So I’ve just returned from a month long,4-country trip taking the Awakening the Dreamer message around South East Asia. The results are new or enlarged communities of active citizens committed to amplifying this message in Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and the Philippines. The further ripples from these same folk are already being felt in South Africa, India, Singapore and doubtless other places too. In the context of our work, awakening the citizens of the world as a an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilled and socially just human presence, this seems quite a result. But there is always a cost to consider in this, the cost of all this travel.
For the flights alone I have caused 4.41 tonnes of carbon dioxide to be emitted into the upper atmosphere through my 19 866 miles of flying. There are several ways to look at this; one is to consider what an annual carbon ration would be per person, and estimates here are mostly in the range 1.5 – 3.0 tonnes per person – yikes. Another view posits that if we are to collectively emit no more than 250 billion tonnes of carbon in order to reduce the probability of a 2 °C warming to 25 per cent, then for today’s population we each have only 36 tonnes left that we can ever emit . . . ever! So I’ve used up 12.25% of my lifetime’s carbon ration in just this one trip.
A couple of questions remain
Is this justifiable? There is no way to answer this objectively, we can only weigh the balance between the value to our long-term future of this process of awakening and linking active citizens and the environmental cost of so doing. What do you reckon?
Can I offset this environmental damage? Yes is the answer. In fact one of my flights has already been off-set as a generous donation by Gregers Reimann in Kuala Lumpur – thanks Gregers. And the work of the Pachamama Alliance helps to preserve nearly 2 million acres of pristine tropical rainforest, a valuable carbon sink as well as the forest home to the Achuar people.
Today as we are ever more acutely aware of the health of our planet home any active that isn’t directly restorative to the environment can be called raise questions for which there are no easy answers. I’ll leave the last words to Seize the Day, a radical British folk band . . . . . and to you, what would you do?
