Grounded, and loving it. Can giving up air travel bring joy?

The last time Jack Hanson took an airplane, he was a junior at the University of Vermont. To return from a semester abroad in Copenhagen, he flew from Denmark, stopped in Iceland, and landed in New York. 

But the next term, one of his professors asked students to calculate their individual energy usage. And when Mr. Hanson did the math, he realized that just one leg of that international flight accounted for more energy, and more greenhouse gas emissions, than all the other things he had done that year combined – the driving and heating and lighting and eating and everything else.

He was taken aback.

“I just couldn’t justify it,” he says. “It really is an extreme. It’s an extreme amount of energy, an extreme amount of pollution.”

So Mr. Hanson decided to stop flying. That was in 2015. Since then, he has traveled by train and bike and car, and has even written a song about the trials of getting home to Chicago on an overnight bus. But he has not been on an airplane.   

And he has never found travel more joyful, he says.

He knows that some find this hard to believe – including many friends and family members. They look at a two-day overland trip from Burlington, Vermont, to Chicago, compare it to 2 1/2 hours in the air, and decide Mr. Hanson’s approach is ludicrous. 

But with more people recognizing the climate impact of the aviation industry, and more people interested in lowering their own carbon footprint, a new ethos of “slow,” climate-friendly travel is taking hold. And those at the forefront of this movement – travelers like Mr. Hanson who have pledged to go “flight free” for a year or more – claim that their new approach from getting here to there is surprisingly fun.

“The motivation initially is the emissions, but once you try it, you think, ‘Why have I been torturing myself?’ says Anna Hughes, the head of Flight Free UK, a group based in the United Kingdom that has collected some 10,000 pledges from people to eschew flying. “Flights are too fast, and kind of fake. You’re air dropped from one place to another.”

Go more slowly, she says, and travel begins to return to what it once was: a slow metamorphosis of one place to another, a sense of space, an unwinding of time.

“Once you’ve tasted this way of travel, you understand what it’s all about,” she says.

“The flip side is something positive”

But there is more underlying the satisfaction of land-based travel, psychologists say. A growing body of research increasingly ties environment- and climate-friendly behavior to a personal sense of well-being. In a recent Environmental Research Letters article, for instance, author Stephanie Johnson Zawadzki of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands explored the stereotype that environmental living is all about sacrifice. She found numerous studies showing that people not only felt better when they took easy “green” actions – choosing a paper bag at the grocery store, for instance, or buying a “sustainable” product – but also reported an improved sense of well-being when those actions required more give.

“Indeed, despite the possible inconvenience, cost, or discomfort which are sometimes associated with pro-environmental behaviors, people appear to consistently associate pro-environmental behaviors with positive feelings rather than negative ones,” she wrote.

Part of this, psychologists speculate, is that taking actions to counteract global warming helps counteract “climate distress,” an increasingly recognized psychological phenomenon.  

Climate distress, explains New York-based psychologist Wendy Greenspun, is “a range of emotional reactions from sadness to despair to grief to anger and rage, hope and shame and guilt.” And one of the key ways to build resilience to it, she says, is to behave like part of the solution, and to creatively connect with others doing the same.

“Guilt maybe leads us to recognize that we care and we want to repair,” she says. “Anger can often be the fuel for taking action rather than being helpless. Grief or feelings of loss can lead toward love. There’s something for me about negative or distressed emotions – the flip side is something positive.”

Traveling with joy – and justice – in mind

This was certainly true for Dan Castrigano.

A former teacher who now runs a climate organization from Burlington, Vermont, he says that he worried for years about flying. At first, he tried to lower his feelings of guilt by buying carbon offsets. (The offset system is basically an accounting mechanism where individuals or organizations pay to keep carbon out of the atmosphere one place to counteract their emissions somewhere else.) But he knew that many climate activists doubted the real value of offsets, and he didn’t feel much better. 

“There was this cognitive dissonance when I would fly,” he says. “I was teaching about climate to seventh and eighth graders, and I just kind of became embarrassed that I was flying to Europe for vacation.” 

Eventually, he decided to give up flying altogether. Now he helps run Flight Free USA, which connects people who have pledged to avoid planes for a month, a year, or indefinitely.  

“It’s extremely joyful not to fly,” he says. “It’s liberating.”

The aviation sector is responsible for around 2.5% of the world’s carbon emissions, according to researchers. There’s a greater total global warming impact when scientists consider the heating effect of planes’ contrails – those temporary, line-like clouds formed by an airplane’s exhaust stream.

In an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released this month, scientists noted that although land-based vehicles still cause most transportation-related emissions, there are ways to stabilize or decrease those greenhouse gasses. Emissions from the aviation sector, on the other hand, are growing, and do not have an easy fix.

Part of this is because there is still no real alternative to jet fuel. While biofuels, electric planes, and green hydrogen engines are all the focus of research and speculation, the only way to lower the aviation industry’s climate impact at the moment is to either fly less or use offsets. 

“There are just a lot of things we did on default”

And more people are concerned about this – even as the aviation industry grows. 

The concept of flygskam – a Swedish word usually translated as “flight shame” – is common in Europe; climate activist Greta Thunberg helped popularize the term when she traveled across the Atlantic in a racing yacht to avoid going by plane to a 2019 conference in New York. That same year, in a study commissioned by the World Economic Forum, one in seven global consumers said they would pick a form of transportation with a lower carbon footprint if they could, even if it were less convenient or more expensive. And a recent report from the consulting group McKinsey cited growing customer concerns about sustainability as one of the largest looming challenges to the aviation sector. 

Meanwhile, more organizations, newly accustomed to virtual meetings, are rethinking their business travel in order to reduce their carbon footprints, says Shengyin Xu, the global sustainability initiative lead for the World Resources Institute. 

“There are just a lot of things we did on default,” she says. “Historically, when we were invited to speak at a conference we would go and book a ticket.”

The airline industry itself is well aware of these climate concerns. It has pledged to become “carbon neutral” by 2050, primarily by using carbon offsets. But climate activists are skeptical.

“There is no getting away from it,” says Ms. Hughes. “As an individual, there is nothing you can do in your life to raise your emissions as fast and as high as taking a flight. I could drive a car for an entire year and that would be the same as the flight from London to New York, per passenger. It’s insane how much fossil fuel it takes to get something so heavy up into the air and going so far.”

There is also a justice component, she and other activists say.

A growing body of research shows that the world’s richest countries and individuals emit a hugely disproportionate amount of the greenhouse gasses that warm the atmosphere. Research from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute in 2020, for instance, found that the richest 10% of the world’s population were responsible for 52% of the globe’s cumulative greenhouse gas emissions; the richest 1% was responsible for 15%. 

This is mirrored in air travel.

Although it’s hard to get exact statistics, most research shows that around 80% of the world’s population will never travel on an airplane. In 2018, a study by Sweden’s Linnaeus University found that only 11% of the world’s population took a flight that year. Meanwhile, frequent fliers, who comprise 1% of the world’s population, generated half of the aviation industry’s carbon emissions.

This is why it feels so good to Mr. Hanson to stay on the ground.

“I want to live in a way where I know that, if everyone on earth was living like me, the world would be OK,” he says. “When it comes to individual lifestyle behaviors, that’s the baseline for me.”

Besides, if he was flying, he’d never have the story of when his girlfriend’s bike got a flat tire in rural Vermont, and how a stranger helped them and became a new friend. He wouldn’t have watched the sun rise over Indiana from a train’s sleeper car.

And he definitely wouldn’t have had those lyrics about the overnight bus to Chicago.

Editor’s note: The spelling of Jack Hanson’s surname has been corrected since the initial publication of the story.