How far can we get without flying?

How far can we get without flying?

Asks the article. I sigh.

The author shows us how much emissions go into the average American’s air travel. He shares how he got the courage to opt out of air travel. He paints a rosy picture of his family’s adventures road tripping in a veggie oil car to visit his family halfway across the country. “I suspect most people don’t know the huge impact of their flying – but I also suspect that many of us are addicted to it.”

He’s right. What would my carbon footprint look like if I calculated my air travel? I have a feeling I don’t want to know.

I know air travel is bad for the planet: planes not only emit CO2, but also have other effects that enhance warming in the short-term. I also know what that means for human beings: Nicaragua is the 4^th country most affected by climate change in the world. The farmers we work with are struggling as we enter our third year of drought. This week the organics co-op had to send its precious funds to pay down a debt incurred when the cotton crop failed two years ago. Carbon emissions from airplanes contribute to these very real human effects.

But flying has also contributed to the pivotal moments in my life: my first international flight resulted in meeting my future husband. Without flying, I never would have come to Nicaragua in the first place, found a home, or my calling. Now flying connects me to my family: thanks to air travel I bounced my nephews on my knees as babies, watched my father-in-law play peek-a-boo with my daughters, showed my parents my adopted country. It simply would not have been possible to do any of that without airplanes: there are five international borders and an entire ocean between our home and our families.

Family moments made possible by flying

“Chances are that [in the future] we’ll live nearer to our friends and loved ones, and we won’t be expected to travel so far for work. Both these seem like good things to me,” the author concludes. I’m uncomfortable. I squirm a little in my chair. Is my discomfort only guilt over my continued air travel, or is there something else?

Before that first flight, I’d never been east of Helena, Montana. My world was small, my understanding of it limited to what I’d seen in the Inland Northwest of the United States. When I close my eyes and think of what that first trip did, I can see the lens of my life zoom out, I can feel how I opened up, how learned to question what I had been told was true, how I suddenly and viscerally understood that the rest of the world was really out there, and it was full of real people. Maybe the climate scientist who wrote the article was born with an unusual sensitivity to empathize and to imagine scenes he’s never witnessed. More likely, he was concientizado – had his conscience raised – during his own travels and education. I certainly had to be concientizada –  if I’d stayed in my hometown listening to the loudest voices, it’s likely I wouldn’t even believe in climate change today.

That is the piece we are missing: how can you concientizar those who don’t see the effects of climate change unless they leave their safe place and come somewhere like Nicaragua, where that suffering is tangible?

Cross-cultural understanding, made possible by flying

Just two weeks ago, I had the privilege of seeing with my own eyes the opening that can happen when someone dares to leave home and hearth. We had a group of folks new to Nicaragua with us and one of them went walking in Nueva Vida alone. When one of our volunteers found him and told him that it was not safe, he seemed to come back to reality. He began to make connections between our barrio and one he knew closer to home, where he’d witnessed a friend’s fatal shooting. He was able to connect the dots between a marginalized community in Nicaragua and one in the U.S., and his fledgling understanding of Nueva Vida helped him to better understand his home community.

Transformations like that happen all the time, with people who come to work even a few days with us, and they might never have begun without the airplane. It isn’t necessary to travel by air to be concientizado, but flying does make it possible for so many people to connect with other humans on a more profound level. I wish there were a way to calculate that into our carbon footprint. - Becca