{"id":7469,"date":"2019-05-20T06:20:10","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T06:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7469"},"modified":"2019-05-20T06:20:10","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T06:20:10","slug":"is-your-flight-really-necessary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/05\/20\/is-your-flight-really-necessary\/","title":{"rendered":"Is your flight really necessary?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In last week's THE<\/a> Joanna Kidman of the Victoria University of Wellington<\/a>\u00a0[ @JoannaKidman<\/a>\u00a0]\u00a0<\/span><\/span>says that we need to talk about climate change. \u00a0The \"we\" being frequent flying academics like I used to be. \u00a0She begins:<\/p>\n

I arrived in Toronto during last summer\u2019s record-breaking heatwave. When humidity was taken into account, temperatures were spiking in the mid-40s, and the air felt like a hot, wet towel pressed against your face. Emergency cooling centres were operating at peak capacity and public swimming pools were offering free entry. \u00a0I was one of six thousand people gathering for the International Sociological Association\u2019s quadrennial World Congress of Sociology \u2013 a major event for sociologists everywhere, and the second of three long-haul trips I took from New Zealand to northern hemisphere conferences in 2018. ...<\/em><\/p>\n

Here are a few other quotes that caught my eye:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I\u2019m ... bothered that I play a role in the destruction. As an academic with several large research projects on the go, I spend a lot of time in the air. If it saves a few hours of road travel or an overnight stay in a hotel, I\u2019ll usually catch a plane. I don\u2019t own a bicycle and I haven\u2019t planted a tree in about 10 years. But I don\u2019t like these eerie clusters of strange weather events and other indications that damage to ecosystems is taking place. And I am troubled by the irony of flying thousands of miles to speak about the fears of M\u0101ori youth for the future of Papat\u016b\u0101nuku.<\/em><\/div>\n
\n

Over the years, I\u2019ve been to many conferences where the \u201cprestige economies\u201d of academia \u2013 those engines of white privilege, oiled by male networking practices, male bonding and ethno-sociability<\/a> \u2013 govern everything from the line-up of speakers to the election of Fellows. I\u2019ve met a lot of interesting people along the way, but I\u2019ve also noticed the absences: the indigenous scholars, the academics of colour, the female early career researchers with small children, the part-time faculty on the minimum wage, the untenured workers living precariously between short-term contracts in the academic \u201cgig economy\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Making the 24-hour trip across the world to hear disciplinary experts present their research continues to be a rite of passage for many early career faculty in New Zealand, as well as a professional lifeline for others. Yet it is time that we asked ourselves more searching questions about whether it is always worth it. Is speaking for 10-15 minutes to a privileged and potentially predatory subset of your academic field really worth all the environmental destruction?<\/em><\/div>\n
................................................................<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Kidman is a sociologist. \u00a0How much more pertinent these arguments are to environmental educators and\u00a0environmental education researchers.<\/p>\n

Her article was positive in parts. \u00a0For example:<\/p>\n

\n

Nevertheless, several academic societies and associations are directly addressing the problem. In April of last year, the Society for Cultural Anthropology held its biennial conference, Displacements<\/a>, as both a virtual and in-person event, running simultaneously in 46 countries. Panels were live-streamed through the conference website over a 60-hour period and online participants could access the proceedings from their homes and offices \u2013 or else join local \u201cnodes\u201d where they could watch presentations collectively.<\/em><\/p>\n

The benefits weren\u2019t merely environmental. Registrations were more than six times higher than for the previous year\u2019s physical-only conference. Moreover, this expanded reach drew new audiences<\/a>who do not usually attend international meetings. In fact, it was these participants who drove some of the more exciting debates and conversations that I saw online.<\/em><\/p>\n

But this is how she ended:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I think there is a day of reckoning coming for those of us in academia who, through wilful neglect rather than deliberate planning, are gambling away our futures, one air ticket at a time. The deathly silence about our addiction to air travel needs to be broken as the Anthropocene era of human-driven climate change manifests itself all around us. It is high time.<\/em><\/p>\n

It surely is ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In last week's THE Joanna Kidman of the Victoria University of Wellington\u00a0[ @JoannaKidman\u00a0]\u00a0says that we need to talk about climate change. \u00a0The \"we\" being frequent flying academics like I used to be. \u00a0She begins: I arrived in Toronto during last...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}