Two of our good friends, Anirvan Chatterjee and Barnali Ghosh, a couple from the San Francisco Bay Area, recently returned from a year of traveling around the globe, without any flying, while using the 350.org website to meet up with and capture the stories of local climate activists. Check out Anirvan and Barnali's inspiring report-back below…and keep us posted if you embark on your own daring climate adventure!
We were aboard a container ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean when it really hit us: we live on an amazing planet. We had just begun our Year of No Flying, an attempt to get around the planet aviation-free, while documenting the work of local climate action movements.
Aviation is responsible for about 4.9% of the total human impact on the climate, but the fact hadn't really registered until we did our first carbon footprint. Despite our car-free vegetarian lifestyles, our footprint was bigger than that of 90% of Americans, the result of flights to India and around the US. (A return flight to India has about the same impact as an average American driving for one year. We'd always taken flying for granted, and wanted to find out what it might feel like to live without it; we headed out on a journey across oceans and continents by container ship, ferry, train, bus, car, bike, and rickshaw, interviewing 60 climate activists in 12 countries between September 2009 to September 2010.
The 350.org website was our guide to finding climate action groups everywhere we went. We arrived in Japan in time to spend the International Day of Climate Action with the Make the Rule campaign in Tokyo, then crossed Asia by train and bus. We were inspired by emerging youth climate action movements in Hanoi, Saigon, Dhaka, and Bangalore, each at different stages of movement-building. We crossed over to Europe by train, where we eventually made our last stop in London, trying to learn about the coalition of neighbors, climate justice activists, and fiscal conservatives that prevented the expansion of Heathrow Airport. By the end of our year, we'd written about climate justice in developing and developed
We crossed the Atlantic, then returned home to California by train, feeling deeply inspired. We're continuing to focus on the role of aviation and climate change, and have joined up with airport environmental campaigners from around the U.S. to try to build an American aviation justice movement, working toward a leaner, greener, more just aviation system, coupled with better alternatives to an unsustainable system.
We're bringing two of the British aviation/climate organizers we met last year to the U.S. for a national lecture tour, with a little help from 350.org. Catch the Aviation Justice Express tour this October, coming to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. International cooperation is critical, and we're grateful to be part of this amazing network bringing us all together to take on the biggest challenge on the planet.