Global climate change caused by our fossil fuel emissions is forcing us to assess many aspects of our behaviour. Flying is a particularly sensitive example because we have become accustomed to hopping on an airplane and dashing off at 700 or 800 kilometres per hour to some foreign country for the taste of another culture, for a change of scenery, for a family gathering, for an exotic adventure, or for a routine business deal. Not only are we destroying the uniqueness of the place that we came to experience by homogenizing the entire planet—the source of Yogi Berra’s oxymoronic comment that, “Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”—but flying happens to be the single most polluting activity over which any single individual has control. This is because flying is a choice. So the subject of flying and its contribution to the 37.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in 2023, although uncomfortable, deserves some consideration.
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The Quadra Project – Flying Into the Future
Boeing, an American builder of aircraft, estimates that the increasing demand for flying will require 44,000 additional commercial planes during the next 20 years. These new planes will be added to the current fleet of about 25,500 presently serving the flying public. Of course, Boeing expects to build a generous portion of these planes, while competing with Airbus and a rising Chinese aviation industry.
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The Quadra Project – The Rise of the Teratribe
Tribalism, as Harvey Whitehouse explains in his feature article, “Rise of the Teratribe” (New Scientist, June 22, 2024), has been a fundamental cohesive force in the making of human societies. “A visceral sense of oneness with the group” is a force that psychologists and anthropologists call “identity fusion”. It makes us into the social units that then function for our individual and collective survival.
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The Quadra Project – Deep Water
When we think about environmentalism, we tend not to consider the oceans because we don’t live on or in them, and they are just there as they have always been, defining the edge of the land that we occupy. Of course, oceans provide us with most of our fish, but in the popular understanding, they are mostly experienced as vast spaces of waves and wet that separate the faraway continents that we visit. So we tend to give much more importance to landscapes that we occupy. And because we live within the thin layer of air that girdles the globe, weather is also a concern to us. But we generally don’t consider that much of our climate and weather is determined by what happens in the oceans.
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The Quadra Project – Pure Consciousness
What is pure consciousness? In simplistic terms, it seems to be awareness of awareness. That is, it is not an awareness of the content of awareness such as being conscious of fish or trees or ideas, but an awareness of the awareness itself. As such, it would seem to be a distancing from the content of awareness—of the things that we think about—to the awareness itself. This detached awareness from experiences and ideas would give us the perspective to assess the substance of our thinking, to give us special insights into how we think, and perhaps more appropriately, to allow us to assess how we behave.
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