It is the last day of school for my children, and the holidays (that’s “holidays” in the UK as opposed to “Holidays” in the USA) start here. In the middle of a torrential downpour through which I’m going to have to transfer all of our camping gear into the car, and then trundle down to the South Downs – small but beautiful range of hills in Southern England – to put up the tent, probably in the same downpour.

But we’re going to love it, because we don’t do normal holidays. At this time of year millions of people will be flying around the world, on longer and longer journeys each year as flights get cheaper and carbon becomes ever more passe a subject for those who only care about boasting about how far they went, and didn’t those poor people have such charming manners when we took photos of them!

Ahem.

As I said, we’re not like that. We are spending 3 days in a camp site in a wood, then 5 days in a camp site in some more beautiful countryside near the sea, then another 2 days in a camp site near to Cheddar caves (yes, where the cheese comes from), then finally 3 days in a small chalet on the Isle Of Wight. All probably in the rain.

Total carbon dioxide emissions for travel : about 80kg

Total carbon emissions just for a flight for our family to Spain : 1300kg

So I don’t feel at all guilty about driving, especially when I look up on our journey to the South Downs, and see the jets flying from Gatwick Airport with their chemtrails behind them. And they’ll probably get food poisoning, anyway.

Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.org
And kitted out member of The Sietch