The headline story in today’s issue of Salon is Katharine Mieszkowski’s article “You are now free to pollute about the country,” on the rising environmental consciousness among air travelers. It seems that everywhere I turn these days there’s a heated discussion about travel, environmental awareness, and carbon offsets. The three bloggers for this site belong to a forum at Travelwriters.com that recently had a heated discussion about the environmental ethics of flying for travel writing.

We’ve heard a lot about the environmental impact of travel in recent months, from World Hum’s recent interview with Leo Hickman (regarding his book “The Final Call,” about the often unseen costs and effects of travel), to Plane Stupid’s campaign to end cheap flights in the UK. Mieszkowski’s piece is not an expose or coverage of breaking news, but rather an excellent summary of where air travel falls in the debate of environmental awareness and consumer decision-making so far.

It’s no news that Britain and the rest of Europe are far ahead of America on environmental issues, from requiring chemical companies, for the first time, to prove that their products aren’t harmful to humans, to the increased support for high-speed, integrated rail networks. Mieszkowski focuses on a major consumer-environmental issue Britain in particular faces, which is the expectation of cheap flights. She asked Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler and Rough Guide founder Mark Ellingham to weigh in: ‘”In Europe, and especially Britain, we have become addicted to cheap flights, heading off to Rome for the day or Prague for the weekend,” writes Ellingham in e-mail. “Many people buy these as casually as booking a restaurant. I consider this ‘binge flying’ and I don’t think it’s sustainable behavior.”‘

It should also be no news by now that our environmental problems are a by-product of waste, an excess of consumerism as Steve so eloquently pointed out in a recent post. People not only expect to be able to heat and cool their homes — no matter how large or energy-inefficient — at will, they expect to be able to fly anywhere, whenever they want, for an affordable price.

That said, as Mieszkowski points out, air travel makes up a very small percentage of worldwide carbon emissions (if cheap flights continue, this could rise drastically as populations in China, for example, earn their way into the middle class), and of that the majority is business travel.

It’s easy to pick on people who are flying somewhere for a few days’ vacation, or travel writers sitting on an exhaust-spewing plane on the tarmac for hours, but Mieszkowski also notes that travel increasingly has a beneficial environmental side, too: rainforest loss is one of the largest contributors to CO2 emissions on the planet; when tourism rather than agriculture or ranching become a viable option for a local economy, those rainforests tend to stay put when they would otherwise be slashed for land use.

The problem of air travel impact isn’t an easy one to unravel. Britain might be focused on cheap flights, but here in the US we don’t always have a lot of options. I make an 11-hour drive to Tennessee every year for the National Storytelling Festival, after finding that flying was not only more expensive, it was also a lot more hassle. If a train were available, even if it took longer, I’d be on it like a shot. But train travel is something that just refuses to take off in the States. I wish it would. In my college days I took Amtrak, 24 hours each way, from my university town to my hometown, every Christmas and summer, simply because it was cheaper and a lot more pleasant. But now it would take me over 48 hours to get to Montana from New York, not counting inevitable delays and dismissing the added cost of getting a bed instead of a seat. So I fly. It’s a miserable experience, as flying often is these days, involving four airports, and is almost twice the price of flying to London. If it were cheaper, would I go more often than once a year? Definitely, yet I think of myself as a person dedicated to the environment.

It’s perhaps the future impact of increased air travel that we need to worry about, which is why cheap flights are, as Ellingham noted, unsustainable. That’s not just about the carbon emissions — Patrick Smith of the Ask the Pilot blog has been hammering away recently at the plane-choked skies and runways that are creating delay disasters at major airports like JFK.

In truth, what we need is another way to think about the problem. Getting tourists to reduce that “binge flying” is a good start, although focusing on reducing business travel would have a much greater impact. My spouse alone makes a transatlantic flight at least every six weeks if not once a month, and smart business practices could cut most of that out (I’d sure miss the miles, though!). But that doesn’t change the fact that flying itself is just an inefficient way of shuttling people from one place to another. As with the problem of worldwide energy consumption in general (where the huge environmental devastation of coal mining is glossed over when presenting shiny, supposedly “clean-burning” coal power plants), there are no good answers.

Related posts:

1. Costa Rica’s bold environmental move: the eco-tourism pioneer looks to set a new standard
2. Sensitizing the Unwary Traveler
3. America’s greatest rural traveler: government demographer Calvin Beale
4. Cower the Conquering Traveler

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 7:29 am and is filed under Antonia projects, travel stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.