[Scpg] food for thought...

[anna carney-melcher]

We need to start thinking about another way to fly, that does not use  
fossil fuels.
Thought is the beginning of manifestation.
Anna.
On Nov 3, 2010, at 9:56 AM, lbuzzell at aol.com wrote:

This was passed along to us by George Vye.  A tough topic! We fly only  
for good reasons (family, conferences, teaching, learning) as well as  
not so good.  But the hard fact is that every flight, no matter how  
well intentioned, damages the planet.  I confess to still flying  
occasionally (albeit hopefully for good reasons) and I have no good  
answers, only questions...

Linda
Flying Is One of the Worst Things You Can Do for the Environment -- So  
Why Do So Many Well-Intentioned Folks Do It?
By Joseph Nevins, AlterNet
Posted on November 1, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148675/

You’re in a hurry, and for good reason. You -- or people you identify  
with -- have to catch a flight to somewhere like Cochabamba, Detroit,  
London, Montreal, or Washington, D.C. You’re off to participate in a  
mass mobilization, a social forum or a meeting, to protest, to  
exchange ideas, to investigate, to bear witness or demonstrate your  
solidarity. These gatherings are a manifestation of, and contributor  
to, exciting and important efforts of social and environmental justice  
activists, advocates, analysts and organizers struggling to build a  
better world.

Given the political and intellectual energy these get-togethers embody  
and help to spur on, the allure to participate by flying “there” is  
undeniable. They provide valuable opportunities for networking,  
debate, discussion, protest, and organization- or movement-building.  
They also speak powerfully to the willingness and ability of many to  
expend significant resources to advance weighty causes.

Such long-distance engagement also illustrates the scale of the  
challenges humanity faces. Indeed, the institutions and individuals  
who give rise to our most pressing problems typically exercise great  
mobility and exert their power in a manner that shows little regard  
for territorial limits. Accordingly, those of us who want to contest  
what they do often must labor across long distances to enable and  
strengthen relationships with others. And a common way we from the  
relatively wealthy parts and sectors of the planet do so is by flying.

The trouble with this is that flying is the single most ecologically  
costly act of individual consumption, one that requires the  
exploitation of large amounts of environmental and human resources. In  
a world of deep inequality, it thus also speaks to privilege -- most  
notably what we might call ecological privilege -- and its ugly  
flipside, disadvantage.

The exercise of this privilege flows from highly differentiated access  
to the world’s resource base and helps to intensify the planet’s  
degradation, contributing in the process to all sorts of unevenly  
distributed social ills. As numerous studies demonstrate, for example,  
climate change -- to which flying contributes significantly --  
disproportionately harms people of color and low-income populations.  
Air travel is therefore inextricably part of the making of global  
inequities along axes such as those of race and empire.

That our decisions to fly have profound implications for the welfare  
of people and places across the globe illustrates how the movements of  
people are, among other things, “products and producers of power” --  
as geographer Tim Cresswell asserts. Those with more power  
consequently have greater mobility than those with less, while their  
mobility, in and of itself, helps to enhance their advantage over the  
less fortunate.

For those of us from the planet’s more privileged portions,  
acknowledgment of these ties should give serious pause before  
embracing the air travel that has become standard operating procedure  
among all too many. It should also compel us to engage political work  
in a manner commensurate with the ever-more-evident reality of a  
fragile and threatened biosphere. This requires a radical reduction in  
activism-related flying.

Do You Really Need to Go to That Meeting?

Because flying allows relatively quick travel over great distance, it  
facilitates far more resource consumption than other transport modes.  
Undoubtedly, many airborne voyagers would forgo trips is they had to  
use slower, more time-intensive, surface-level travel.

Moreover, the climate-destabilizing effects of air travel -- per  
passenger mile -- dwarfs that of other modes because of the enhanced  
climatic “forcing” it brings about: due to the height at which planes  
fly combined with the mixture of gases and particles they emit,  
conventional air travel detrimentally impacts global climate  
approximately 2.7 times more than that of its carbon emissions alone,  
according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Yet it is striking how little one hears about this from those involved  
in environmental and social justice work. To many, the link between  
the problems they decry and try to remedy and their own consumption is  
seemingly invisible. Take, for instance, a Jan. 7, 2010 article by  
Orville Schell of the Asia Institute, where he works on, among other  
matters, climate change. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Schell  
laments the Himalaya’s melting glaciers. They are, he writes, “wasting  
away on an overheated planet, and no one knows what to do about it.”  
Meanwhile, he mentions that he has “roamed the world from San  
Francisco to Copenhagen to Beijing to Dubai” over “the past few  
months” -- presumably by airplane.

Such a disconnect is hardly exceptional: a few years ago, a friend who  
works on climate issues for a progressive international NGO informed  
me that he and his colleagues had never discussed the ecological costs  
of flying in relation to their participation in meetings in distant  
locales.

Critical scrutiny of these costs did emerge somewhat in the context of  
the Dec. 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. The gathering reportedly  
generated 46,200 metric tons of carbon dioxide (an estimated 2,000- 
plus tons of which was due to President Barack Obama’s two Air Force  
One jets alone), the vast majority of which came from the flights of  
the delegates, officials, journalists, activists, and observers in  
attendance. (This is roughly equal to the annual emissions output of  
660,000 Ethiopians or, given the profoundly different levels of  
consumption across the planet, 2,300 Americans -- according to U.S.  
government data.)

But the voicing of concerns about such matters was isolated and, in  
places like the United States, almost non-existent -- at least as  
indicated by media coverage.

Ironically, an organization critical of efforts to regulate carbon  
emissions, “Americans for Prosperity,” raised the issue. Trying to  
discredit U.S. student activists who had disrupted one of the Tea  
Party-allied group’s climate-change-skeptic sessions in Copenhagen, it  
posted a video on YouTube titled “Eco Hypocrites Fly in Jets Across  
Atlantic to Attack AFP.”

Given Americans for Prosperity’s climate-change-denial politics and  
the fact that its representatives had also flown to Denmark, it is  
difficult to take seriously its accusation of hypocrisy. That said, it  
forces the question of how one justifies an oversized ecological  
footprint -- as Grist, the online environmental magazine put it in  
relation to flying to Copenhagen -- “to help save the planet.”

What is striking about the Grist piece (May 17, 2009) is that it  
merely mentions ships as a low-impact alternative to flights, but only  
after saying that flying “is pretty much the only option” for non- 
European attendees. More importantly, it didn’t even raise the option  
of not going to Copenhagen -- and pursuing other courses of action to  
advance a climate justice agenda in relation to the conference. To  
give one example, how about organizing in one’s hometown during the  
gathering and pressuring elected officials from the area to actively  
support a strong international agreement?

This is not to say that no one should have gone to Copenhagen -- or to  
call for the end of all gatherings that involve long-distance travel.  
Nor is to say that no one should ever fly. For some, attending  
meetings in far-flung locales is absolutely necessary. But for many  
their attendance is not vital to the cause’s advancement. Moreover,  
some who would normally fly can get there by other means. And, of  
course, perhaps the in-person gathering need not take place, and would- 
be participants can figure out other ways to communicate and  
collaborate, and to further their political agenda.

In other words, there are alternatives to what has become the default  
option. But for great numbers of us, consideration of such  
alternatives doesn’t happen -- in large part because flying is so easy  
and inexpensive, at least in the financial sense.

When Green Living Is Not So Green

Not having to seriously consider alternatives to the dominant ways of  
doing things is one of the beauties of privilege -- for those who have  
it at any rate. According to a 2008 study by researchers at Britain’s  
Exeter University, supporters of “green living” -- those who try to  
live lightly by, for example, rejecting bottled war, biking or walking  
whenever possible, recycling and composting -- are the most likely to  
engage in long-distance flying. These relatively wealthy folks are  
also as resistant to changing their high-flying practices as those  
skeptical of climate change science.

This demonstrates how privilege is structured into the social order in  
such a way that it is invisible to many, or comes to be seen (at least  
by its defenders) as the natural or acceptable order of things. There  
are important questions that privileged people simply don’t ask or  
don’t have to answer. Here’s one: how do you justify the appropriation  
of an unsustainable and socially unjust share of the biosphere’s  
resources in a manner that concentrates benefits among a minority, and  
detriments in those associated with a disadvantaged majority?

In posing such a question, I am mindful of Derrick Jensen’s warning  
(Orion, July/August 2009) against thinking that taking shorter showers  
will change the world. Those working for ecological sustainability and  
justice, Jensen argues, must not retreat into a comfortable focus on  
individual consumption and avoid the very necessary and hard struggle  
against powerful structures and institutions that drive much of the  
destruction of the biosphere.

At the same time, we should also avoid the trap of making a simple  
distinction between the individual and the collective, agency and  
structure. The work-related flights of social and environmental  
justice advocates add up in significant ways. A roundtrip flight  
between New York City and Los Angeles on a typical commercial jet  
yields an estimated 715 kilos of CO2 per economy class passenger,  
according to the International Civil Aviation Organization. This  
results in what is effectively, in terms of climatic forcing, 1,917  
kilos, or almost two tons, of emissions.

Opinion varies as to what is a sustainable level of carbon emissions  
per capita were the “right to pollute” allocated equitably among the  
world’s human inhabitants. What they all suggest is that flying and a  
sustainable lifestyle are at fundamental odds.

The London-based International Institute for Environment and  
Development (IIED) posits two metric tons per person at present as the  
cut-off. But if we project into the future and assume a need to cut  
global emissions by a whopping 90 percent vis-à-vis 1990 levels in the  
next few decades to keep within a safe upper limit of atmospheric  
carbon, the IIED asserts we must achieve 0.45 tons per capita. Either  
way, that New York-L.A. flight at best effectively equals the  
allowable annual emissions of an average resident of the planet or  
exceeds it manifold.

Such numbers have led analyst and activist George Monbiot to conclude  
in his book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, that “most of  
the aeroplanes flying today be grounded.” In addition to meaning the  
end of distant holiday travel “unless you are prepared to take a long  
time getting there” (e.g. by bus, train or ship), it also means “most  
painfully,” he says in reference to himself, the end of airborne  
travel to “political meetings in Porto Alegre.”

Air Travel’s Ecological Footprint

Part of the problem associated with challenging ecological privilege  
is that, like all systems of structural violence, the myriad costs and  
injuries associated with it are rarely visible to the beneficiaries in  
any sort of immediate, tangible, easily accessed way. Of course, there  
are rare occasions when the costs of the typically out-of-view  
extraction and production of the carbon-based fuels that drive modern  
transportation become horrifically visible: when we see, for instance,  
images of oil-soaked pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico, or view and  
listen to video of inhabitants of the Niger Delta’s ravaged villages  
who have the misfortune of sitting atop lucrative oil deposits.

But in terms of the consumption of petroleum, the resulting harm is  
cumulative over time and space, its effects socialized and delayed,  
while the benefits (getting from point A to B quickly) are individual  
and immediate. So phenomena such as increased desertification,  
biodiversity loss, drought, or rising sea levels -- and the attendant  
human and non-human dislocating and destructive consequences -- seem  
distant, and unrelated to “us.” They become what anthropologist Nancy  
Scheper-Hughes calls “the violence of everyday life,” or what writer  
Rob Nixon characterizes as “slow violence.”

Raising the issue of air travel’s ecological footprint, and the  
environmental and social hazards associated with flying, does not make  
for comfortable discussion. My experience is that some respond  
defensively, many engage in verbal acrobatics or make jokes as a way  
of deflecting the conversation, or some simply ignore the matter and  
change the subject. At the same time, a small but not insignificant  
number acknowledge the need to greatly reduce that footprint. Yet few  
actually follow through in terms of the ethical and ecological  
implications of that acknowledgment.

It seems that too many environmental and social justice advocates  
think they should be exempt from reducing their aviation-related  
footprint because their work is important. The continue their airborne  
ways because they don’t see “realistic” alternatives, and, perhaps,  
more importantly, because they can.

It is not that the exercise of privilege can’t be put to good use, but  
such action always and inherently also brings about injury. So the  
question we have to grapple with individually and collectively is,  
does the resulting good compensate (at the very least) for the harm,  
while laying the groundwork for eliminating the system of privilege  
and disadvantage -- what ultimately, from a social and environmental  
justice perspective, has to be the goal of progressively minded folks?

We Can Do Better

As someone who has engaged in more than my share of activist-related  
flying over the years -- to go to protests and conferences, to  
participate in national and international meetings of organizations I  
have been involved in, to lobby government officials, or to give  
lectures -- I appreciate the many positives associated with long- 
distance travel in furthering a transformative politics. It has  
allowed me to connect and collaborate with old friends and colleagues  
on important matters and make new ones, and to learn a great deal --  
in addition to having a good time and visiting interesting places.

Yet, in looking back, I have to admit that most of it was unnecessary.  
Given the heavy socio-ecological costs involved, I could and should  
have pursued far more environmentally sustainable alternatives that  
would have involved my staying put physically, while still being in  
position to connect with people afar and advance the struggle. (As  
Bill McKibben argues in his book Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough  
Planet, Internet-related communication can and must serve as the  
substitute “trip” for the jet travel that climate change and falling  
oil supplies no longer permit.) And if it was so important that I go  
“there” in person, I should have, and could have in most instances,  
taken the time to travel slowly and on the Earth’s surface.

Obviously, social and environmental justice advocates are hardly among  
the principle forces bringing about the planet’s degradation. But what  
we do matters -- for better and for worse. As Monbiot points out,  
“well-meaning people are as capable of destroying the biosphere as the  
executives of Exxon.” So, if for no other reasons than the necessity  
of “walking the walk” and the demands of a biosphere under siege, we  
need to hold ourselves to a much higher standard in terms of how we  
conduct ourselves.

By challenging our own ecological privilege and working to find less  
environmentally destructive methods of connecting with others, we  
lessen our complicity in racism, imperialism, and other malignant  
“isms” that disproportionately harm peoples and places on the national  
and global margins. We also show others -- activists, friends, and  
family members who fly unhesitatingly -- that not only is another  
world possible, but also some of what needs to be done to bring about  
that world.


Joseph Nevins is an associate professor of geography at Vassar  
College. Among his books are Dying to Live: A Story of U.S.  
Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid, and Operation Gatekeeper  
and Beyond: The War on 'Illegals' and the Remaking of the U.S. Mexico  
Boundary.


_______________________________________________
Scpg mailing list
Scpg at arashi.com
https://www.arashi.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/scpg

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.permaculture-guilds.org/pipermail/southern-california-permaculture/attachments/20101103/2e4b0cf3/attachment.html>