Upfront

FIONA McCANNOn guilt about flying

IT IS A universally acknowledged truth that travel broadens the mind. And one must be ever-eager to broaden one’s mind. After all, it’s the narrow-mindedness that causes all the trouble these days. In this here 21st century, narrow is only desirable for waists, at least if certain folk are to be believed, while the mind must head in the opposite direction.

One way to ensure the latter is to take a trip, see how others live, and negotiate new cultures and restaurant menus outside your comfort zone. And coming from an island of just 6.3 million people on a planet of about 6.8 billion, it would seem pretty much essential to leave it at some stage, if only to avoid inbreeding.

So huzzah for cheap travel, right? Thanks to the arrival of budget airlines and the internet and such, I can now expand my horizons like never before, and see how the other 99.9 per cent lives. And not just me. The increased availability of cheap airfares means more and more of us can travel: multiple trips abroad are no longer confined to ceann comhairles. Surely this can only be a good thing?

Except it’s not. Because just when it all got accessible, and the future looked like some kind of broad-minded utopia of cultural understanding and cross-pollination, up popped the environment to scupper us all. We, who have been recycling for years (a little tip I learned from a German I know), reusing plastic bags (got that one after a year’s globetrotting when plastic bags became a premium for packing purposes), and refusing to turn the heat on (fair enough, that one came from growing up in Ireland in the 1980s) are now being told that the worst possible thing we can do as ecologically-minded liberals, is travel. Particularly on aircraft.

Er, hang on. Travel broadens the mind, but broad-minded folk should not travel? You see the problem. But there’s no getting away from it: air travel wreaks havoc on the environment, and the only real solution right now is to stop flying.

According to the experts, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference if you didn’t get on a flight at all until well into your teens: this whole air-miles thing doesn’t work on quotas or credits, so too bad if you didn’t get to indulge back in the good old glamour days when smoking and cocktail-quaffing were de rigueur on planes, and you didn’t have to take off your shoes to board them.

This is not quite what I signed up for as a tree-hugger. I’m all about railing against the SUV drivers and investment bankers with houses too big to heat, but since when did innocent country-hoppers, just out for a break from the parochial, become the enemy?

There is a loophole in the form of “love miles”, a term coined by eco-scribe George Monbiot – even he admits that visiting loved ones abroad is morally distinct from plane-hopping for sunshine or shopping. This seems like excellent reasoning to me, given that I’m married to an American whose family lives in New York, have a sister of my own in Dubai, and close friends in places as far-flung as Denmark, Argentina, Australia and London: won’t all that entitle me to some serious love-mileage?

This still means I have to eschew any air travel for work or pleasure purposes. That part is not so easy. What happens when some superstar rocks up in London for a series of interviews and grants The Irish Timesan audience? It's an ethical conundrum of the highest order. Do we fly Muhammad to the mountain, or vice versa, or do we just jack it all in and attempt to conduct the whole thing over Skype?

I know what Monbiot would go for, but that’s not going to sell many newspapers in these difficult times. Truth is, either of the first two options means you’ve got a short-haul flight on your hands – the worst possible kind of flying, environmentally speaking. Way to burn up an atmosphere for a measly livelihood.

At least we can agree to striking off travel for pleasure, which introduces a grim kind of Calvinist future to someone who gets her kicks through passport stamps. It also rules out any honeymoon for the newly-weds, unless we can find someone to visit in the process – and as close as my distant relatives and friends are, precious few of them are up for hosting a newly-nuptialed couple for their first trip of wedded bliss.

I’m hoping yon airline people find an environmentally friendly fuel alternative, or that Richard Branson or Michael O’Leary are required to fork out for our carbon credits, or that we go back to the good old days of targeting SUV drivers, because the truth is, I don’t want to give up flying, even as I know that I should. The dehumanising experience of airports these days and the general unpleasantness of some budget airlines is helping, mind, but I’m still looking for a way to rationalise my eco-thuggery. Which I bet is what most SUV drivers do, too.

I might as well fess up to my own hypocrisy then: I’m all for the environment and all for travel. Moral dilemma? Not really, if I’m being honest. I know the right answer to this one. But it’s not easy being green, as Kermit once sang so sadly.

What is easy and oh so seductive is blaming big business for the consequences of your own irresponsible choices (shakes fist at airlines, governments and everyone who has already been to China).

So I guess that means we all have to stay on this benighted little landmass and go back to the days of mono-culturalism and travel-less narrow-mindedness. The planet had better be worth it.