No, not sacrificing the city -- sacrificing my time in Amsterdam.
I made a very difficult decision yesterday. I'm fortunate to have become, over a couple of decades, a fairly big fish in certain small ponds. Consequently I serve on various advisory panels.
One of them, a large European open access project, is having its meeting in Amsterdam next month. They will pay my travel, and put me up at a swanky hotel, and feed me ever-so-well.
Free travel to Amsterdam! Free luxury lodging in that most lovely of cities! Hooh-hah!
I'd get to spend a productive day with a bunch of European colleagues who I see only rarely, and enjoy a great deal. I'd learn a lot about European attitudes to things we confront in the US too, and that I need to understand professionally; and I was to present a brief report on some of the movements in that same arena in the US. And maybe take an extra day to just enjoy myself.
But I decided, after much pondering, that I just couldn't do it.
I just couldn't fly across the Atlantic and back for a daylong meeting.
I couldn't pump that kind of carbon into the air anymore, just to sit in a large room -- even if I could take an extra day of delight in Amsterdam, perhaps my favorite city in the world.
I couldn't treat the atmosphere and environment as a given, and treat air travel as a natural right.
I couldn't ignore my own responsibilities, especially in light of the Gulf Gusher. Especially when I might, by my choice, be able to apply some pressure to add virtual-meeting options to the panel's options. Maybe one or two others might make that choice as well.
I tried to explain this to my daughter-in-law, who is not nearly so clear about the Converging Emergencies crisis as I am.
She was a little baffled.
"Can't you just buy some green credits or something?" Well, no, because many of those are bogus, and because plant transpiration (CO2 into O) declines as CO2 rises. Beyond that, supporting an unsustainable status quo is complicity in the impending environmental collapse.
"I mean, you have to travel. It's your work!" Well, yes -- and I understand better than most that virtual facetime isn't the same as real facetime. And perhaps, if I had a super-important agenda item to push forward, I'd be reacting differently, so I could personally buttonhole obstreperous panel members, ahead of some vote. I don't know.
But in this case -- and perhaps, for me, in an increasing number of cases -- the travel is not truly necessary.
"But it's Amsterdam!"
Yes, and that's what makes it a true sacrifice for me. Nothing against Los Angeles, but it wouldn't be a sacrifice to not go to LA.
But Amsterdam, the city of canals, and sanity, and delicate beauty. The city of coffeehouses and music and laughter. The city of big beers in little restaurants in narrow streets full of ding-a-linging bicycles.
To give up Amsterdam in June seems almost a crime.
But if we are to save -- or even mitigate -- our future by our actions, we will each need to sacrifice. Sacrifice luxury, sacrifice strawberries in January, sacrifice shopping as recreation. Sacrifice the culture of disposable consumption. Sacrifice what we, all our lives, have been taught is our natural right: to have whatever the hell we want.
We need to sacrifice our presumption that everything's just like it was yesterday, and that it will be the same tomorrow. It isn't, and it won't be.
Human-made toxins reside in the blood and flesh and bone of all the animals in the world. Our waste exhaust is melting the Arctic. Our desire for ease has led to drilling for energy a mile beneath the ocean, and our desire for the cheapest "cost" has caused a catastrophe of incomprehensible proportions in the Gulf.
By sacrificing this trip, I'm cementing further my convictions about the choices I must make today and next month. And that cements further the choices I must make this year, and next, and the year after that.
This sacrifice is a victory for me -- a victory of conviction over training. It's small, but it hurts. And that pain is what makes it more meaningful to me.
"But someone else will just take that seat!"
Yep. And it won't be me.
Every gram of crap we don't spew into the world is a few minutes of time: time to perhaps wrench this Discovery Horizon Titanic society away from murdering itself, and time to enact the necessary repairs.
Each gram unspewed delays the tipping points which we must not cross.
Every act can be part of the work of reviving our damaged world.
That's not sacrifice, but a strategy for sanity.