I’ve meant to post about this response from a reader to my post fro March 2022: Year 7, day 1 without flying, seeing our cultural and individual addictions.

I’m not sure how to respond, but I know this site has a bug that doesn’t always show comments and didn’t want people to miss it. One big point I’ve realized since that post is that I have to clarify I don’t oppose flying. I oppose people destroying or taking other people’s life, liberty, and property without consent and governments abdicating their responsibilities to protect life, liberty, and property. Pollution destroys life, liberty, and property without consent. Nobody consents to being born with birth defects, getting cancer, or their homes losing value from being submerged or in a region known as Cancer Alley or a Sacrifice Zone, so they can’t move.

People who call not flying privileged misunderstand what privilege means. Flying is possible for those at the top of a dominance hierarchy based on control over resources including fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

I agree the comparison to meth or cigarette addiction isn’t apt, since meth and cigarettes mostly hurt the user whereas addiction to polluting activities hurt others far more. And the suffering polluting causes to people who didn’t consent is much greater.

Still, it’s not other people’s responsibility for me to be understood. I appreciate the post.

If my words come off as smug, I have to learn from reader feedback. My book presents my views more comprehensively and with more subtlety than a blog post can, so I think it communicates my message more effectively. Still, some things require experience. You can’t put the experience of hearing Beethoven or Billie Holliday into words, and likewise experiencing the Spodek Method conveys more. The how-to workbook and workshop create that experience and teach how to share it with others.

Here is the reader’s post:

That your “addiction” was cured in only three months says everything about the immense privilege that seems to be lurking behind this wall of intellectual masturbation. Flying, like all forms of transportation, is a means to an end. Very few people get on a plane just for the sake of getting on a plane. Many people go years without flying just out of circumstance and then do it again when such a purpose for it arises. It’s genuinely absurd to liken that to meth or cigarettes, and it says a lot about how out of touch you seem to be when you needed to “challenge” yourself to reduce your flying for such an insignificant period of time.

The average person who _does_ fly isn’t flying every month, or even more than once a year, if at all. They’re – at best – flying once every year or two for a vacation. If they’re seeing family, it’s probably once around Christmas. Most people who do this just simply don’t have the funds or the time off from work to fly as frequently as you’ve seemingly admitted to doing. If you flew as frequently as you imply, then the damage done by _your_ addiction and _your_ carbon footprint in the pursuits of _your_ advantages and _your_ leisures before you quit flying were leaps and bounds beyond those of the vast, vast majority of people you seem to be deriding as “addicts,” and quite possibly more damage than most of these people will do in their lives. If you want to make an example of yourself, that’s fine, but the volume of pieces you’ve written about this topic suggests considerable self-righteousness instead, and given your apparent history and your warped view of how/why people travel, it shouldn’t surprise you that it might come off to people the same way a billionaire would when they tell you that you’re “addicted” to money for negotiating a 3% raise.

You could make the same argument about dispersion of “communities” by pointing to every way we’ve increased the speed or pace of transportation throughout history. The first humans reached North America with their own legs. The Roman world spread across thousands of miles using horses and ships. You’ve glorified sailing, something which enabled the European colonization of the world and the destruction of the many cultures they encountered. I genuinely don’t understand how – by your logic – any form of travel wouldn’t a community-thinning addiction, nor how short-term travel (something enabled over greater distances by the airplane) would be more detrimental to communities than permanent migration, which travel in these old days required a commitment to.

I permanently abandoned several “communities” because I was genuinely uninterested in the minutiae that you seem to find fulfillment in. I did it without flying. I also haven’t been back. Yet I suspect this is less objectionable to you than a low-income family’s one-off round-trip flight to their dream destination simply because of how this piece comes off.

The bottom line: good for you for breaking a supposed addiction that most of the people reading this will never have, but you don’t have me convinced that you’re genuinely feeling better about yourself when you’re writing about this same topic over, and over, and over, and over again. If you’re surprised at how some people might perceive it, maybe try being less smug about it.

• ← 782: Jane Muncke PhD MSc: Toxins in your food from plastic packaging. You’d rather know.
• My functional new word: Enlightendigenous →