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A former teacher who now runs a climate organization from Burlington, Vermont, Dan Castrigano says that he had always enjoyed traveling, but eventually became worried about his carbon footprint.
He tried first buying carbon offsets. He eventually decided to stop flying.
This is Why We Did It
A small but growing number have given up flying due to climate concerns. The joy they experienced on the journey is what surprised them.
“There was this cognitive dissonance when I would fly,” he says. “I was teaching about climate to seventh and eighth graders, and I just kind of became embarrassed that I was flying to Europe for vacation.”
With more people recognizing the climate impact of the aviation industry, and more people interested in lowering their own carbon footprints, a new ethos of “slow,” climate-friendly travel is taking hold. And those at the forefront of this movement – travelers like Mr. Castrigano who have pledged to go “flight free” for a year or more – claim that their new approach from getting here to there is surprisingly fun.
Waking up on a sleeper train to an Indiana sunrise en route to Chicago is just better than fighting the crowds at O’Hare International Airport, Mr. Castrigano says.
“It’s extremely joyful not to fly,” he says. “It’s liberating.”
Jack Hansen was a junior at University of Vermont when he last flew in an airplane. He flew from Denmark to get back from a semester in Copenhagen. He stopped in Iceland and landed in New York.
The next term, however, one of his professors questioned students about their energy usage. And when Mr. Hansen did the math, he realized that just one leg of that international flight accounted for more energy, and more greenhouse gas emissions, than all the other things he had done that year combined – the driving and heating and lighting and eating and everything else.
He was stunned.
This is Why We Did It
A small but growing number have given up flying due to climate concerns. The joy they experienced on the journey is what surprised them.
“I just couldn’t justify it,” he says. “It really is an extreme. It’s an extreme amount of energy, an extreme amount of pollution.”
So Mr. Hansen decided that he would stop flying. This was in 2015. He has been traveling by train, bike, car, and even wrote a song about the challenges of returning to Chicago via overnight bus. He has never been on an airplane.
He also says that he has never experienced travel more joy.
He knows that some find this hard to believe – including many friends and family members. They look at a two-day overland trip from Burlington, Vermont, to Chicago, compare it to 2 1/2 hours in the air, and decide Mr. Hansen’s approach is ludicrous.
But with more people recognizing the climate impact of the aviation industry, and more people interested in lowering their own carbon footprint, a new ethos of “slow,” climate-friendly travel is taking hold. And those at the forefront of this movement – travelers like Mr. Hansen who have pledged to go “flight free” for a year or more – claim that their new approach from getting here to there is surprisingly fun.
“The motivation initially is the emissions, but once you try it, you think, ‘Why have I been torturing myself?’ says Anna Hughes, the head of Flight Free UK, a group based in the United Kingdom that has collected some 10,000 pledges from people to eschew flying. “Flights are too fast, and kind of fake. You’re air dropped from one place to another.”
She says that if you travel slower, it will return to what it was once: a slow metamorphosis from one place to the next, a feeling of space, and unwinding of your time.
“Once you’ve tasted this way of travel, you understand what it’s all about,” she says.
“The flip side is something positive”
Psychologists believe there is more to land-based travel’s satisfaction. Research is increasingly linking climate- and environment-friendly behavior to a person’s sense of well-being. Stephanie Johnson Zawadzki from the University of Groningen (Netherlands) explored the notion that environmental living is all about giving up. She found numerous studies showing that people not only felt better when they took easy “green” actions – choosing a paper bag at the grocery store, for instance, or buying a “sustainable” product – but also reported an improved sense of well-being when those actions required more give.
“Indeed, despite the possible inconvenience, cost, or discomfort which are sometimes associated with pro-environmental behaviors, people appear to consistently associate pro-environmental behaviors with positive feelings rather than negative ones,” she wrote.
Part of this, psychologists speculate, is that taking actions to counteract global warming helps counteract “climate distress,” an increasingly recognized psychological phenomenon.
Climate distress, explains New York-based psychologist Wendy Greenspun, is “a range of emotional reactions from sadness to despair to grief to anger and rage, hope and shame and guilt.” And one of the key ways to build resilience to it, she says, is to behave like part of the solution, and to creatively connect with others doing the same.
“Guilt maybe leads us to recognize that we care and we want to repair,” she says. “Anger can often be the fuel for taking action rather than being helpless. Love can be found in the loss of grief or other feelings. There’s something for me about negative or distressed emotions – the flip side is something positive.”
Traveling with joy – and justice – in mind
This was true for Dan Castrigano.
A former teacher, he now runs a climate organization out of Burlington. He claims that he has worried for years about flying. He bought carbon offsets to try to lower his guilt. The offset system is an accounting mechanism that allows individuals and organizations to pay to keep carbon out in one area to offset their emissions elsewhere. But he knew that many climate activists doubted the real value of offsets, and he didn’t feel much better.
“There was this cognitive dissonance when I would fly,” he says. “I was teaching about climate to seventh and eighth graders, and I just kind of became embarrassed that I was flying to Europe for vacation.”
He decided to quit flying altogether. He now helps to run Flight Free USA which connects people who have committed to flying no matter what time of the year or month.
“It’s extremely joyful not to fly,” he says. “It’s liberating.”
The aviation sector is responsible for around 2.5% of the world’s carbon emissions, according to researchers. There’s a greater total global warming impact when scientists consider the heating effect of planes’ contrails – those temporary, line-like clouds formed by an airplane’s exhaust stream.
In an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released this month, scientists noted that although land-based vehicles still cause most transportation-related emissions, there are ways to stabilize or decrease those greenhouse gasses. However, the aviation sector is generating more emissions and there is no easy way to reduce them.
This is partly due to the fact that there is no alternative to jetfuel. While biofuels, electric planes, and green hydrogen engines are all the focus of research and speculation, the only way to lower the aviation industry’s climate impact at the moment is to either fly less or use offsets.
“There are just a lot of things we did on default”
And more people are concerned about this – even as the aviation industry grows.
The concept of flygskam – a Swedish word usually translated as “flight shame” – is common in Europe; climate activist Greta Thunberg helped popularize the term when she traveled across the Atlantic in a racing yacht to avoid going by plane to a 2019 conference in New York. According to a World Economic Forum survey, 77% of global consumers surveyed said that they would choose a less carbon-intensive mode of transport if possible, even if it was less convenient or more expensive. McKinsey, a consulting firm, recently reported that sustainability concerns are growing and one of the biggest threats to the aviation industry.
According to Shengyin, Shengyin Xu is the global sustainability initiative leader for the World Resources Institute.
“There are just a lot of things we did on default,” she says. “Historically, when we were invited to speak at a conference we would go and book a ticket.”
These climate concerns are well-known to the airline industry. It has pledged to become “carbon neutral” by 2050, primarily by using carbon offsets. But climate activists remain skeptical.
“There is no getting away from it,” says Ms. Hughes. “As an individual, there is nothing you can do in your life to raise your emissions as fast and as high as taking a flight. I could drive a car all year, and the cost per passenger would be the same as a flight from London to New York. It’s insane how much fossil fuel it takes to get something so heavy up into the air and going so far.”
She and other activists claim that there is also a justice component.
A growing body of research shows that the world’s richest countries and individuals emit a hugely disproportionate amount of the greenhouse gasses that warm the atmosphere. Research from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute in 2020, for instance, found that the richest 10% of the world’s population were responsible for 52% of the globe’s cumulative greenhouse gas emissions; the richest 1% was responsible for 15%.
This is also true for air travel.
Although it’s hard to get exact statistics, most research shows that around 80% of the world’s population will never travel on an airplane. In 2018, a study by Sweden’s Linnaeus University found that only 11% of the world’s population took a flight that year. Meanwhile, frequent fliers, who comprise 1% of the world’s population, generated half of the aviation industry’s carbon emissions.
It is because of this that Mr. Hansen feels so happy to stay on the ground.
“I want to live in a way where I know that, if everyone on earth was living like me, the world would be OK,” he says. “When it comes to individual lifestyle behaviors, that’s the baseline for me.”
Besides, if he was flying, he’d never have the story of when his girlfriend’s bike got a flat tire in rural Vermont, and how a stranger helped them and became a new friend. He wouldn’t have watched the sun rise over Indiana from a train’s sleeper car.
And he definitely wouldn’t have had those lyrics about the overnight bus to Chicago.
