This is my attempt to make what difference I can against the horrendous environmental crises we are making, by sending out some food for contemplation and conversation. It began as a long letter sent out to a few dozen friends, out of the need to feel that I was at least doing something (beyond simply living my life as low-carbon as I can manage), and which I posted here as my first entry. The title of the blog comes from a story I once heard, which (as I have finally found) was adapted from an essay by the anthropologist and philosopher Loren Eiseley. The version I first heard goes like this: A father and child are walking on a beach that is covered as far as the eye can see with starfish washed ashore, dead and dying. When the child picks up a starfish to toss it back in the ocean, the father asks "Why? What difference can you possibly make, just you, with all these thousands and thousands of starfish dying?" And the child picks up another one, tosses it in the ocean, and says "It makes a difference to that one..."

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Kevin Anderson on flying

I'm still working on the next long post, about the carbon cost of eating meat (I work pretty slowly during the school year, I'm afraid)… in the meantime, I recently heard an interview on Democracy Now with Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the COP 19 climate conference. They had a lot of things to say about many aspects of the climate crisis, and you can read (or watch) the whole interview here; but in light of my last post, I was especially interested in the part about why they took a 23-hour train ride to the conference instead of flying. His basic point is about hyper-mobility — here's a bit of an excerpt, in response to a question about using a train and using a plane, in terms of energy consumption:

"Well, a lot of people just ask me that question: Is the train that much better than the plane? Actually, it doesn’t really matter, in terms of the journey, whether it’s better or not, because what happens if you go by train is you don’t go very often. So you immediately curtail about how much you travel. And also, you plan when you get there to spend longer there. So I went to China, and I spent two weeks doing a lecture tour in China, as many of my colleagues flew there to give 20-minute talks and then flew back the following day, and then probably the following week were flying to another venue. So, it’s not the actual emissions from the journey that matter; it’s how it makes you change your life.

"Virtually everyone that I’ve spoken to who’s flown here say, "Oh, I flew here and then got a taxi into Warsaw." So people who fly already do not then use public transport to, say, travel back into the town. It normalizes a whole load of high-carbon activities, that we then—that then become what we do every single day…

"You know, we manage to engage with scientists around the world using all of the forms of communication that we’re all using here... We do not have to keep flying around the world in a sort of old-fashioned, colonial style. You know, here’s the great white hope, the great white males from the rich parts of the world, flying around to the poor parts of the world, telling them how they should be living their lives. So I think that we really need to be stepping away from thinking about the world like that."

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