Ahead of Earth Day, we’ve been hanging our Earth Day Pledge Trees around town. These are large posters with the design of tree branches. The idea is, you pick up one of the leaf-shaped sticky notes, write a thoughtful pledge onto the leaf and then stick it to the branch of the tree.
Like so:
A Tarrytown Earth Day “pledge tree”, hanging in Muddy Water cafe.
But one of our members sent around a comment on some of the suggested pledges, and I thought it was worth posting here:
“One big thing is missing: asking people to give up — or at least dramatically rein in — flying for a year.
“This is important not because flying is the single most climate-change-impacting act one can do, but also because it’s an elite activity (less than 20% of the world’s population has ever flown) generally limited to the world’s high-consumers (the 10% of the global population responsible for almost half of all CO2 emissions).
“There are already efforts to get people to stop flying or to fly a lot less — especially in Europe. Below are some links: