Love miles
19 Jun 2009 by Paul Northup
This week is a special week. My little boys have their aunty, my sister, with them for a few days. She arrived on the twins’ birthday last weekend and she’ll leave next Sunday. They love her so much. She brings them great gifts – carefully and lovingly chosen; gifts that keep them busy for hours. But even if she didn’t bring them wonderful things they’d still be enthralled: she has a way with children.
The problem is, this kind and lovely aunty lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and we live in Gloucestershire. So what’s the ‘problem’ with that? Well. It’s all to do with flying. It’s where changing our ‘default settings’ to try and be a more Generous family rubs up most sharply against the things we really want to do.
My father was American, so I have lots of family in the States. I have visited most of them in my younger days and I would like my boys to be able to do the same. But what I know now – that I didn’t even give a second thought back then – is that flying is the single most damaging contributor to global warming that I can make direct decisions about.
Since belonging the Generous community I have only made one return flight to the Middle East. On average before that – I joined Generous in 2004 – I would fly perhaps every other year. This reduction is partly due to the fact we started having children in 2004 (and we’ve barely stopped since). But it is also a conscious thing; something we’re cutting back on as we read the conversations on the Generous website and talk with Generous friends in the flesh.
But when those you love are separated from you by a plane journey, ethics and generosity get a little muddled. George Monbiot writes about this in his book, Heat, and he’s coined a great phrase to speak into the dilemma: ‘love miles’.
Love miles are the distances we will want to travel to keep in touch with our nearest and dearest. He argues that it’s only natural – indeed, morally right – that we will want to travel to see them. But at the same time he argues that it is also morally wrong to make these journeys, if we care about the planet.
This conundrum is one I feel in a very real way this week as I see my boys with their aunty and know there will come a day all-too-soon now when they will start to ask to go and see her. And, when they do, I can hardly use The Wire as a defence for not letting them go (Baltimore being such a dangerous city and all)!
More than a conundrum, this is, as Monbiot would say himself, a moral dilemma. In the end, making an effort to live a Generous life is a moral decision that will entail myriad moral choices in its wake.
But before I get too precious about all this I need to remember that ‘to fly or not to fly’ is a line from a modern day drama that only a fraction of the world’s population ever get to play a part in.
You can read more about Monbiot’s view on flying and love miles in an article he wrote for the Guardian back in 2006 and you can see him speaking about it much more recently at a OneWorld.net event this January (go to 1 minute and 50 seconds in).
Heat, by George Monbiot, was published by Penguin in 2007.
His website in support of the book is here.
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About the Blogger
Paul Northup
Reading a few lines before sleep, listening to Elbow, inspired by Stanley Hauerwas, on the way down with the Rams, trying to hardly ever use the car, hopeful and fearful for my children, tired but usually happy.
