To fly or not to fly?

The summer holidays are here and I hope that, whatever you’re planning, you manage to have a really good break. If you’re heading abroad, as I will be soon, the chances are that you’ll be flying to your destination.

Before Covid, UK residents made over 58 million holiday visits abroad a year. There were almost 300million air passengers at UK airports. In the past couple of years during the pandemic these numbers crashed, but as restrictions have eased, and recent chaos at UK airports shows, people can’t get enough of flying abroad on holiday or to see family and friends.

For the advocate of creation care, or just for the Christian who wants to live a simple, creation-friendly lifestyle, flying is something of a dilemma.

Benefits of flying

Ever since the advent of mass aviation and package holidays in the 1960s, flying has opened up opportunities for millions of people to enjoy holidays in the sun and visit destinations that previous generations could never have dreamed of. Flying connects the world for people and businesses and, prior to Covid, was a fast-growing sector.

It’s not just holiday makers and business travellers who benefit. Christian workers fly all over the world with the gospel. It took Hudson Taylor five months or so to get to China on a slow boat. And while of course God can use long sea voyages for good (the apostle Paul’s journey to Rome also springs to mind), few Christian communities reject planes on the grounds that what was good enough for the apostles is good enough for us. Aeroplanes are here to stay.

Environmental problems

And yet, aviation comes with all kinds of environmental problems. First of all, it causes a great deal of pollution and is a major emitter of greenhouse gases. It’s true that aeroplanes have become much more fuel-efficient over the years, and continue to do so. New fuels are being trialled and even electric planes. However, technological fixes – which may cause different kinds of environmental problems – have simply been outstripped by the rapid expansion of aviation worldwide. We should be sceptical about the green claims of airlines. Despite the Covid hiatus, this growth shows every sign of recovering and continuing on an inexorable upward path.

Then, on the ground, more air travel means more and bigger airports. These have often been hugely controversial because of their cost, the effects on countryside or coast and on local communities. The search for a third London airport in the 1960s and 70s has its own chapter in the book Great Planning Disasters. The planning inquiry into Heathrow Terminal 5 was the longest ever and spawned a whole new Planning Act. A proposal for a new airport in the Thames estuary (‘Boris Island’), which would have destroyed some of our most valuable wildlife sites, has been and gone. But at the moment, there’s a proposal for a new Lisbon airport in the Tagus estuary which would be similarly destructive.

So it’s no surprise that green lifestyle gurus say ditch the flying!

Still, I’m a fine one to talk. For 20 years or more I regularly flew abroad to visit family, to say nothing of other occasional trips for business and pleasure. Now we have inherited a holiday flat in Portugal, and getting there by road, rail or ferry is simply not realistic.

My travel options illustrate the dilemmas we often face, and I struggle with the hypocrisy in my own heart. There is no perfect solution, but I’m reminded of the wartime poster, ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ It’s a good question to ask from a creation perspective. And there’s positive action I can take when I do travel. I recommend visiting the website of Climate Stewards, a Christian charity which offers a carbon calculator. You can work out the carbon cost of your journey and then donate to support carbon reduction projects in developing countries.