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I posted about not flying last week and got unexpectedly large agreement/endorsement and I thank every one of you for it.
Nonetheless, in day to day life I feel so alone in my stance. And I remained silent about it in a conversation last night that left me feeling really quite sad about just how disinterested most people are in the fabric of the rest of their lives. It’ll be in tatters and they’ll have helped shred it willingly.
The disconnect is vast
@urlyman Sympathise - v enjoyable stay at field studies centre in lovely location; near-disbelief that we genuinely didn't want a lift in private car back to the train station (a gorgeous 50-minute walk away) or that posters about sustainable food choices were undermined by the mass of single-use plastic and continued normalisation of meat and dairy consumption. (Someone told me in good faith of their shock at low levels of recycling in Italy. They'd flown there for a holiday.) #moanover
@urlyman I don't fly anymore for the same reason and get my wife a little angry too when I say, no, I would not like to make holidays in X or Y.
I mean, heck, when I was little we did one trip to South Africa by plane to visit family and that was it. All other holidays were holidays I fondly remember (by car not train, but you can improve). Nowadays it seems holiday = flying for some weird reason.
So, long story short: I'm 💯 on board with you and you should not feel weird about it.
@urlyman I have two good friends locally (outwith my family) who share my climate stance and more people who are not so close friends but I can interact with.
It makes such a positive difference to be in a room with people with common values, looking for positive ways forward.
In Scotland we have Climate Hubs and the Scottish Climate Community Action Network (SCCAN) with smaller groups connected to it. Is there something similar near you to get involved with?
1/
@urlyman 2/
Otherwise, having one to one conversations about climate with good friends can be helpful - not looking to change their minds - just find out where they are & you may be surprised that they are already worried & don’t know what to do -so keep on doing what everyone else is.
You at least know where they are & they know where you are.
There is helpful “how to have a climate conversation” information online. It’s all about finding where they are, not trying to change them.
@urlyman 3/
It can still be very hard and feel very lonely.
Especially if you find yourself in company that has not even begun to think about the consequences of carrying on as “normal”.
Or what I found hardest was friends I thought understood the climate breakdown buying an SUV. For no good reason I could see.
It did impact how I felt about them.
@urlyman 4/4
Lastly the community on Mastodon has been a delight- knowing that there are so many more people out there who care & are doing so many different positive things has been keeping me going.
…thing is, would I have been the same if 30+ years younger today? I’ll never know
…helpfully though, just as I’m revisiting last night’s moment in my head (recursively over-reflecting is a thing I do), and trying to construct how to sit with it, along comes an episode of The Great Humbling while I’m cooking lunch, in which Ed Gillespie delivers the perfect metaphor.
A transcript of the story of RMS Tayleur follows:
It “was the first ironclad sailing ship. Built for the Australian gold rush, taking passengers from Liverpool over to the Antipodes. And it was a rush job…
…“It was built under commercial pressure. They’d made all sorts of mistakes in the design. You know, the rigging was poor. They hadn’t stretched the ropes. I think half the sailors were Chinese who didn’t speak English. I mean, it was a kind of catalogue of mistakes. There weren’t enough lifeboats as with the actual Titanic. But the most crucial thing was they didn’t rebalance.
They weren't aware that they had to rebalance the ship’s compasses for the iron hull…
…“So the compasses were distorted by the iron hull, which meant that the captain thought they were sailing south and they were actually sailing west.
They ran aground. They basically crashed into the island of Lambay and half the people on board drowned…
…“And so I’ve been reflecting a lot about the institutions in which we operate, to what extent they are also distorting our personal moral compasses and how awkward and uncomfortable and painful that can feel when your own moral compass feels like it’s pointing in a very different direction.”
Thanks Ed, cos that is exactly how I felt in last night’s conversation and also why the folks on the other side of it can’t/won’t see the problem
And not just our personal compasses, but our institutional compasses: how do we measure what society needs and what direction we are pushing it? Using GDP and stock markets and concentrated wealth to steer by? We will likewise run aground. Sure we know we know to steer away from the giant maw of the fascist whirlpool, but then we look at our broken compasses and sail around the circle a quarter turn only to be a risk of being pulled in again. Let’s work together to set a whole new course, using a whole new way of navigating, and a whole new set of instruments.
…This has an added poignance because Portmsouth, where I live, is host to HMS Warrior (1860), the world’s first iron-hulled ironclad steam and sailing ship. It didn’t suffer the fate of the Tayleur but did turn out to be a very expensive misjudgment of British naval procurement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Warrior_(1860)
Anyway, The Great Humbling then turns to Dougald talking about his current writing project and that too is worth a brief mention…
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