Can Environmentalists Fly Too? // Shenzhen pt. II
“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” — Pat Conroy
Cycling down the Death Road in Bolivia, swimming in a hot-spring fed waterfall in the bottom of a kilometer deep canyon, climbing up a tree in France to avoid a wild boar, running after packs of lemurs down tiny deer tracks through the jungles of Madagascar — these are some of the peak experiences of my life. With the Cansbridge Fellowship, I recently returned to my job at a travel apparel company in China after a week spent surfing in the Philippines, and when I’m done here I’ll likely go live in another surf town in New Zealand before I hit Japan for the ski season. Travelling is amazing. I can attribute some of the most fundamental transformations I’ve experienced in my life so far to travel, whether it involves solo trips to Europe, South America, and now Asia; or family trips all over the world.
So needless to say, I love this lifestyle. I traveled a lot this year, and it’s been wonderful despite my perpetually empty bank account. But, as Andy Newman wrote in an article for the New York Times, “going someplace far away […] is the biggest single action a private citizen can take to worsen climate change”. My flight from Vancouver to China alone emitted as much carbon as 6 months of my current vegetarian-ish diet, and it was one of the 20 flights I’ll have taken by the end of 2019. Flying accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions, emitting nearly as much CO2 as the 28 states of the European Union combined. I had some idea of this at the start of 2019, and yet my jet-setting life continued unabated. This article is my attempt to be real with myself, and map out the battleground of conflicting thoughts and emotions which drive my current behavior. Will I stop flying entirely, knowing that the coming climate crisis is projected to kill millions, potentially billions of people? If I’m being honest; no. So how on earth do I justify this? The benefits of travel are many; but how do we weigh them against the costs?
Carbon Offsetting
Carbon offsetting involves calculating one’s carbon emissions and taking action to create an equivalent decrease in atmospheric carbon — usually achieved by paying someone else to plant trees for you. Let’s start by offsetting the carbon footprint of my traveling habits (yay! Math!), and then dive into the core behavior changes.
I wish I had the time to dig deep into my daily lifestyle and dietary habits in order to attempt a true carbon emissions estimate for the year, but this year I’m going to stick with two easy metrics: driving and flying. I use an app called Fuelly to track my gas consumption for my vehicle — 154 gallons this year, which at the EPA’s conversion factor of 19.60 pounds of CO2 per gallon comes out to 3018.4 lbs, or 1.37 tonnes. This excludes all the driving I did in vehicles I don’t own, which I didn’t have the foresight to track. Every year I’ll try to make this calculation more accurate; I have to be realistic about constraints on my time, energy and money and do my best with what’s available this year.
For flights, I took another high-level estimate, this time using the emissions calculator on the Cool Effect website. Taking the sum of the baffling 20 flights I am taking this year, I arrived at 9.26 tonnes of CO2 emitted. I wish I had time to dig into all the assumptions made here, but to be honest, the dying turtles don’t care and I’m better off using that time to vote in the damn federal election. Cool Effect only accepts round numbers in their calculator, so taking the sum of my driving and flying tonnage (10.63 tonnes of CO2) I rounded up and arrived at the cost they would charge me to purchase the corresponding carbon credits; $85.58 USD. Such satisfying precision on this number, the environmental price tag on my personal share of this year’s destruction of biodiversity and ecocide! I rounded up again to $90 USD, just to be safe. I like round numbers. It probably would have been more accurate to triple it, but I’ll have to wait until I have a little more in the way of liquid assets.
OK — Now You Plant Trees, Right?
I didn’t actually donate that money to Cool Effect. As I understand it, their approach to carbon offsetting seems to emphasize solutions that rely on market and technology-based impact. I can’t tell you with any certainty that these are bad things; but market and tech-driven solutions already get a lot of attention from press and donors, while more systemic efforts to mitigate climate change align better with my values. What’s more, Einstein allegedly said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”, and expanding markets and technology seems to be what’s gotten us into this mess. That’s not to say they don’t have a role in getting us out of it, but there are certainly other approaches that deserve to share the spotlight.
So, where do I put my money? I looked to Project Drawdown for guidance; which is an effort to systematically rank climate change solutions by their total atmospheric CO2 reduction potential. Number one on the list is refrigerant management, followed closely by onshore wind turbines. But remembering lessons from my time at Queen’s, my eyes were drawn down to #6 on the list: Educating Women and Girls. From the Project Drawdown website;
“Education lays a foundation for vibrant lives for girls and women, their families, and their communities. It also is one of the most powerful levers available for avoiding emissions by curbing population growth. Women with more years of education have fewer and healthier children, and actively manage their reproductive health.
[…] Education also shores up resilience and equips girls and women to face the impacts of climate change. They can be more effective stewards of food, soil, trees, and water, even as nature’s cycles change. They have greater capacity to cope with shocks from natural disasters and extreme weather events.”
Decreased population growth and enhanced stewardship of land, air and especially water using the knowledge of women are some of the most powerful leverage points in the fight against climate degradation. Project Drawdown lead me to the Women’s Earth Alliance, which places a heavy emphasis on supporting grassroots movements led by indigenous women in the Global South. Their work is an incredible example of a systemic approach that hits at the intersection of gender equality, climate stewardship, and neo-colonial power structures to create change which goes deeper than simple CO2 in = CO2 out equations.
This is no surprise to anyone, but my pithy $90 donation is a drop in the bucket compared to the actual damage I cause annually (even if it is in USD). Many climate experts call carbon offsetting a cop-out, tantamount to “paying someone else to diet for you,” as Alice Larkin from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research states. And Larkin walks the talk: she hasn’t flown since 2008 for a variety of reasons. The first is that offsetting can “encourage a break-even mindset when what’s needed to avert disaster is to slash fossil-fuel consumption immediately,” as Andy Newman writes. Buying a ticket does more than reserve a seat on a gas-guzzling flying machine; it also increases market demand, contributing to airport expansion and the growth of a harmful industry. In this sense, Newman quotes Professor Kevin Anderson as saying, “offsetting, on all scales, weakens present-day drivers for change and reduces innovation towards a lower-carbon future.”
It’s important not to equate this small action with a wholesale redress for all of my travel-related emissions. But it is another small step in a continual journey to do better for the planet. But it avoids the big question; is it defensible to fly at all?
Traveling Without Killing People And The Planet
“May I see what I do. May I do it differently. May I make this a way of life.”
-Buddhist mantra
Two main arguments hang around in the basement of my mind, and come screaming up to the main floor whenever I contemplate boycotting the tourism industry. The first is very hard to admit, but it’s kicking around everyone’s brain at some point… and the mental dialogue sounds like this.
Basement Max: “If the planet is doomed, if all of the lemurs are going to die and the ice caps are going to disappear, well I’d sure as hell better see them quickly!”
Moral Compass: “Max! You can’t say these things! People are dying out there and all you can think about is the next surf break?”
And then comes the rebuttal, the second important argument;
Basement Max: [tries to be strategic] “If I travel, I will learn things which will help me fight climate change! Think of all the amazing insights, lessons and opportunities just hiding in the next Vietnamese village! I could change the world!”
Moral Compass: “Shouldn’t you just stay at home, skip the emissions and just learn about them on the internet?”
“Okay, but the Vietnamese village also has mangoes and bungee jumping…”
“I’m starting to wonder how pure your intentions are bucko”
And the truth is that there is no way to quantify the pros and cons of travel. Well; the cons are pretty obvious I guess — beyond ecocide, I haven’t even started on the reinforcement of neo-colonial power dynamics, the commoditization of culture, and the reinforcement of privilege. Whether my travels will help me help others, or whether I’m simply allowing myself to be deluded by my own ego and self-interest; this is the hardest question to answer. The ability to ask the question at all is a crazy form of ultra-privileged calculus reserved only for the airplane class. But this is no reason not to wrestle with it.
Perhaps I’m fooling myself, but I do genuinely believe that my desire to see the world creates benefits beyond my own hedonistic pursuits. Not all travel does this — as Elizabeth Drew wrote, “too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” Mindful travel requires a healthy amount of research, intentionality, and critical thought. Sorry to break it to you, but even your annual one week of vacation can’t be devoid of responsibilities as you lie on the beach sipping on your sixth cocktail. If you’re going to burn all the fuel to get there, at least make it worthwhile — to yourself, to the planet, and to society. I can’t tell you how to do that, but it’s worth thinking long and hard before your next transatlantic flight. Maybe once you get there, you can resist living behind the high walls of an international all-inclusive resort with an all-you-can-eat buffet, and explore a new culture while supporting locally-owned businesses instead.
For me, maybe a good start would be to fly less than 20 times next year. I feel legitimately terrible about this — it is indefensible. Another example of the inevitable contradictions and ironies which confront anyone trying to lead a more sustainable life. But I can do nothing but accept the inevitability of these contradictions, forgive myself for them, and work to reduce the amount of hypocrisy in my lifestyle to the best of my ability. Part of the reason I bought a van to live in was to satisfy my desire for a nomadic existence without relying on planes. I’m going to avoid constantly relocating every two or three nights, in favor of a slower rhythm which allows me to see more while driving and flying less. It also helps me dig deeper into the environmentalist community wherever I go, so that I have a better chance at learning a thing or two.
We’re all together in building this movement to protect the planet and her residents. I aspire to use my travels to help build bridges between initiatives the world over, so that we can learn from and support one another. I am committed to constantly reevaluating whether it’s worth the fuel I burn. I’ll let you know about the results!
PS: Other Cansbridge fellows have written beautifully about the many benefits of travel, something I glossed over in this article. Check out this one, or this one, or this one.
This is Part II of a series covering my experience as a Cansbridge fellow in Shenzhen. In Part I, I covered the long journey which eventually found me working at a startup in Shenzhen. Part III walks you through my day-to-day life and how the first three months looked. Thanks for following me on this adventure!
