We are excited to share the travel petition and pledge for anyone in academia or higher education to support greener academic travel, while maintaining the good that we do in the world. Please sign it yourself, and please share widely with your colleagues!

This new automated travel petition and pledge form will support a renewed publicity campaign for the #flyingless initiative in August and September, 2021, in collaboration with the Time to Explane campaign and other organizations.

The new petition/pledge in 2021 has 4 elements, for varying levels of institutional and personal change. Our older petition, which was started in 2015, had just the first 2 elements. Here is a list of 700+ academic supporters for the older petition, including a link to the original petition text. In addition to the new petition and pledge form, we have updated the design of this website (an archives for our older site still is available).

We continue our active Twitter feed at @flyingless, and can be reached by email at academicflyingpetition@gmail.com. Thank you for your support!

We hope you will enjoy the third annual New Year’s Eve Eve party on #flyingless themes, at 4pm Eastern (9pm UK) Dec 30, with toasts and good cheer for 2021 from around the world. Here below is a Zoom registration link and a video from the previous year.

by Parke Wilde

The most recent in the wonderful series of online conferences in a “nearly carbon neutral” format starts today.

The title is, “Confronting the climate crisis with systemic alternatives in the age of coronavirus.”

This format of online video presentations with asynchronous text discussion, while preserving the sense of a time-limited event, has been developed and refined since 2016 by the Environmental Humanities Institute at the University of California Santa Barbara. This particular conference is sponsored by UCSB’s Environmental and Climate Justice Hub in cooperation with the Center for Climate Justice at UC Merced.

Joe Nevins, Peter Kalmus, and I participated in the first conference in this format, in 2016, for a session on flying less initiatives. Peter spoke about the inner lives of climate scientists.

In that 2016 session, Joe spoke about the false characterization of flying-less initiatives as “self-righteous, self-referential, ascetic bullshit.” And I introduced our approach to setting goals and measuring progress for flying less in academic communities.

I hope you enjoy the new UCSB conference this week.