Flying as an Environmentalist

The amount I’m flying this year is getting me down, because it’s hands-down the most carbon-intensive thing I do, and it negates all the carbon reductions I achieve by eating vegan, biking to work, and trying to reject consumer habits.

I’m flying this year to four conferences to give papers on ecocriticism — the study of how literature and other cultural artifacts like art, movies, and historical documents describe or depict how humans interact with the environment. My scholarly work deals with how the literature of early medieval England represents humans and the environments they occupy and imagine — from wilderness and forests through farms and their homes.

My engagement with medieval ecocriticisms is explicitly activist. I believe that thinking about the ways that humans of the past engaged with their environments can help us understand our present. I also believe that we’re in a time of climate crisis, and ecocritical humanities has to recognize that, and our scholarly endeavors have to advance understanding of the need to act, NOW. So that means I also need to act, myself — and all the flying is a real problem.

The last time I flew, I googled “carbon offsets” for flights, and rapidly went down a rabbit hole of conflicting information. One article claimed individuals don’t need to buy carbon offsets, because airlines are taking care of it. For example, they claimed Delta was providing carbon offsets for all travelers through certain airports, including the one I flew through. Turned out they were only doing that for flights taken on Earth Day.

I decided to create my own carbon sink by planting a tree for every flight I take this year. Here’s number one:

It’s a tiny, baby swamp white oak, maybe a foot tall. I planted it in a gully by Long Branch’s elementary school, with the help of a colleague and friend who has a contact there. In the photo, I’m building a cage made out of hardware cloth that will help protect the little tree from predators, mostly deer, and from accidentally being mowed. I’ll need to check on it periodically, and if we have a dry spell in the next four years I’ll have to water it.

My flights to Detroit, San Francisco, Albuquerque, and Charlottesville will add up to carbon emissions of about 3.4 tons.

A tree can sequester one ton of carbon in 40 years.

I plan to plant four trees this summer to offset the four flights I’m taking. And the labor of doing that is making me think harder about conference planning for next year, because I plan to continue planting trees to offset my own flights. But we’re in climate crisis now — we don’t have 40 years for the trees to grow.