My mom worked for Pan Am and my dad regularly had business overseas, which meant that I grew up travelling. Since we would travel on my mom’s free passes in “space available”, it usually resulted in us sitting in First Class. In fact, as a little girl, I had to go to the airport dressed in a pretty dress and stockings so that I would be deemed acceptable to sit up front. Oh my, how times have changed.
My flight from JFK to Buenos Aires was relatively tolerable, thanks to my Ambien-induced 8 hour slumber (someone I know once referred to Ambien as “Business Class in a bottle”). The plane was bizarrely small for that long of a flight and I felt like a sardine. I actually had to get acrobatic at one point to launch out of my seat since the guy next to me wouldn’t wake up.
I am not sure why I feel so intrigued by the concept of travel as I write this. Maybe it is because I have spent much of the past year and a half studying climate change, or maybe it’s simply because I’ve just completed a 25-hour travel day. It never ceases to amaze me that I can leave the bustle of Manhattan on a Friday in rush hour, take off on a plane in an early winter Nor-Easter storm at night and land on a warm, Spring morning in another hemisphere, speed in a taxi through Buenos Aires to another airport and another plane, only to then again find myself in the freezing cold dark night 8 hours later, looking at the faint outline of mountains covered in snow in the southernmost city in the world. This planet is truly an amazing creation, and to think how humankind has found a way to jump all over it in contraptions that fly 35,000 feet in the air is nothing short of mind-boggling…if you really think about it.
So, I can’t help but think, as I embark on this journey to deepen my understanding of the urgent need to change how we use the planet’s resources, “why can’t humankind figure out a way to move our technology forward in a way that preserves this planet and enables future generations to live a comfortable life? Are we so spoiled, like little girls in First Class, that we can’t imagine doing things differently or making investments for the sake of those who will come after us?”
Wait, does that last paragraph sound like Carrie Bradshaw opening a “green” episode of “Sex and The City?”
Changing humankind’s behavior will not be easy, but as I reflect on the last year and a half since returning from my first trip to Antarctica, the signs that we may be on the road and travelling in the right direction seem to be present all around me. I live in New York City, and there is not a day that goes by that a bus with an advertisement with the word “green” doesn’t pass me. The trashcans in the subway now have stickers that explain that everything is recycled so that commuters won’t feel guilty disposing of their morning newspapers. My local farmers market not only provides me with everything I need to eat for the week (locally grown); I can also give any unwanted clothes to them to recycle, and there is someone sitting there every week signing up New Yorkers to “switch to wind energy”. This means that I pay a couple of extra dollars per month on my electric bill, but it’s creating a market and subsidizing more wind farms.
Now, I realize this is New York City, where you don’t need a car, apartments are small, and it is very easy to have a small carbon footprint. Even with its millions of inhabitants, New York City is becoming one of the “greenest” big cities in the world. However, the signs I see in my community are also appearing on national magazine covers bearing the words “Green Issue”, on national TV sitcoms that have “green” episodes, and most notably, a presidential campaign last year where both candidates acknowledged the importance of the issue of climate change.
While all of this is encouraging to me, it must seem odd to my European friends who have been recycling since they were born. I’m afraid the United States has a lot of work to do to catch up. I went to a debate the other night at the Japan Society near the U.N., to listen to several authorities from Japan, China and the U.S. share news of the negotiations leading up to December’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. All had been active in the Kyoto negotiations and some even further back to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1989. It was made very clear that the world is waiting for the U.S. government to decide what they are willing to commit to. One gentleman from Japan described it as “holding the rest of the world hostage”. That same man, however, was encouraged by the Obama administration’s progress. The Ambassador from China was very quick to point out that while China recently surpassed the U.S. as the top carbon emitting country, they also have 21% of the world’s population while the U.S. has only 5%, leaving their per capita carbon emissions much lower than ours. It is also very obvious that they are already positioning themselves for the future green economy, particularly global solar panel production. I love my country and feel fortunate to have been born here (it is, after all, totally random where we end up finding ourselves as new lives on earth), but we share our atmosphere with the rest of the world and we need to take the lead in cleaning it up. Even if the thousands of scientists who have agreed that anthropogenic climate change is happening were all of a sudden found to be wrong, so what? The world is wasting time arguing. It is still happening! It doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is. When I asked the debate panel a question about leadership at Copenhagen, mentioned that hours before the President of the Maldives and leaders of ten other nations had pledged to go carbon neutral, and asked about grass roots activism happening all over the world, and what effect, if any, it was having on the negotiations, I didn’t really get a straight answer. It’s a very complicated negotiation process, maybe the most complicated treaty that world leaders have ever had to face, but they need to stop playing politics, come up with solutions, and get this planet on the road to recovery…quickly.
So, as I wind down this marathon day of travel and get ready to start my longer journey south to the white continent (yes, my entire trip is offset…a complicated notion and I am sure the subject of a future blog entry), I am focused on the power of people and what they can accomplish: they can invent an airplane and change the world, they can study science in school and grow up to invent a wind turbine or solar panel, they can use the internet to spawn a grass roots movement that results in a coordinated International Day of Climate Action in over 180 countries, they can be ambitious and pledge to make their climate-vulnerable countries carbon neutral as a statement to the rest of the world, and they can be leaders who travel to Copenhagen and put politics aside and the future of the planet first by signing a fair and ambitious treaty. The first four have happened…I pray the fifth will too. That would be a trip worth taking. Anyone have an extra plane ticket to Copenhagen?
Lauren Wylie
Ushuaia, Argentina
