By Joseph Nevins

An exciting, low-carbon academic conference will begin in a few days. Organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the title (and theme) of the biennial meeting is Displacements. These include, according to the conference website, “episodes of profound political upheaval, intensified crises of migration and expulsion, the disturbing specter of climatic and environmental instability, countless virtual shadows cast over the here and now by ubiquitous media technologies.”

Scheduled to take place April 19-21, #Displace18 is the first time that the biennial meeting will be a virtual gathering. “Air travel is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and one of the chief ways that an academic livelihood contributes to carbon pollution,” the SCA explains. “We are exploring the virtual conference format with the ideal of carbon-neutral activity in mind.”

According to Jerome Whitington, a visiting professor of anthropology at New York University, the no-flying conference emerges not only out of climate change concerns, ones related to a marked increase in interest in ecological matters among cultural anthropologists over the last decade or so. It also grows out of a new generation of cultural anthropologists eager to experiment with alternative ways of interacting and disseminating knowledge and ideas like open source and new media formats.

Before it has even begun, #Displace18, a conference co-sponsored by the Society for Visual Anthropology, has already succeeded, it seems. As of this writing, there are 48 local nodes around the world where attendees and participants in the conference will gather “to watch portions of the conference together, and in many cases host their own workshops, dialogues, and local events.” The locations range from Addis Ababa, Bangalore, Cartagena, and Seattle to Copenhagen, Lima, Montreal, and Quetzaltenango. According to Whitington, the geographical diversity of participants constitutes a marked increase over previous, in-person SCA meetings. And with over 330 registrants thus far, the number of participants has also grown considerably.

Beyond the Displacements gathering, Whitington points to the need for the SCA to engage its members in serious, far-reaching discussions—ones that he is charged with helping to organize and facilitate in his role as the SCA’s “Climate Liaison.” While there have been no formal or published critiques within anthropology levied against the decision to hold a no-flying meeting, some have suggested that such efforts are misplaced, that they do not make much of a difference in the fight against climate change. There are also questions of how virtual conferencing will impact informal benefits that in-person meetings allow for—for example, by allowing scholars who come from historically marginalized communities, or scholars who are at small, geographically isolated institutions to connect with people who share their concerns, struggles, and experiences. It is for such reasons plus the hope that #Displace18 is only a first step, Whitington says, that the SCA needs to “get it right” in developing the appropriate, low-carbon tools. This requires extensive consultation and negotiation among anthropologists, as well as experimentation and flexibility.

A key goal is to engage to the AAA regarding its yearly meeting, one Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at Goldsmith, University of London, recently characterized as “an enormous carbon bomb.” The international annual conference involves several thousand people, each of whom, Hickel estimates, travels “about 3,000 miles round trip, emitting 900 kgs of CO2 per person in the process.” (The SCA is engaging in a rigorous carbon footprint analysis of Displacements.) This, he argues, is “nothing short of carbon colonialism, shot through with violent disparities of race, class, and geography.” It is also, he writes, contrary to the AAA’s own code of ethics, which states: “Anthropological researchers must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does not harm the safety of the people with whom they work.”

It is inspiring to see the members of the Society of Cultural Anthropology taking this code to heart, and helping to push the discipline of anthropology in a low-carbon, ecologically just direction.

Registration for the conference is open to all. The fee is $10. Go to:  https://displacements.jhu.edu/register/

Parke is traveling overland by Amtrak for the next 2 weeks, for a mix of talks and meetings on food policy and #flyingless topics.

If you are near one of these events, please stop by to say “hello.” The chance to meet in person feels especially precious during these years of not flying.

Itinerary:

• New York City, Mar 16 (tomorrow), noon, CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, Hunter College. 1216 East Building. Contact O. Douglas Price (Twitter @ODouglasPrice) with quick RSVP to arrange building entrance. Presentation and discussion on #flyingless themes.
• Atlanta, Mar 19 (Monday), 11:30am. Emory University, AMUC room 223. Presentation and discussion on #flyingless themes.
• New Orleans, Mar 21 (Wed), 5pm, American Heart Association Epi/Lifestyle meetings, 5pm poster presentation related to U.S. food policy research.
• Memphis, Mar 24-25 (tourism on music and civil rights themes).
• Bloomington, IN, Mar 26 (Mon), 12:30pm, IU Food Institute, 405 N. Park Ave, on #flyingless themes and 4pm, 513 N. Park Ave. (Tocqueville Room), on U.S. food policy research.
• Urbana Champaign, IL, Mar 27 (Tues), noon, University of Illinois, 426 Mumford Hall, on U.S. food policy research.
• Chicago, Mar 28 (Wed). No meetings planned yet (indeed, suggestions welcome).

This journey is a pilot for a different way of organizing academic life, with a moderately smaller role for academic conferencing and a somewhat bigger role for slower-paced academic tours or sojourns from place to place. Among other activities, this tour gives me a chance to share topics from the second edition of my book, Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge/Earthscan), published this month, March 2018, as well as to act out some of our initiative’s ideas for #flyingless. Thank you to all the nice people who arranged these invitations. If you are interested in other people doing travels in a similar spirit, follow the inspiring Twitter feed of Giuseppi Delmestri (@gdelmestri) this month, and the growing number of other lifestyle pioneers we share from the @flyingless feed.

In these years of not flying, am I deprived of cross-cultural exchange, adventurous vacations, networking for my career, or art? No. The whole world is at my doorsteps.

My daily subway commute ends with a walk through Boston’s Chinatown. My work colleagues come from all parts of the globe. On the way to a movie, my family eats at the Asmara Ethiopian restaurant. I worship from time to time at the Spanish language services in Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross (Catholic) and Congregación León de Judá (evangelical). Walking distance from home, we see a concert by a Malian singer and guitarist at the Somerville Theatre. Traveling to NYC, my family stays in a side-street B&B in Queens, a global metropolis unlike any other. I read the international news, watch international history documentaries on television, and reminisce about past travels in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Europe. It is true that I feel the loss of travel by air to new places, but I enjoy plenty of cross-cultural exchange.

On a family bike tour, we take the new ferry and pedal through the alternating francophone and anglophone fishing villages of Nova Scotia. We speak with fishing folk, packing plant laborers, naturalists, and international tourists. In a random conversation in a grocery store parking lot, we listen to the stories of a First Nation Canadian man about the old farms that were paved over. It is true that I feel the loss of vacations by air, but I enjoy fine travels regionally.

For work, in the past few years, I have learned from conferences and meetings in Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Immokalee, Woods Hole, Albany, and many other places. I travel frequently by train to Washington, DC, for work. In one long trip next month, I will take Amtrak for meetings, conferences, and presentations in New York City, Atlanta, New Orleans, Indiana, and Champaign-Urbana, with stops for tourism in Memphis and Chicago on the way. It is true that the train journeys are sometimes wearisome, but they have offsetting pleasures and the work time is good. It also is true that I feel the loss of travel by air to meetings in other continents and the West Coast, but I see many colleagues from those places at the meetings I do attend.

For art, I have always visited the great galleries of Washington and New York, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, but for some reason I never had been inside the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum or Boston’s Public Library, which are both walking distance from my office, until after I stopped flying. Why not? Because, when I was flying, I thought I lacked the time. Reflect on the irony! It is true that I miss the Prado and the British Museum, and have never visited the Louvre or the Hermitage. I will have to use the virtual tour, which is of course not the same and yet an artistic and technological marvel in its own way. It also is true that I feel painful loss at not being able to revisit the temple at Borobudur or the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, which is a holy place to me. As a balm for my heart-ache, I instead visit Trinity Church in Boston, which is the masterpiece of the architect H.H. Richardson and the artist John La Farge, and the delightful quiet Romanesque chapel of the monks of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist alongside the Charles River. This week, I watched on TV Jim Jarmusch’s charming movie Paterson, about a quiet poet with a passionately artful sense of place in his run-down New Jersey city. Art is not a competition, and nobody should care if the museum we visit is ranked third or eighth globally. If we have a heart to listen with, we all can recognize that we are blessed by enough art to occupy all the hours we can devote to it.

For people who fly frequently, it is possible to drastically reduce flying while preserving what we love about cross-cultural exchange, adventurous vacations, stimulating work-life, and art.

For readers who doubt my claim, take your own mental inventory. If you fly four or more times in a year, imagine that you cut your flights to one quarter of their current level. To compensate for the loss, imagine that you increased your time invested locally and regionally, in overland travel, and in longer and more extensive use of the rare flights that remain. Confirm for yourself, while the environmental impact of your aviation falls 75%, that your quality of life would barely be diminished, and even the small sacrifice might trigger a response in your own soul, enhancing your appreciation for the treasures that surround you in your own place and region.

Some readers will consider my message obvious. Others will rebel against it with a hardness I can only attribute to selfishness. A third group will tell themselves that they would be willing to fly less if only the system were more supportive (through more understanding employers, more reasonable expectations from family members who live elsewhere, better train prices and comforts, better national climate policy, and so forth). For people in this third group, please focus for now on advocacy. For starters, especially if you are connected to a university community, please participate in the advocacy aspects of our #flyingless initiative (see petition, list of academic supporters, and FAQ).

Trinity Church, Boston (the Exploragrapher,CC-NC).