20 Pledges for 2020: What going flight-free during a pandemic taught me

After a year in which nearly all of us stayed grounded, Helen Coffey reflects on what she’s learnt from her 2020 New Year’s resolution

When a New Year’s Resolution lasts longer than 12 months (Flight Free UK)

Choice is an important thing. When you have it, you barely notice. When it’s ripped away, you keenly feel the loss.

I say this because, unlike most thwarted travellers, 2020 was the year I had already chosen to go flight-free. I sat down in January and wrote about what I presumed would be my biggest ever New Year’s resolution: kicking the flying habit for a full 12 months. When I made that promise as part of The Independent’s 20 Pledges for 2020 campaign, where numerous journalists decided to start the new decade by doing one thing to achieve a greener lifestyle, it felt more adventure than sacrifice. Little did I know how difficult travel – all travel – would become in the year ahead.

Later down the line, lots of people commented that I’d picked a “good year” for my pledge – as if the timing had worked out in my favour. I respectfully but wholeheartedly disagree. I chose to stop flying – not to stop travelling. The whole idea was to cram in as many tantalising overland trips as possible, and to show that the whole business could be just as fun – more fun, even – without wings. I wanted to sell slow travel as a concept, to myself as much as to our readers. I wanted to see if this was something I could commit to longer term.

Similarly, you might have expected the flight-free movement in the UK to applaud a year in which so many planes stayed on the tarmac, but again, it’s not that straightforward. They, too, were disappointed after months spent campaigning to convince people to pledge to stop flying for 2020. “The whole point is, we want this to be a choice that people feel empowered to make, not something that’s forced upon them,” said the founder of Flight Free UK, Anna Hughes, at the campaign’s Christmas party over Zoom. Because if the choice hasn’t been made, the change won’t be permanent.

I’m reminded of something one of the many climate scientists I interviewed this year said to me – that he wasn’t in favour of mandates or quotas or restrictions to reduce flights, because human beings don’t like feeling that their choice has been removed. “It seems even if someone’s not involved in a certain activity, like flying, they don’t like it if there’s a limit imposed,” Professor Stefan Gossling, a Swedish academic who specialises in sustainable tourism, told me. Far better to tax aviation properly, he said – so that the cost of a flight actually reflects the cost to the planet – and let market mechanisms do their thing. “If you increase the cost of flying quite significantly, a huge chunk of the market would disappear. People wouldn’t even notice too much – because you haven’t curbed their personal freedom. It’s a personal choice.”

That’s why this year has felt as hard for me as for any other travel journalist – or anyone who loves travelling, come to that. My freedom of choice was just as blighted as anyone else’s once travel restrictions swept the globe. In fact, the feeling of being trapped was amplified, given that the dwindling list of approved destinations that made it onto the Department for Transport’s travel corridors list and the Foreign Office’s “low-risk” list was so often comprised solely of places you’d need to hop on a plane to reach. In the brief pockets of time offering the potential to flee, off my colleagues would zip to St Lucia, Dubai, the Maldives, Gibraltar, and I’d glumly contemplate another month of the same four walls. Yes, it sounds petulant, but a little green kernel of envy formed in my soul, battling it out with the little green kernel of climate activism, and who knows which might have won had I not so publicly nailed my colours to the mast already?

And yet, for the forays I did manage to shoehorn into this strangest of years, I started to get a real taste for the slow travel life. Interrailing across Europe to reach Rijeka in northern Croatia turned what would have been a nothing-special journey into an epic adventure spending 24 hours on trains; arriving in the Scilly Isles after a sleeper train and a rollicking sea passage felt close to miraculous. Even when I was stuck wandering the same London streets for long chunks of time, my imagination soared, planning the most elaborate rail itineraries across the Continent with the help of the seat61.com website. I’ve never felt anything like such vivid yearning and anticipation when booking a flight.

Even when I was stuck wandering the same London streets for long chunks of time, my imagination soared, planning the most elaborate rail itineraries across the Continent

It was the year, too, when I learned that so much of the inherent joy of travel is about our perspective – our desire to experience something new. I discovered that those experiences can be replicated much, much closer to home if we’re able to just shake off the shroud of familiarity and see the beauty of what’s around us with clear, unjaded eyes, as I did during explorations of the capital.

But mainly what I learned was that my 2020 pledge will not just be for 2020. Partly, yes, because this year felt a bit like cheating. Partly because I want to do it when going flight-free is a real choice – with all the difficulty and temptation that entails. And partly because the year of the pandemic was the year I properly looked my frequent flying habit in the face – as inconvenient and guilt-inducing as it was – and concluded that I couldn’t go back to the way I was with a clear conscience. After a year of listening to the experts, I finally get it: the amount we fly is simply unsustainable; aviation growth and our climate targets are not compatible. There is nowhere to hide anymore.

Am I a flight-free lifer? I’m not sure I could commit to that just yet. But one year was enough to irrevocably change my mindset and spur me on for another bash in 2021. Not bad for a New Year’s resolution.