My Dilemma of Travel

Aloha Edition

It’s barely 4AM local time, but I’m wide awake. This is giving me a little PTSD, because when I got home from Baku and COP29, I was up at this hour for about two weeks as my body tried to adjust to the time zone difference. This time I’m only half as many time zones away in the other direction, so I’m hoping it might be just one week of early rising. I do feel productive, though.

That’s me in 30G on the 9 hour flight from MSP to HNL (the guy in 32G doesn’t look to happy about it). Photo credit: my right arm.

My day began yesterday in the 15 degree darkness of northern Indiana at 5AM eastern time (which was midnight where I now sit). My good wife drove me to the airport through a dusting of snow so I could set off for Hawaii. My podcast traveling companion Colin and I are part of a project here that is being run by A Rocha. That wasn’t a typo. A Rocha is Portuguese for “the rock” (or is it “a rock” or “to the rock”?). They are a Christian environmental group we’ve worked with before. Perhaps my favorite podcast episode we’ve ever done was called “The Oceans Declare” where Colin and I embedded ourselves with an A Rocha team in Titusville, Florida to learn about oceans and their status. We did a census of horseshoe crabs, we kayaked on the inter-coastal waterway, we stood at the rumbling Atlantic shore and prayed with the ocean. Yes “with”... that also wasn’t a typo. The premise of that episode was that if the psalmist was right that the heavens declare the glory of God, then it’s not a stretch at all to think that the oceans do too. So we tried to listen to the ocean as it declared God’s glory and do so along with it.

Now Colin and I are embedded in another A Rocha project. This one isn’t so much about oceans, but we’re on a speck of lava out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I’ve been to Hawaii a couple of times before, but this time I was really struck by how far out in the middle of a really big ocean this place is. It’s pretty remarkable that people ever made their way here. That’s another part of what I hope to explore while here, but the main reason is to tell a story about the A Rocha project, which is a church that is turning a golf course back into native habitat. I’ll have more to say about that once I’ve seen the place this afternoon.

I haven’t seen much of anything yet that tells me we’re in a different place. Yes, I know Hawaii is still in America. They speak English and our cell phones work. But in preparation for this trip, I’ve read a bit about the history of this place and how in some ways it actively resists assimilation to the mainland culture. (Of course the mainland has its own history of being assimilated by the equivalent of Star Trek’s The Borg. Resistance is futile.)

We arrived around 3pm yesterday, and from the airport I did see a glimpse of oceans and mountains, but my mind was on something else. I left yesterday from the South Bend airport, and heard Marcus Freeman on the PA system talking about that airport as the home airport of the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. That’s not the most inspiring mascot for the pacifist community I’m part of now! But we root pretty hard for them in my family. In case you live under a cultural rock or have boycotted watching football (perhaps for justifiable reasons), Marcus Freeman’s Notre Dame’s football team played in the semifinal of this new-fangled college football playoff. And kickoff was just as we were landing in Honolulu. So I convinced Colin (whose sports affiliation gravitates more around college basketball and Duke — whose mascot also challenges good Christian sensibilities!) that our number one priority was to get somewhere to see the game. That ended up being a Buffalo Wild Wings, which other than the Maui coconut porter on the drink list didn’t feel very authentically Hawaiian. But ND usually has a Hawaiian connection or player (although this year’s Junior Tuihalamaka is actually from California), so the Bee-Dubs crowd was very much on our side. We saw a close game that ended the way it’s supposed to. Then we went back to the airport to pick up Ben Lowe, the president of A Rocha, who is staying with us at the home of a very nice couple from the church. By then it was dark, so I didn’t get to see the scenery on our way through the mountains to Kaneohe.

Now it’s early morning and the sun isn’t up yet. I’m sitting outside in the lanai next to a banana tree in shorts and a t-shirt (I’m in the shorts and t-shirt, not the banana tree), so that feels different for January. I don’t have much to report on yet about this actual travel experience, so instead I’ll reflect on my dilemma about travel. Or is it irony or paradox, or just outright hypocrisy that I fly around the world to highlight issues related to climate change and the environment?

Air travel is not the worst category of activities that is contributing to climate change: it is responsible for about 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Compare that to electricity production, which accounts for about 25% of emissions in the US. Do we call climate activists hypocrites every time they turn on a light or use a toaster? The reality is that we are all deeply implicated in energy use and its effects on the planet.

That doesn’t excuse me from my personal choices, and I think about those a lot. In my defense, we have tried to limit our overall carbon footprint in other ways. We drive an electric car, and we charge its battery with solar panels (which was not an easy thing to get past my homeowners’ association!). We eat much lower on the food chain than we used to. We’ve even devoted much of our vacation money and time to staying more locally. It’s my travel that is the black mark on my climate advocacy scorecard. But I buy carbon offsets for flights and try to combine trips so they have multiple purposes.

Still, I might be charged with hypocrisy because with my mouth I say we should be doing our best to limit our greenhouse gas emissions, while with my actions I keep perpetuating the problem by flying lots of places. I try to justify my travel by comparing what I do to business entrepreneurs. If the goal of business is to make money, then couldn’t we say business people are being hypocritical every time they spend money? You shouldn’t pay your employees, because that is the exact opposite of what you’re trying to do?! No, of course not. You have to spend some money to make some money.

So too with the climate crisis: you’ve got to burn some carbon to save more in the long run. Our work here is going to try to tell a story about how we can live more sustainably with the natural world we’ve been gifted. Our hope is that we can inspire more people — and particularly Christians who ought to have more reasons to care for the Earth — to take better care of this remarkable planet.

At least this is what I tell myself so I can sleep at night… oh wait… I don’t sleep at night. Maybe I need a better story.