Why fly to Europe when you can catch a few trains and it will only take you 89 days? If you're lucky
A flight-free adventure between the UK and North Africa offers the romance of slow travel alongside the opportunity to get to know some of Europe’s most famous artists, finds Diana Jarvis
Haha, no I flew last in 2019. Did a 6 month tour in the US in 2021 and have just been doing more local tours or renting bikes since then. I'm planning on saving up and quitting work for a 3+ month journey around Europe in 5 years or so. That's the plan at least, we'll see whether life says otherwise ;)
I'm planning to fly transcontinental once every 8 years for the rest of my life, but I'm being pretty strict with myself for anything shorter than that and going train or bus. For me it's not exactly about the personal impact as much as doing it to make it easier for others in the future to do better. So every time I "suffer" a little because I take an extra day to travel by train/bus, I just think about how my doing it makes it more likely that train service with bikes will get easier for the next person to do the same thing. (Also I live in the US so most routes are much much harder than pretty much anywhere in Europe from what I hear.)
Totally amazing and the very most solarpunk way of doing it imho. Especially that really beautiful classic train getting the retrofit.
The county has been selected to take part in an innovative trial
Beat the summer's soaring flight prices by taking one of these train journeys.
Adam Swanson was just 17 when he and his friend Henry left Minnesota on a two-year cycle trip around the world in 2021. Here’s what happened next.
To encourage guests to travel more sustainably, the Hoxton is offering £20 off room rates for those who arrive by train
This would be so lovely for some far northern/southern latitudes that need all the sun they can get to stay warm. With double or triple paned glass to insulate.
Extreme heat is prompting tourists to rethink their plans.
This is me except I spent a year working on farms and now I absolutely want to write code that automates farming because in reality it is backbreaking and quite monotonous. Hobby farms are leisurely but actually feeding yourself and others is exhausting.
by Syris Valentine When Black Panther debuted, Black folks everywhere lost their collective minds witnessing an African society free from the ravages of colonialism. One of the most striking aspects of Wakanda was how technology and the environment harmonized to support thriving communities. The mov...
Björn Bender envisions a ‘wonderful outlook’ for night trains and what it will take to get there.
The transformed Bristol Beacon, set to reopen in November this year, has unveiled a tie-up with First Bus, which will reward concert-goers for travelling sustainably to the venue in the city.
I'd argue that the absolute shift in biases aren't the measure of open-mindedness, and it's the rate of change that determines how open-minded you are. From that regard the second half of the 20th century was fairly close-minded about the unmitigated correctness of our institutions and our place in the world. I'd say the year 2020 was one of the most rapid periods of open-minded inquisitiveness in my lifetime and that was when everyone was stuck at home.
As a counterpoint to this. Americans travel more now than they ever have in our history and I'd say culturally we are not significantly more open-minded or charitable as a whole.
It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.
What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.
The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:
> I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.
If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.
One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson, a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”
Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?
It's strange that they didn't include the food offset by the ebike though. This link tries to give a comparison between the two accounting for a typical European diet (which is also far more sustainable than the typical American diet).
https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-environmental-impact/
A person riding a bike has to consume extra food to burn energy in their muscles to propel them. The energy has to come from somewhere. There are CO2 emissions associated with producing food.
A group of European consumer groups have launched an EU-wide complaint against 17 airlines for so-called “greenwashing” over their claims about making air travel more sustainable.
Imagine upping the size, running the vacuums on renewables and automating it though. You could distribute farm fresh veggies to the doorstep of everyone in an entire city. I think that'd be solarpunk as hell.
You can read more about the fascinating history here: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pneumatic-tubes.pdf
Credit: https://hachyderm.io/@miah
This article features Ariella Granett who founded Flight Free USA and hasn't flown since 2019.
Travel start-up Byway has launched an exciting new collection of sustainable holidays for dog owners, prooting sustainable travel.
Byway Travel tries to make flight free travel simple for more people to shift towards more sustainable travel.
I'm a pretty visible positive example I'd say. My objective is to provide reminders to reframe carnism as socially stigmatized. I think this mostly works because a lot of my friends are vegan, but there are a few "bros" who rationalize why they don't need to change.
It sounds a lot like you want us to be silent so you don't have to think about it.
Most people intellectually understand that torturing and killing animals is wrong and they don't want to do it. But they can put it into the back of their minds unless the vegans in their life remind them of what they look like to us.
And personally, I firmly believe that getting those little reminders from my friends added up over years for me until I realized it was worth it to make the change.
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/501556
> But then I remember I didn't take their children away, hook them up to a machine to extract food from them, or kill them. And that makes me feel like making fun of carnists is not so bad.
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I do. People get uncomfortable for a second, but I feel like I have to remind them what their actions look like from my perspective. I've realized that if I don't make jokes, they just never think about it!
But then I remember I didn’t take their children away, hook them up to a machine to extract food from them, or kill them. And that makes me feel like making fun of carnists is not so bad.
That seemed like a pretty valuable feature on reddit, and it seems even more valuable given that there can multiple communities with the same name on different servers.
So is it possible to crosspost?
Dang, that is nice. I'm guessing that's because the French grid has a lot of nuclear?
Flying from Stockholm to Hamburg results in around 250kg of carbon dioxide emissions per passenger, according to calculation website EcoPassenger. By contrast, the C02 released by travelling via electric-powered train is just 26kg.
That's amazing. It's only about 1/3rd the emissions in the US, but the sleepers are sooooo expensive I've never been able to afford it.
But that's OK I'm fine in coach 😄
The challenge that isn't covered here is that the grandeur of Singapore is far far easier to achieve with authoritarian centralization than the anarchic style of solarpunk. And people are compelled by the grandeur of a large expensive project in different ways than the DIY scale.
So how can a ragtag group in SF or Berlin make something that captures imagination just as well as Singapore?
I'm a huge fan of the ebike for camping too. In 2021, I took a year off work to ebike around the US.
This weekend's adventure was low-key by comparison, just a 14 mile ride from downtown Madison, WI out to a county park campground.
If you're around Madison, WI I'm running group campouts now! Have one coming up this weekend and will do more over the summer.
Oh my! That video is so freaking awesome. I have a butterfly. I only need to ride it less than a mile to my nearest lake. My trailer is much heavier because it was a converted car one.
I have 3 bikes right now. An upright ebike for around town and short trips, a recumbent ebike for 50+ mile trips, and a mtb/commuter (mostly to handle the winters). I ride everywhere around town, and I do lots of bike camping around my area.
