In The Carbon Code (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), long-time #flyingless supporter Brett Favaro embeds aviation issues within a broader agenda for personal and social change. Along with the energy sector, local and regional transportation, and the food sector, Favaro explains the magnitude of aviation’s impact for the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of comparatively prosperous people:

For the average person, [commuting] trips make up most of the transportation footprint. For those of us in the top quarter of global wealth, the GHGs we emit from long-distance air travel can be far more damaging. We can’t ignore this any longer. The carbon cost of travel is enormous and growing quickly.

The book, written for lay audiences, (1) summarizes the science of consumption impacts on greenhouse gasses and proposes a code of conduct (hence, the title phrase, “The Carbon Code”), (2) reviews implications for daily life sector by sector, and (3) finally engages a broader conversation about cultural and political change.

The book is so terrific that I have added a new question to our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list, citing this work. I will be sharing it with friends in my community.

In addressing aviation, Favaro writes:

Flight is a luxury. The vast majority of people on Earth never set foot on an airplane or do so very few times throughout their lives. If you fly regularly, then you are statistically an outlier. This is hard to wrap our heads around in North America and Europe, where flying is relatively common. But every time we travel by air, we are accountable for a large amount of carbon pollution. Climate justice demands that we examine this carefully.

Here are three recent links emphasizing #flyingless themes in a constructive way.

1. The March 28 event at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has now been posted online, and it’s wonderful. We appreciated the shout-out from Kim Nicholas for our initiative. Kevin Anderson illustrates in his own calm manner the hybrid radical realism that he espouses. Nowhere else in my academic life do I see PowerPoint slides with titles like, “Narrow thinking led to our shameful littany of scams.”
2. Our own Joe Nevins, from Vassar College, has a new essay in truthout, emphasizing the combination of systemic and lifestyle changes. He warns against “a ‘soft denialism’ shared by many associated with the broad left and the climate movement in the United States and the West: a failure to scrutinize lifestyle and everyday consumption.” At the same time, he emphasizes the need for systemic change focused on environmental justice. He writes, “collective action and individual action are necessarily linked in the effort to make structural change. Like any project of far-reaching change, the effort to radically cut carbon dioxide emissions, and environmental degradation broadly, is a multi-front endeavor.”
3. Registration is now open for the Global Arts and Psychology Seminar (GAPS) on April 28-29. Here are links for registration for the Boston hub, which will be 9:30am to 2pm on April 28 at Tufts University, and for the global event. As the keynote speaker for the Boston Hub, Emily Morgan, Ph.D., a researcher at Tufts, will discuss “Modeling Melodic Expectation.” In format, as a small-scale pilot, this event offers one step toward addressing a challenge Kevin Anderson raised in the Swedish event in #1 above, reflecting on the need for experimenting with new methods of long-distance or virtual academic connection that preserve the essential warmth and human connection of in-person conferencing. Join us at the hub nearest you!

Graz, Austria, one of five hubs.

The Global Arts and Psychology Seminar (GAPS), on April 28-29, will bring together graduate students and scholars around the globe, especially in music and psychology. There will be integrated keynote talks, breakout sessions, and workshops, at universities in 5 hubs:

• Graz, Austria
• La Plata, Argentina
• Sydney, Australia
• Sheffield, UK
• Boston, USA

The seminar offers a novel mix of in-person and virtual conferencing. It is a pilot run for a possible major professional conference in summer 2018.

The request for papers invites graduate students to submit brief abstracts. The deadline for abstract submission is Apr 7. Existing or previously presented papers are welcome.

The lead organizer and innovator is long-time #flyingless supporter Richard Parncutt, a professor of systematic musicology at Uni Graz, Austria. “The purpose of the new conference format is to go global,” Parncutt says, “opening up to colleagues in as many countries and regions as possible, regardless of financial means.” He suggests the conference can halve CO2 emissions per participant by eliminating most of the flying. For practical reasons, the project is starting with a relatively small number of hubs, but the “cloudcast” approach means that the number is practically unlimited: each hub transmits its local presentations live to the cloud and all other hubs can choose which presentations to include in their virtual program, either live or with a time delay.

I’m personally delighted that my university, Tufts University, will host the “Boston” hub — the actual location is the university’s Medford/Somerville campus. For this hub, the schedule is entirely on Apr 28. Tufts has a long record of great work in music and psychology, including by former provost Jamshed Bharucha and current internationally known music psychology professor Aniruddh Patel. As the organizer for the Talloires Declaration, Tufts also has been a leader in encouraging university communities to develop more environmentally sustainable operations during a time of climate change.

This event offers a distinctive combination of in-person presence at each hub and global reach across the hubs. We will be connected virtually, but the coffee in the morning, the handshakes with new colleagues, perhaps the glass of wine at the end of the day, and the sense of an exciting event in the conference rooms themselves, learning about important new research in music and psychology, will all be real. I hope to see you there!

Tufts University, Medford/Somerville Campus — the “Boston” hub.