after l ife
o f
c u l t u re
Flight Shame Stephen Henighan
Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago
I
n 2013 I published a short book about climate change. Among my promotional events for the book was a visit to a graduate seminar at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. My book was emotional and impressionistic; the students knew far more than I did about climate science. At one point, I made an offhand remark about the unsustainable carbon cost of flying. Rather than the nods of agreement I had expected, my comment was met with silence. “I hope we can keep flying,” one student said, “even if we have to give up other things.” The reaction my comment elicited in 2013 might be different today. A movement is building against flying. In North America, this trend is strongest in university circles. In particular, the carbon cost of academic conferences, where hundreds of professors and graduate students fly to a single destination to spend four or five days networking, gossiping, flirting and
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presenting their research, has come under fire. In May 2019, Science magazine reported on the “small but growing minority of academics who are cutting back on their air travel because of climate change.” Most academics who limit their flying are well known in their fields and have secure careers; it is far more damaging, in professional terms, for a young person who is trying to break into academic life to skip a conference. Even so, the carbon cost of academics addicted to airports is coming under scrutiny. A 2018 study by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions found that in 2015–16 the emissions attributable to flights taken by academics and administrators at the University of British Columbia was “equivalent to 63%–73% of the total annual emissions from the operation of the UBC campus.” Flying significantly enlarged the university’s carbon footprint. In Europe a grassroots movement against short-haul flights has altered
travel patterns, swelling demand for long-distance train tickets. Some French parliamentarians have even called for laws to ban flights where the same journey can be made by train. Known in Sweden, where it originated, as flygskam, or “flight shame,” the antiflying movement takes credit for a 5% drop in passenger numbers at Swedish airports between the summers of 2018 and 2019. Flygskam’s most salient representative is the young climate activist Greta Thunberg. In August 2019, refusing to fly to New York to speak at the United Nations, Thunberg spent two weeks making the transatlantic crossing by yacht. Industry observers report that only 18% of the world’s population has set foot in a plane. According to the Sierra Club, flying accounts for 2% of global greenhouse emissions. This relatively sanguine assessment contrasts with the brutal evaluation of the carbon cost of flying made by British science writer
Illustration: Aeronautics, published by Rest Fenner, Paternoster Row, April 1818
