My recent flight between Kansas City International airport and Baltimore-Washington International Airport was over 970 miles (each way). Now, calculating how much CO2 planes and cars produce per passenger per mile or km is a vexed topic. But the folks at BlueSkyModel have done some complex calculations that come out to an average of 53 lbs. CO2/passenger/mi.
That means my air travel produced 102,820 lbs. of CO2 – that is, over 51 tons. And that was only across one time zone. And it doesn’t include the rental car. (Or all the “disposable” plastic dishware one inevitably produces while travelling, but that’s another story.) So, is this just a little carbon (self) shaming, or does it relate to writing? Well, I would argue that it has a lot to do with the institution of writing, as currently practiced. For instance: my trip was a research trip – so it directly relates to my writing (and I’m not even a travel writer!). But I suspect the more numerous category of writers’ trips are those we make simply to schmooze and to sell our wares. Successful writers travel. A lot. They go to conferences and book fairs around the world to meet, greet, rub elbows, see, be seen, get to know you, get contracts and publication deals. They go on reading and lecture tours to try to promote their work. And how many writers are there, in the global north? And what if you include aspiring writers? Multiply that figure by thousands of miles a year by 53 lbs./mile, and the magnitude of our (professionally-related) contribution to the climate disaster becomes apparent. Granted, eliminating all of this travel would not decrease the number of cyclones, the incidence and severity of flooding, the intensity of drought and firestorms, or the melting of glaciers that south Asia relies upon for water. But for a field that notably thumps its chest over injustices of all kinds, it is significant that not many people mention the implications of the way we conduct our day-to-day professional lives, where environmental justice is concerned. In that respect, there is not a great deal of difference between us and the software salesman or political consultant sitting next to us on the flight. If we determine our ethical choices based on principles or character (as opposed to utilitarianism), this is something we might want to change. Personally, I don’t travel a great deal and plan to do so even less. But when my book Things Come On came out, I did travel a great deal, at least for a time. I was trying to make my publisher happy, so they’d publish my next book. And I wasn’t especially “woke,” when it came to what was happening to the climate and how that is impacting people around the world. Today, all that travel just doesn’t seem worth it. Will the travel we’re doing today seem meaningful, important, or beneficial ten years from now? One thing we could do would be to develop alternative means of publication and networking – ones that require fewer fossil-fuel BTUs and less money. E-books are not ideal – I, too, dislike them – but I use them and they do require fewer BTUs than paper books (paper production requires more BTUs per pound than concrete, according to Wm. Vollman’s research). Likewise, teleconferencing and telephoning (tele what??) are ways to make connections that require less carbon (and time) than schlepping to Iceland or Singapore or the opposite side of your continent. Also, double-blind peer-reviewing keeps the need to schmooze way down: as both a critic and writer, I can tell you it’s nowhere near as bad on the scholarly side of things. Why not do the same for “creative” writing? Of course, doing any of these things assumes that writers are more willing to confront the realities of climate catastrophe than are other people. And I haven’t seen evidence of that assumption’s being based in reality. We’re all part of capitalism, and we all want that competitive edge - even if it pushes us all over the edge.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |