Week 4: Mapping Flight Systems.

1)After reading the story about 16-year old Greta from Sweden and her action towards climate change, I felt shocked and definitely inspired. As a 16-year-old young girl, she is brave enough to speak in front of the public and also has a strong faith. As the New York Times described, she choose to sail across the Atlantic on an emissions-free yacht to speak at the U.N. Climate Action Summit instead of taking flight. The action was truly incredible. Nowadays, almost everyone would choose a flight to travel a long distance, and sometimes short ones too. Despite reducing emissions, I think another reason of Greta’s action by taking boat was to tell and show people that even a 16-year-old girl realized how the urgency of the climate crisis is, and if she can do it, why can’t other people. 

2)In the article ”If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?”, the author has clearly pointed out his perspective on travel by listing many shocking statistics and facts. As he described in the reading that one cross-country flight one-way from New York to Los Angeles shrinks the summer sea ice cover by 3 square meters or 32 square feet. I can’t imagine how much emission we have created already since the flight was invented. At first, Carbon offsetting seems to be an efficient way to undo our fault, but then after reading the article, I changed my mind. There are so many concerns about carbon offsetting actions. Like what the author has said in the article, many certifying organizations go to great lengths to verify their carbon offset projects, but these verifications still have limits. Many other things can occur behind the scenes. Therefore, according to my perspective, carbon offsetting is not an efficient way. Giving money to somebody else and make them take actions for you is not the correct way to solve the problems we are facing today. I found this also a little bit ironic, say if you give somebody a 100 dollars and tell them to eat less because you want to lose your weight, but on the other hand, yourself still eats all the unhealthy food in the world, that to me does not make any sense. 

3) The huge population, economic growth, and the strategy of many airlines in Asia are all factors that make the environmental situation worse. More and more parents in China are making the decisions to send their children to abroad for their learning career, this, of course, add up the traveler’s population and uncountable emissions. In addition, as the author mentioned in the article that places such as India and China are planning to built more airplanes to open their arms and welcome more and more travelers. To me, they seemed not realizing what the problem is, or they realized it but ignored it because all they care about is how much more money they can get from these planes. This is clearly a huge contrast to the story of Greta, the 16-year-old girl. I think the question: “ should people travel less?” is a hard question to answer. For me, four times a year is the least, and this adds up to a total of 56 hours of flight. We have to admit that flight brought us so much convenience and allow us to see a bigger part of the world, but at the same time, we have to consider how to make those beautiful sceneries last. Until this point, I do not think that air travel could be completely banned, however, people need to travel as least as they can, and again, I agree with the authors’ point view that governments won’t get far if they try to tell eager new consumers they can’t fly. The key is to make all those trips a lot less damaging than they currently are.

4)

How do various people (you, corporations and/or governments) could intervene in the systems of international travel to help more sustainable and resilient systems of international travel emerge? 

For me, I think one way for government and companies to do is to raise the flight ticket cost, and for individuals, try best to reduce their flight times.