It has been months in the planning – he had to convince his bosses to give him a month off to travel to and from China. Has it been a pain? “It definitely has. It’s a matter of getting your train schedule in line with your visa requirements. I didn’t realise I needed a visa to travel through Mongolia, even though I’m not stopping there. There have been moments when I’ve been close to giving up and either cancelling the whole trip or just booking a flight.” But he is glad he has stuck with it, he says. “I have to prove it is possible.”
The no-fly movement is a small but growing community of people who are drastically reducing the number of flights they take, or giving up air travel altogether. Many campaigners say they feel flying is about to receive the same attention as shunning plastic or eating less meat because of its 2% contribution to global carbon emissions, predicted to grow to as much as 16% by 2050. In Sweden, where the movement has taken off, a new term has emerged: flygskam, meaning “flight shame”. Siân Berry, the co-leader of the Green party, has called on people to take no more than one flight a year and suggested a tax should be imposed on further journeys. Berry hasn’t flown since 2005.
The climate activist Greta Thunberg hasn’t flown since 2015; she did her European tour last month by train. In January, she attended the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland, travelling 32 hours each way by rail, while a record number of private jets – about 1,500 – brought the rich and powerful attendees.
It is becoming harder to defend alleged hypocrisy, however well-meaning. The actor Emma Thompson was criticised for flying from Los Angeles to support the Extinction Rebellion protest in London, not only by the usual naysayers eager to point out double standards, but also by environmental campaigners. “She could just as easily have paid for a billboard poster in Piccadilly and got her message across there,” said Kevin Anderson, a climate scientist who hasn’t flown since 2004, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The issue has been significant among environmental scientists for years; the Flying Less campaign, aimed at academia, has been running since 2015.
Paul Chatterton, a professor of urban futures at the University of Leeds, also hasn’t flown since 2004. “I think every academic has to justify why they are flying to that particular ‘must-go’ conference. If we have something really important to say, say it in a different way.” He travels to European conferences by train. “One of the privileges of being a middle-income professional – and this is a direct plea to other middle-income professionals – is that you can negotiate with your boss and you have a bit more money to get the train. I’m not talking about people who can’t afford to do that, because I know trains are more expensive.”
As for Chatterton’s no-fly family holidays, the best ones have been taking the ferry from Hull to Rotterdam and cycling around the Netherlands. “You travel light, you make it an adventure with your kids,” he says. “Who wants to sit in a departure lounge? You get the excitement of travelling through places, figuring out what the next journey is. I think we have to get back into the idea that travelling is special; it’s a privilege.”
Most flying is carried out by a small proportion of the population. Aled Jones, the director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, says we have become used to the low-cost weekend flight abroad in a short space of time. “When I was growing up, and certainly for the generation before, flying on holiday was not something you expected to do,” he says. “By radically cutting down, we’re not going back to the dark ages; we’re going back to when people holidayed in the UK. It will be less of a sacrifice for a lot of people than we expect.” He admits that addressing “love miles” – flying to see family who live abroad – is “a very different challenge”.
Maja Rosén, who lives in Sweden and gave up flying in 2008, had always kept quiet when friends talked about flying abroad on holidays – until last year. “I thought: ‘How is it possible I’m more scared of destroying the mood than climate collapse?’ I decided that my new year resolution last year would be to start asking some inconvenient questions. I realised that most people weren’t aware of the impact from flying and how huge it is.”
She and a friend started a campaign, Flight-free 2019 (now Flight-free 2020), to encourage people to pledge not to fly. By the end of 2018, 15,000 Swedes had signed; by the end of this year, she thinks it will be 100,000. It has changed the conversation around flying in the country: passenger numbers dropped at Swedish airports in 2018, while a record number of people in the country took the train.
“People don’t realise that what they do as an individual is so important because it affects those around them,” says Rosén. “If you keep flying, all your friends will as well. You contribute to the norm. But if you decide to give up flying or take a flight-free year, that makes others reflect. Change can happen fast as soon as enough people start acting. Before, people saw flying as an experience or something you do, it wasn’t in the category of consumption, but I think now people are starting to realise that by taking a flight they are a heavy consumer of fossil fuel.”
There is now a British arm of the campaign, run by the writer Anna Hughes, who last took a flight eight years ago. More than 1,000 people have pledged to have a flight-free year. Hughes likens it to the Veganuary campaign, by which people give up animal products for January to raise awareness of veganism and change behaviour. She has travelled to Ireland, Denmark and other European countries – and seen a lot of the UK. “There is nowhere I can think of that I want to go that I can’t get to by bike, train or boat. If I was going to go further, I would just take a long time to do it.”
The author Nicola Davies is taking long-haul flights for a couple of upcoming commitments, but after that she will radically rethink her flight consumption, she says. There will almost certainly be no more European flights; she has already travelled to the Balearic Islands in Spain by car. “We did the journey down to Barcelona in two days, then the ferry crossing is eight hours,” she says, adding that it requires a bit more planning than travelling by plane. “It’s much more exciting, much closer to the real skin of the planet than the feeling you get from going to an airport, popping into a metal tube and then popping out at some other point on the planet with no real grasp of the distance, habitat, people and cultures you’ve passed over on the way.
