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A writer wonders how to balance adventure with responsibility.
“I WONT FEEL GOOD ABOUT FLYING UNTIL THE AIRLINES SOLVE THIS”
About ten people sent an article with that headline to my husband when it came out in last year’s December 28th issue of New York Times.
The author did his PhD dissertation on jet engines 13 years ago and says he doesn't see a credible path for the aviation industry to make flying sustainable in the near term. And as soon as he realized that fact, he stopped flying for leisure.
My husband wishes everyone had the same resolve.
The article points out that flying results in 4% of human-made climate change (which sounds teeny to me but apparently is actually a huge number), and that only 10% of the population flies regularly (which sounds teeny to me and is).
I’m surprised that Joel Aronie (that’s my husband) didn’t get sent a thousand copies of this article, considering that for the last five years he has been ranting to everyone who would listen (and some who wouldn't) about what the author calls leisure and what my husband calls willy nilly travel. Translation: jumping on a plane to go to a class reunion or a bar mitzvah or an NBA basketball game, a funeral, a workshop, even a business meeting that isn’t urgent. And if you ask my man what he considers “urgent,” he will say that nothing is all that urgent (even the workshop I teach).
Our friends have learned not to tell him about their plans to go to Japan or Thailand or Spain. These days, they hesitate before sending photos of themselves on exotic vacations, because when my husband saw the picture one poor friend sent of herself standing on a bridge in Amsterdam, smiling and giving the peace sign, he screamed “‘Peace’???” into the air, my air, the one I am also breathing and which he is polluting with his rage and his worry. (But that's another story. Or maybe the same story.)
One of our friends calls him a “Debbie Downer,” and another asked him to stop talking about thorium, the energy-producing element that he feels could save the planet. And another asked him to stop sending doomsday YouTubes about how once we can’t grow grains anymore (which he sees as imminent), dystopia is right around the corner.
Most of our close friends know his lecture about wind and solar not being anywhere close to being able to power the world. And they can quote his take on why he thinks the plug-in hybrid is the only way to go, that the 100% electric vehicle batteries require too much mining of rare earth metals to make them worth it.
But luckily for me, included in that lecture is his admission that he’s a hypocrite. He says, with apology in his voice, that we have a hot tub and we heat with wood and we have done our fair share of traveling by air (but that was before he knew for sure the damage he was personally doing to the planet by flying).
He constantly asks why people aren’t freaking out and changing the way they live. I answer (repeatedly): because we are human.
We compartmentalize. Over here, we’re aware that the planet is burning, and we write checks to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club; and over here, we’re making reservations to go to Dubai.
Another little factoid Joel throws out at dinner parties is that every day there are 100,000 flights in the air. He notes that a 747 holds 50,000 gallons of jet fuel, and every gallon burned puts out 20 pounds of C02 at high altitudes, which means a single 747 can produce 1 million pounds of CO2. That always brings the expected gasps. But right after we pass the asparagus, someone excitedly shares their plans for their trip to Tulum.
I almost got Joel to accept an invitation from friends whose house is sitting empty right on Lake Geneva. I knew he would love to see the Super Collider in Cern, Switzerland, and I think if I had worked on him a bit more he might have succumbed.
But the fact is, over the years, we have swum in the Aegean sea in Greece and we have climbed Masada in Israel and we have dunked in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland and, on a Bultaco motorcycle, we wove in and out of traffic on the Piazza Venezia. We went to the World’s Fair in Montreal. We were surrounded and serenaded by a Mariachi band in Mexico City on my fortieth birthday, and we toured the factories who were making Joel's inventions in China.
So, he understands the seduction of going places and seeing other cultures and learning other customs and eating other foods. He gets it. He really does. But he says times are different now. The paradigm must shift.
The response he hears is always the same: the plane is taking off anyway. How would it help if I didn't go?
If I were married to someone else, and my mate said, “Hey, do you want to go to Paris for our anniversary?”, would I go? Me, who has never been to Paris, would I go? In a New York minute.
But I know he’s right, and at 83, I don’t really feel like I'm missing out on anything. In fact, we have begun to travel again. We used to watch Rick Steves, the travel guru, but we have upgraded: now we’re taking virtual tours online. We recently “went” to Mumbai, and after the tour, we cooked an Indian dinner together, sat down, savored our putter paneer, and marveled how not tired we were from the flight.
Next, we’re thinking of visiting the Fjords in Norway.
I know there are some who would think we've gone off the deep end, but I have one thing to say: we are feeling really good about not flying.
