Book idea: How Not to Fly
I’ve thought of several book ideas lately. Since I can only work on one at a time and don’t want to distract myself, though I’ll keep up the sidcha of posting daily here, I’ll post some titles, sketches, and outlines here when I think of them. I welcome feedback.
Draft ideas
Title:
How Not to Fly: How to make your most harmful activity feel repugnant and easy to quit
Chapters (unordered):
My initial journey:
- From seeing problems as environmental therefore not acting to seeing them as hurting people and acting
- From starting acting to thinking of avoiding flying for a year and freaking out
- From committing to a year with fear to, within a few months, finding more of what I feared losing and committing to a second year, then a third
- To finding that pattern in many other places
Stories from others:
- Norwegian friend: asking questions up to if he flew to see M.
- Swedish community that switched from flying being default and non-flyers having to justify to not flying being default and flyers having to justify
- Poet/mother friend whose mother flew so much that she told her she was no longer welcome to visit her or her children (the mother’s grandchildren)
My experiences:
- Discovering more adventure, for example bike camping
- Connecting more with family
- More culture, for example shooting and Westminster
Observations:
- All places with walking surfaces smoothed for wheeled suitcases are one assimilated culture
- Bali covered with plastic, as are all once-remote places
- Patagonia founders camping in Patagonia, developing gear to colonize by using more plastic
- People who didn’t fly: Lincoln, Jesus, Muhammad, Aristotle, Einstein at time of discovering relativity and miracle year, etc
- Many 5-year-old kids have traveled more miles than Marco Polo. Why traveled more?
- Planes do to nations what cars do to cities
- Flying tears communities and families apart. Can you think of anything that tears them apart more effectively? Maybe fentanyl and meth.
- Person on podcast credited flying with spreading cure for Covid so fast. Left out that it first spread the disease so fast.
Some numbers
- People who fly tend to think nearly all fly. A few percent fly across an ocean or multiple times per year.
- 9 million people die per year from breathing polluted air
Insanity:
- People harp on BP creating individual carbon footprint. They use it to excuse their hurting people. They get back at BP by buying more of its product.
- Today’s business models: Why we fight to keep what makes us miserable
Frame:
- Not about saving planet. About avoiding hurting people.
- Not about emissions, but about funding lobbyists, advertisers, politicians to promote more extraction.
- Distinguish Type 1 from Type 2 pollution and depletion
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