My children's flying shame
Posted by DavidM in Transport | 8 June 2007
It's amazing how attitudes change. Admittedly I'm not representative of the majority as I'm not only more aware of the environment but also committed to doing something, but I recently realised how far my position had changed.
For Christmas 2001 my family flew to the US to spend Christmas with my sister. It was the first time my children had flown and as we travelled with British Airways they were well looked after. Part of their kid's pack was a flight log book to track the journies they make and the distances.
The book has pages to stamp - "congratulations you have flown travelled 10,000 miles". We've taken it on every trip and got the captain to fill in the details. They are both still under 10 years old and are at 25,000 miles each so it's a great record of how well-travelled they are - USA, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, and so on.
Five year's later and we've just come back from our summer holiday. I spotted these books on the sideboard ready to be put away and suddenly had a very different feeling.
Instead of being a testament to how worldly my children are, it's a record of their carbon footprint, of their contribution to global warming. It wasn't a good feeling.
In my quest to improve the family's environmental impact without getting divorced, I'm not about to ban flying holidays, though I do want to limit them.
But it indicated to me how much my attitude has shifted, how a previous innocence is replaced by a much greater awareness.
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Six years ago my children made their first flight and we bought log books to record their future travels. It seemed a nice thing to do to see how far they travelled in their lives. Now it feels like a record of their impact on the enviroment... [Read More]
Tracked on June 11, 2007 7:22 AM
