Climate Change Collective Post 3: Travel With Climate Change

The wonderful Jamie from JamieAdStories has shared the third post in the series being run by the Climate Change Collective.

Many people operate as if they are on islands these days. They have a home island, a work island, a ‘going out’ island and a shopping island. They hop in a vehicle and whizz between each island as if they are all disconnected.

One such example is children going to school. Often we find kids get in the car, distract themselves with devices and then arrive at school, almost magically. Then they hop into a car and nip to cubs or scouts or another hobby island before possibly visiting ‘grandma’ island. Often these islands are not very far away from one another….

Read on here to see what Jamie has to say…. Travel With Climate Change.

Jamie’s article really resonates with me. We have kids in school (we take them the 1.5 miles by car at 7.30am, and fetch them after 5pm most days). They also go to swimming lessons, Beavers or Scouts, rugby, the library and so on. And we mostly go by car. Sometimes we walk to school, but it’s a 30 minute walk so on days that I’m working we’d need to be up 30 mins earlier and I would have to start work 30 mins later. That would have a domino effect, so I’d have to work later in the evening (or catch up after dinner, something I’ve never done) and it would be much later by the time they got home. It’s doable, it would just be super inconvenient and would even mean the kids having to stop some of their other activities as we simply couldn’t get small boy fetched home, fed, changed and back out in 50mins on a Monday if the “fetched” stage took 60 minutes! We tend to mitigate the impact by stringing several destinations together; so himself takes the kids to school on his way to work, so it’s only a slight deviation from a journey he has to take anyway. If I’m on my Friday off, we’ll be much more likely to walk. When time isn’t a limited resource, I walk to town or the shops or wherever else I need to be.

Jamie is right, convenience is the problem. But, for families where both parents work we’re kind of stuck between convenience or being greener at the cost of much longer days (I’m talking scaling 30mins total for car journeys that would take me 2 hours to walk). Often the burden of those extra green journeys falls on the women, because our society’s traditions dictate that we’re the care givers, the organizers, and our jobs are typically less well paid and therefore less valued (don’t get me started, but read Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez).

I love the perspective and the concern Jamie shows for what we’re teaching our children about climate change and the impact of choosing the easy option. We can all do more to educate future generations, and model good practices for them.