Embracing our own hypocrisies

Yesterday Ed Gillespie wrote a Guardian column on the hypocrisy of 'green' celebrities. Debate raged in the comment reel, I can't imagine Ed got a lot of work done as he typed up defense after defense of his own behaviour, which according to the accusations chucked at him meant he was no less a hypocrite than Sting, Bono and chums. Ed has responded again this morning on the safer territory of the Futerra blog. I started to comment on it there, but got carried away, so am giving my response here instead.

I find that being honest with people from the beginning that I don't always 'walk my talk' helps temper accusations that I'm giving it the old hypocritical: 'do as I say not as I do'. I do environmentally damaging things all the time, it's not because I HATE the environment, but because I like other things too. I enjoy experiencing what the wonders of the human mind has been able to create and make possible: eg: Reading festival, aeroplanes, wine, iPhones, go carting, etc, etc, etc. As Robert Tressell in 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' described it, I like to enjoy the 'benefits of civilisation' a little bit. To deny ourselves the 'benefits of civilisation' is to deny ourselves what it is to be human. Robert Tressell's painters and decorators, his ragged trousered philanthropists, were being denied this because of the low wages paid to them by those they worked for. Their bosses were milking the profits and enjoying the finer things in life, while keeping their employees in poverty. It is why the central character, Frank Owen, saw himself as a philanthropist. He, his fellow workers and their families were being forced to sacrifice their own basic wellbeing and enjoyment of life by the controlling elite, corrupt forces of business and local government. We all need to enjoy what it is to be human, when people deny us the benefits of civilisation we quite rightly rebel.

Thanks to my ongoing sustainability education, I'm learning how to ensure I meet my basic material needs (food, clothing, shelter) in as low impact a way as possible and am discovering how to enjoy music, travel, drinking, communication, speed etc, etc, in lower impact ways too. I've questioned whether Reading Festival is really that enjoyable compared to writing and playing my own music with friends, whether I need to travel by plane to Morocco, or whether an overland journey might be more fun and whether the satisfaction of ripping downhill at 50mph on my racing bike after a long climb up is more fun than go-carting. This doesn't mean I don't sometimes want to go to a big music festival and still do; or don't enjoy go-carting when I do it, I truly do; or don't use an iPhone (I'm a slave to it). I do do all these things, but a bit less now and it is because I have learned that what it is I get out of them can be found in other, more fulfilling ways. And with some sustainability literacy I'm able to do them in an environmentally more sensitive way.

But, hey, I flew back from Morocco. I want to talk to you about that, not to justify it to you, just to dig deeper into this common dilemma. Exploring why, despite all the physical and emotional discomfort it caused me, it still made the most sense and was therefore ultimately what I wanted to do. In the list of my life's priorities, my environmental concerns are sometimes trumped by my other concerns - I want to talk to you about those other concerns and how they came to be. Exploring with people our own environmentally destructive behaviours and what drives them takes you to a position where your audience feels they can walk alongside you, rather than wanting to square up to you and punch in your hypocritical nosey nose.

Flying is brilliant - Restrain yourself

Whenever someone says to me 'I hate flying, planes are really bad [for the planet]' I always find myself thinking 'no, I like flying, it is a brilliant, liberating thing, its just a shame it is bad for the planet'.

It is incredible to think that if I really desperately wanted to and had enough time and money, I could book a flight, get a visa and get out to Pakistan by the weekend to help out in whichever I can with those suffering from the great flood at the moment. Pakistan that is, somewhere 4000 miles away! Somewhere like many other distant locations, that really need our help. Flying is a brilliant invention and is regularly used for a lot of good.

Just one example: I am reading 'Stones into Schools' at the moment. It is the follow up to 'Three Cups of Tea' by Greg Mortenson (photo). He has dedicated his life to humanitarian causes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He promotes peace through 'books not bombs'. There is no way in this world he could achieve what he has achieved without the aeroplane. Thank-you aeroplane.

But, it has become environmentally (and by extension socially) irresponsible to fly, just as it is irresponsible to constantly upgrade one's gadgets or drive cars when the bus is a viable option. But I hate the approach of environmentalists who continue to try to demonise flying, telling people that everything about it is evil and bad, or they tell us that the 24 hour coach journey is always a better option, or that Leeds is just as nice to visit for a romantic weekend as Barcelona. It is not. It is just unfortunate that the side effects of flying are so damaging to the planet. But, for me, overall, flying is a means to enriching people's lives (and not just their own).

OK, sometimes the motivations for flying should be questioned, tied up as it is in escapism, status anxiety and runaway hedonism. A fall in the influence of these three on people's behaviour, would probably bring a natural fall in flying. Creating this fall is not going to be easy.

As environmentalists I don't think we should try to kid ourselves that aeroplanes are terrible, awful things, we should be honest and become exemplars and ambassadors of restraint. We must restrain ourselves from the temptations of flying, just like we try to restrain ourselves from alcohol, chocolate and cigarettes. True, it is often a lot of fun to travel overland and holiday more locally, but not always. If you need to go somewhere (like on holiday) cheaply and in a hurry, flying makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. To suggest otherwise makes you look slightly odd and very easy to ignore.

A shift to an age of restraint would require huge developments in maturity and selflessness throughout our population. At the moment we exist in a polar opposite age of infantalisation which breeds hyper-invidualism and countless environmental impacts. Cheap flights and a culture of 'live for today and let tomorrow worry about itself' is the embodiment of this, we should celebrate maturity and foster selflessness by helping people to grow up. Of course the cheap flight providers don't want this to happen. I flew back from a Global Footsteps conference on Saturday aboard an easyjet flight that offered to sell me as 'entertainment' the following choice of reading materials: Hello Magazine, Top Gear Magazine, or the Daily Mail. There is not going to be much critique of materialistic celebrity obsessed consumer culture in that lot!

A 'chance' to escape

This was the scene at Liverpool St Station today at 5.15pm. About 20 people were queing up for a chance to win a pair of flights to Asia couertesy of Air Asia. The queue was moving pretty slowly, these people were in no rush to get home, the chance to escape the monotony of city life was worth the wait even if the odds of winning were extremly thin. The engine type thing was actually a giant tombola which these lucky entrants were putting a boarding pass into in the hope that theirs might be the one drawn out at the end... or something like that!

The drudgery of everyday life fuels our longing to escape, airplanes are so often the cheap and easy means to that escape, but it begs the question of why we live lives that we are so keen to escape for a couple of weeks every year? Are 50 weeks of 'work, work, work' in exchange for 2 weeks of 'me, me, me' in some exotic location (plus a few days at home with the folks at Christmas) really worth it? Surely those hours from 9 til 5 everyday should be spent doing something enjoyable, rewarding, stimulating and socially useful? They are the hours of the day when we are most awake and productive (we spend them chained to desks while the sun shines outside.) At the very least we can get a sense of wellbeing if we know we are doing something that is collectively good, even if it is tiring and stressful.

As for the environmental battle to keep people out of the air for the sake of 'Climate Change' this just shows how keen people are to fly, they would rather spend fifteen minutes in a queue getting heavily marketed to by an airline for the tiniest chance of winning a flight than get themselves home to their families, their books, thier hobbies, their friends, thier 'life'. The need to escape is both created by and catered for by consumer culture, holidays are a key product. If you asked those pictured below whether they thought a new runway to make Heathrow more efficient was a good idea, they would probably answer: 'Yes!' I asked one man this question and he answered: 'Yes mate!' I also asked him 'do you think you'll win?' He answered 'Probably not.'