For my first post, I thought it might be useful to chart a little of the journey that led me to start this blog, and give some background on who I am.
My interest in climate change and low-carbon alternatives to the world we live in now started way, way back when I began to study a course of Astronomy & Cosmology at Lancaster University. I wasn’t the traditional university student, I was a home-educated 13-year-old and had decided that space would be my passion. One of the things that bothered me, though, was that it was becoming increasingly difficult to stargaze without travelling long distances away from the city. The light pollution made seeing faint stars nigh on impossible while the thermal and particulate pollution made seeing even the moon difficult with the shimmer and turbulence in the air.
I started down a path of environmental science, after discovering that a group of scientists at the University of Manchester were working on exactly this issue (my naïve, young self didn’t realise the scale of the community tackling climate change at this point!). I enrolled in a degree programme and managed to audit a unit led by the researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. I approached Kevin Anderson who was at that time the Director of the Manchester branch and Deputy-Director of the international group and was warmly invited to undertake an internship studying alternative propulsion methods for marine cargo transport assisting, then a Doctoral student, Michael Traut.
Another internship later and I had decided that environmental science was not the field for me, and set my sights on environmental governance, moving from the Earth Sciences to the humanities.
Fast-forward a couple of years and I am now doing my PhD in Social Geography at the University of Bristol, 2 (and-a-bit) years in on a 4-year programme.
Whenever I submit an abstract to a conference overseas, I look back on the trip which Kevin took during my internships at Tyndall. He travelled from Manchester through to Shanghai using only rail transport – a trip which took 10-days each way, to attend a 3-day launch of the newest member of the Tyndall family. This commitment to a low-carbon method of transport (some of his thoughts are detailed here) along with my understanding of the damage that air transport does to the climate system on Earth have pushed me to always seek out a better way to get places.
To these ends, the five international conferences I have been to in the past two-years either as presenter or participant (in Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands (x2) and Norway) have only caused me to fly once. I will also be teaching on an international field trip in a few days and have managed to convince my department to let me travel by train to Barcelona.
If flying is the single most damaging thing a person can do to the planet per hour, then surely we must find a way to prevent such a catastrophe? As an environmentalist, I want to reduce my emissions of greenhouse gases to an absolute minimum, as a human being, I don’t believe that cutting ourselves off geographically in favour of teleconferencing is the way to go. Whilst it is more expensive, and more time-consuming, overland travel is, in many ways (not just limited to environmental reasons) a far better way of getting places.
Join me on the journey.
Low Carbon Academic 