Breadcrumbs
- Home
- Research staff
- Research staff blog
- It's not easy being green
It's not easy being green
01 December 2009
By Sarah Davies
I’m writing this on a train – one of the recently re-nationalised (kind of) East Coast ones which have as much wifi as you can eat, as long as you don’t mind the connection dropping every 10 minutes and it taking half an hour to download a website with pictures. Still, despite such minor disadvantages – and the fact that the woman sitting opposite keeps kicking me – I like trains. I like the swaying motion and the views and the freedom to get up and down to escape annoying fellow passengers.
This is just as well: there are times when I feel as though I spend much of my time sitting on trains. I commute to work on the train, and I travel to meetings, conferences, interviews and workshops by train throughout the UK and into Europe, via Eurostar. Like most researchers, travelling to these kinds of activities is an integral part of my job. Who’s going to hear (or care) about our research if we’re not at conferences to tell people about it?
I also like trains because – put bluntly – they’re not planes. I can’t help but feel deeply uneasy about the environmental consequences of flying here, there and everywhere. Apart from anything else, it doesn’t seem to make sense to get used to practices that simply aren’t sustainable.
And yet…the need to network doesn’t end with the European rail network. Others on this blog have written about the importance of international connections, and it’s pretty hard to get a train to the US or China. I’m also sufficiently curious, and sufficiently poorly travelled, to find it hard to turn down an invitation to these kinds of far flung destinations. If I say no now, will I ever get the chance to go again?
So, despite my qualms, I’ve ended up being a big plane-user as well as a train-user. This is partly to do with where I am in my ‘project cycle’: these last few months have been results-tastic and therefore conference-tastic. One of my colleagues limits himself to one intercontinental and one European return flight a year. I wish I could say I’d been this restrained…
We work in one of the relatively few professions where international travel is almost a norm: my experience is by no means unusual. How do we make the most of these opportunities while keeping our environmental consciences clear?
Matthew Salois02 December 2009 at 08:05 PM
permalinkreport this comment
I agree, Sarah, the international travel opportunities are among the most rewarding aspects to a career in academia. I have just returned from a conference in San Antonio, Texas which not only gave me the opportunity to network and communicate my research but to enjoy authentic Mexican cuisine and see the historic Alamo. I also had the opportunity to sit in on various sessions at the conference devoted to the economics of climate change, which seems especially pointed given the topic of your blog. While I am conscience of my carbon footprint, we should be more concerned about what we eat than how we travel. Apparently, the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from world livestock production is more than the GHG emissions from all forms of travel combined. This figure does not even include agricultural emissions resulting from fertilizer production and cropping. Most people think of green pastures and scenic views when thinking of agriculture. But the truth is agriculture and food production is the greatest threat to the environment.