbon emissions to all NYC electricity. Since natural gas replaced Indian Pt., electricity may have gone back on top. [inserted 5:05 pm ET]

on Twitter

CeCe Carter Sieffert posted this comment on Bulletin:

I’m reading this from the Jakarta airport, ready to head home. I work for a wildlife conservation organization, which requires me to make 3-4 long international trips per year. I appreciate this post, and look forward to the next piece on moderate aviation. I look at my aviation footprint as one part of the way I chose to live my life. I‘m very conscious of what I consume, from locally sourced food to secondhand clothes. Most importantly, I vote for politicians with a strong environmental agenda. Using LED bulbs and driving my Prius is small potatoes compared to legislation that could shift global carbon emissions.The juxtaposition between my carbon footprint and my career trajectory troubles me but it is a necessary evil of the trade. While zoom has patched the gap over the past few years, there are conversations that partners, particularly in different cultures, would never have on zoom, which creates an artificial formality. It’s not till we’re standing side by side in the jungle do the real problems with implementation appear, and I realize that the 22 hours in coach were, in fact, worth it. I admit I dream of being bumped to business class… who wouldn’t want to lie flat and arrive refreshed? But perhaps there is a gift in that process as well; the real connections develop over (many) cups of coffee or chai.