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Travelling Without Borders

Hello, fellow travellers,

Next stop on The Travelling Scientist journey is the Travelling Without Borders project, managed by Environmental Humanities Lab and with support from KTH-Sustainability. In this project we want to explore how we as scientists travel and the reasons to why we do it. This from an environmental and cultural perspective. We will arrange a range of seminars and activities and we would love to have you on board.

Do you want to give a confession? We want to know why you travel and how you feel about it. Write in the comments or send an anonymous confession to kristoffer.soldal@gmail.com.

More information about the project, and how you can contribute, will be revealed soon

//Kristoffer Soldal

TwB

Copyright: https://flic.kr/p/3j5huk

Anna Kaijser: Embodiment, privilege and the brightness of countless mirrors – miscellaneous notes from a fieldwork

Five sustainability scholars from Lund University, Sweden, on a rooftop terrace in Rabat, Morocco. Below us the city unfolds. The ancient medina performing its ancient medina-ness: winding alleys, torn mosaic stairs and arcades, market stands parading rows of bright colors, smells of grilled meat and scented oil. Walls lined with elderly men drinking thick black coffee, playing backgammon. Then the futuristic tram floating majestically along the broad avenues dreamed up by the French during the years of protectorate. Then the Atlantic. Then the world.

11660314_10153452848549439_827811267_oFieldwork, while often a romanticized and problematic notion (what is the field anyway?, etc.), is one of the reasons that researchers, not least those engaged in matters of sustainability, fly across the world more than most other people. In this case, we are here to explore the political ecology of solar power initiatives in Morocco. We are trying to follow the webs of power and politics, to figure out whose interests materialize in recent projects, who benefits and who pays with money, land, labor. We move through the city, unpacking laptops and notebooks in modest activist headquarters and the glossy offices of investment banks. As foreign researchers we have access to all kinds of spaces. Our translator speaks six languages. While we travel smoothly across her country, she would only be able to visit us with a formal invitation and special permission, involving tedious and humiliating bureaucratic struggles.

 

I am utterly impressed by the train stations. On the platforms by the tracks benches are grouped together under the shades of trees. Welcoming spaces for waiting and people-watching. From Rabat to Marrakech I follow the landscape through the window. Soft hills, a thin veil of green over red dryness. We continue our journey in a rented car across the Atlas Mountains. The snow-crested peaks are draped in mist, which dissolves as we pass Tichka, slightly above 2200 meters above sea level. The winding road turns downward until we reach Ouarzazate, a town between the mountains and the desert. Fifty-two days from Timbuktu on camel back, I learn – an exotic way of counting distance and time, when you are used to the inherently absurd possibility of hopping on a plane and getting anywhere in the world within 30 hours.

 

The dramatic landscape is a popular site for movie shootings: Asterix and Obelix, Gladiator, Game of Thrones, our interlocutor recites. We visit a village with small-scale photovoltaic solar panels, managed by a cooperative and used to pump water out of the ground to irrigate olive and saffron plantations. The bottom-up, small-scale character of this arrangement stands in contrast to one of the main destinations of our trip: a large solar power plant under construction, just outside of Ouarzazate. This plant is part of a larger initiative towards renewable energy incited by the Moroccan government, funded through investment banks and development agencies, and constructed by a Saudi Arabian firm. It gathers a wide range of dreams and expectations: energy independence for Morocco; infrastructure and employment opportunities for local communities; divestment from fossil fuels. After leaving our passports at the gates we are handed helmets and boots and escorted through the construction site. The place is spectacular. Thousands of vaulted mirrors spread out across the land, reflecting the bright sun. Walking among these mirrors feels like being in a sci-fi movie. Futuristic and eerie. When finished, the size of the plant will equal that of Paris. Back by the gates, I see busloads of men from Ouarzazate and nearby communities, shipped to the site to carry out construction work. After our visit to the plant we drive to the nearest village where people are gathered in the school to meet us. They talk about their poverty, voicing the pain of seeing great drams of the future materialize next to their grazing lands without any improvements to their life conditions. For the villagers the intense brightness of the mirrors accentuates their own remoteness.

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Who are we, researchers from Lund, in all this? We nod solemnly and take notes as we listen to the villagers. We sip sweet Moroccan tea with the villagers in the classroom. We pose for group pictures in helmets in front of the grandiose mirrors of the solar plant. Always armed with laptops, cameras and voice recorders. Always with easy access to the near and the far.

 

All the things I read about before we left – the abundant sunshine, the remote villages, the solar power plant out on the dry plains – materialize here, seep through me. I feel the sun burning my skin. I sense the sublime grandeur of the mirrors. I hear the desperation in the villagers’ voices. This is what fieldwork does: it embodies. I am very aware about the layers of privilege that play out here. Yet: I learn more with my skin and feet and eyes than my computer screen would ever be able to teach me.

 

Michael Deflorian: Flying but not quite free – individuals and their (self-)government in modern societies

In a recent blog entry Gabriel Söderberg summarized the discussion about individual contribution to climate change quite well: because voluntary restrictions are not enough to achieve considerable CO2 reductions we have to hope for new technical policies or cut each others’ liberties. This resembles two of the “myths” which Mike Hulme diagnoses behind the disagreement about climate change. While the first one reflects the belief in human inventiveness to shape the world’s destiny (Babel) the second one mirrors the regret that humans have used their power irresponsibly and should refrain from it (Apocalypse). The debate about flying and climate change range between these two fundamental stories about ourselves.

What I want to do in this blog entry is to complicate that picture a bit: by taking a quite different angle on how ‘government’ is achieved in modern society. We might usually think of government as the exercise of power over people by the state, which is justified through a legal-democratic body (or not). In contrast, I would argue that we should think of government in a different way: as the different ways human behaviour is conducted towards certain ends.

Michel Foucault reflected prominently in the late 1970s on what he called the “art of government”. According to this perspective, modern societies are full with attempts to steer our behaviour by applying restrictions, disciplinary practices and also liberties. In that way we know that we ought to vote, not drive too fast, work forty hours a week, brush our teeth and not harm our neighbours. We usually do not think of these things as something that is forced upon us: most of us would say that these are beliefs or interests they would call their own and not external to them. Government in this sense does not only apply to authorities we would subsume to “the state” but is exercised in different places like schools, offices, homes and ultimately ourselves. Obvious forms of such “self-government” are vegetarianism, regular sport or time management: practices through which we bring our bodies and souls in line with certain goals. In other words: it is a bit tricky to speak of “free” or “unfree” individuals if we consider how we are part of a meshwork of governing processes which cannot be traced back to a single authority but are rather historically grown parts of our lives.

Kid-Brushing-TeethGoverning your mouth, twice a day: brushing teeth can be understood as a form of self-government towards oral health. Instead of picking it up ourselves it is achieved through disciplinary practices in childhood.

How is it then in the case of flying? Like any other way of transportation, it is governed in a certain way: airlines need to follow security regulations, pay aviation taxes, respect landing restrictions. The passenger is included in these governing processes to a certain extend (“let’s think about safety procedures”) – but she can choose where, when and how often she wants to fly. Thus, we might assume that individual flying is hardly governed in our societies. However, I would argue that this and other freedoms of individual consumption are guaranteed because they contribute to two fundamental goals in modern society: the well-being of the population and the state. Both of them rely on an increasing input of fossil resources, something that is strongly related to the emissions of carbon. Thus, the dilemma about responding to climate change might not be about conflicting interests of individuals but the ways we stabilize and govern our societies since industrialization.

Does that mean that the individual and, more importantly, the travelling scientist is without power? Certainly not. It is important to point to different strategies of government among groups: the conduct of human behaviour does not start and end with the state but involves the university, its departments and associations. It is in these places where academics can stress what Göran Finnveden called why we travel, who should travel and how we travel.

This is crucial because in order to change ways of government they need first to be problematized: they must be questioned due to certain reasons and then countered with a different logic and means. It is up for debate and trial if these should involve taxes, targets, incentives or affirmative actions. But it could also include less technical instruments: what about reducing the number of academic conferences by coordinating and concentrating them in fewer times and places? (and why not staying a bit longer and spending your holidays there?). Another step forward would be to reconsider what a change in flying could entail: not a loss of freedom but a change of freedom. Flying less would mean to have more time, money and carbon to govern our lives, jobs and universities in more fulfilling ways.Tempelhofer-Feld_Wooden-Plane

Setting off flights instead of carbon: following a referendum the city of Berlin closed down the airport Tempelhof in 2008. Two years later it re-opened as a park and is now one of the most popular places for leisure time.

/Michael Deflorian

Martin Hultman: The nomads who does not move

As scientists we are today pushed towards traveling. Meeting peers at conferences, having a postdoc period in another country far away or even do field work abroad are judged as part of becoming a successful scientist. The evaluation system regarding new positions is structured so that publications in English and experiences of networking abroad are encouraged. There are plenty of funding opportunities as guest researcher or postdoc to search for if you are prepared to go abroad for a while. Since the world economy is to 85% based on fossil fuels , the amount of possible carbon dioxide emission stored for us in the funding schemes of VR, Formas, RJ, Forte, STINT is huge.

This development is of course great in many ways. You get to share knowledge with scholars researching similar issues as yourselves, your own results get a potential larger audience and you get personal bonds to places and people all over the world. I have done it myself and am in this sense an exemplary scholar in this new regime of globalised scholarship based on a westernized minority people high emitting travel patterns. As a nomad guest researcher three times in New Zealand and frequently participant in European and global conferences as well as organizer of international meetings, I have played the game to be played. I admit I have enjoyed it. Very much. And I will probably have/want to do it again in the future. Even though I have been aware of all the problems with my consumption patterns before, it has not become personal for real until lately.

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After finalizing the book Discourses of Global Climate Change there is something in my body that does not want to go away. It is a combination of awareness and inaction both personally as well as broadly politically. First of all it is about awareness. What we saw during the period 2006-2009 was that virtually everybody in Sweden, and globally, got aware of the consequences of emissions from fossil fuels as well as the consequences of climate change. We all live with that knowledge of the possible future apocalypse for societies as we know them. Simultaneously those who are responsible for this approaching catastrophe do very little, almost nothing, about it. This inaction, or conservative action which we call it, do have such a strong foothold in our industrial modern societies making it almost impossible to see the paths needed to be taken. This is what makes me feel uneasy and ashamed in situations never connected to these feelings before.

Lately I have been discussing awareness and conservative action with family, friends and colleagues in connection to travels. It creates awkward situations since we in my middle-class community are so used to creating ourselves with plans for, or memories of, travels far away from Sweden. It seems not possible to talk about the emissions from travels at the same time as the beautiful beaches of Thailand are enacted. Talking about travel patterns as something which destroys our planet is a “no-go” area, a taboo in our high-energy consuming society (thank you very much Josefin Wangel, a very short but rewarding trip from Linköping, for suggesting that concept in relation to travels!).

But perhaps we have got it totally wrong? Maybe we are so stuck with the image of traveling as a practise that we do with a car, train or airplane to faraway places that we have lost the whole sense of actually travelling? Might travel become something else also for us the minority high-energy consuming societies from now on?

Maybe we need to understand movement and travels in a much more relational way, then we can experience travels and moves all around and within us. Travels would no longer be something that take us from one point to the other, but something continuously ongoing with us. The true nomad might not be defined by movement at all, maybe s/he is instead to be understood, as Deleuze and Guattari says in A Thousand Plateus, as a territorial principle:

“The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space […] the nomad is on the contrary he who does not move” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004:420).

/Martin Hultman

/Martin Hultman

Göran Finnveden: Where should we go now?

The starting point of this blog is absolutely right: We need to talk more about travelling. Some points of departure for further discussion could be:

  • Globally we need to reduce emissions to something like 1-2 ton of CO2-equivalents per capita by 2050 in order to be in line with the 2-degree target.
  • For us in Sweden this corresponds to approximately 80-90 % reductions of our emissions related to consumption.
  • Travelling by air is expected to increase. Technical development alone is not likely to stop the increase in emissions. So the trend of increased travelling by air must be changed as well.
  • The emissions related to business travelling for KTH employees is approximately 1-2 ton of CO2 per person on average but is probably very unevenly distributed.
  • Travelling is part of the job as scientists. We need to do research and meet other scientists in order to exchange ideas, to learn and promote ourselves.
  • Some scientists think that travelling is a great part of the job and wouldn’t mind travelling more.
  • Some scientists would like to travel less.

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At KTH we have as an environmental target that CO2-emissions from travelling should be reduced by 10 % between 2013 and 2015. I have heard people in leading positions at KTH question whether we should have this target. Instead, they argue, we should travel more to get more contacts and to promote our research which is necessary in order to get more citations and climb on international ranking list. I expect that there will be discussions when we will set new environmental targets later this year. But a discussion about travelling should not only be about how much we travel, but also why we travel, who should travel and how we travel. Maybe we should promote travelling among younger scientists who needs to meet people and get themselves known to colleagues. Maybe some older scientists could skip meetings where they meet the same people again for a discussion that probably could have been arranged in another way as well. Maybe some need to travel less in order to get a better working situation and be able to spend more time with their family.

For me it is clear that the emissions from travelling need to be reduced. This will not be easy, it takes time and it requires a learning process. We need to explore our possibilities of developing travel free meetings. We need to explore possibilities of low-carbon travelling like trains, also when travelling longer distances.

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What is crucial now is to keep discussing travelling. We need people to start asking for possibilities for video conferences and train tickets. If it doesn’t work, let us know. If you are a researcher at KTH then talk to the environmental representatives at your schools. Send us an email at kth-miljo@kth.se or sustainability@kth.se. On a central level we can support, but the discussions and the actions need to be everywhere. What do you think the next steps should be? Should we develop an internal carbon tax at KTH? Should extra costs for train tickets and video conferences be covered somehow? Should we have an environmental target for greenhouse gases and if so what should it be? Can you study some of these issues in your research? Could some of these issues be integrated in your teaching? This blog is a great first step. It would be fantastic if we could continue the discussions in new fora and also create possibilities for a change.

/Göran Finnveden
Vice-president for sustainable development
Professor Environmental Strategic Analysis