As we approach the end of the semester and the arrival of the season for large conferences such as the MLA or AHA, I wanted to draw attention to a project by Parke Wilde and Joseph Nevins, Fly Less: Reducing Academia's Carbon Footprint.
Flying Less has several parts: a blog focusing on the environmental costs of air travel, and explaining why this is unlikely to improve soon; a near-obligatory Change.org petition; and a pretty detailed and informative Google Doc explaining the logic behind the project.
Wilde and Nevins aren't out to prevent all forms of academic air travel; instead, what they propose is the somewhat simpler goal of getting off the treadmill of frequent flights to faraway conferences for little-to-no professional gain:
We sometimes ask colleagues what fraction of their flights could be reduced without impairing their productivity and career success. The answer often is surprisingly high, reaching half or more of all flights. One might ask why faculty members sometimes fly to conferences and meetings that are unrewarding. One common answer is that they feel pressure not to miss the same events that other people in the field are attending. Collective action and coordination will help us alleviate the air travel arms race, allowing us each to scale back comparatively less productive travel without sacrificing the flights that really are most important.
In particular, they call on professional organizations to find ways that alleviate just this form of academic FOMO. (Cf. the Virtually Connecting group!) They also call on colleges and universities to include data about faculty and administrator flying in their reports on sustainability.
Wilde and Nevins also collect stories about people who have adopted a lower-carbon approach to their professional obligations, so it's not *all* doom and gloom! Why not check out the project?
Do you have suggestions for making conferences more sustainable? Please share in comments!
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