I don’t fly within Europe, my friend says. If the trip’s worth taking, it’s worth taking more slowly, by train, and anyway by the time you’ve gone to the airport and queued for security and boarding and immigration and waited to disembark, the train’s probably quicker anyway. There’s no point you being vegetarian and biking everywhere, she says, if you keeping taking planes.
My friend lives in Berlin, which is not to say that she’s wrong, but also she might feel differently in Ireland. I fly too much, almost all for work, almost all short-haul distances that would be uncomfortable and inconvenient but not impossible by ferry and train. I feel guilty about the flying but I keep doing it, partly because it’s part of my work and also because talking about books to international audiences seems important as well as delightful. On a burning planet with limited resources, we need more international understanding, more curiosity about other lives in other places.
Most of the Irish people I know understand how it is to have your closest friends and family living far away. The greatest blessing of my Irish life is the friends I’ve made here, and I hope they’ll be my friends for ever, but I was 45 when we moved and there’s no replacement for the people who have known and loved and forgiven you in childhood and troubled adolescence and undergraduate foolishness, who watched you fall in love with your husband and heard your children’s toddler malapropisms. My family is metaphorically as well as literally distant, but we all need to see old friends sometimes, in real life, with hugs, breaking bread and passing wine. (Do we need that more than all our children need a planet to live on?)
My son is flying to Paris, Aer Lingus willing, later today. He’ll be spending a couple of weeks living with a French family, speaking French and seeing the world from a different point of view. He’ll come back indefinably altered, in the way that we all are by travel and especially by immersion in another culture and fluency in another language. Of course there are other ways of broadening the mind, and it’s possible to learn wisdom and flexibility anywhere, but I can’t wish that international travel should become again a privilege of great wealth and leisure for his locked-down generation. (I wish we were passing down a healthier planet for them.)
I have made two intercontinental journeys in the last five years, both to participate in literary festivals. I have also turned down invitations to travel intercontinentally for trips that seemed to me too short to justify their impact on both the planet’s health and my own, because I do have some conscience. In New Zealand and California, I talked to audiences and organisers about the environmental impact of international arts festivals. No one was comfortable with the situation, but also no one wanted to return to a world of cultural isolationism, in which only the richest citizens experience art and music and live performance from other places. Of course I know there are online forms of these things – that’s what I did for those invitations I declined in real life – but we all learned the hard way that the internet is not real life and that there’s an energy and a collaboration and a joy in real people in real bodies in a real room that no electronic connection can replace. (Yes, and what joy, what art, will there be for future generations on a burnt-out planet?)
And sometimes, surely, we need to travel for delight, for unfamiliar skies and food and flowers, for good times with beloved people, which still matter at the world’s end.
I don’t have answers. It’s clear that part of the problem is the expectation that individual citizens take action where structures fail to change, but it’s also clear that it’s a cop-out to say that one more economy passenger doesn’t make any difference and it’s the responsibility of government and corporations, not individuals, to address the climate emergency. It’s an emergency, everyone needs to do everything.
And also we still need old friends and new visions.