MY EARLIEST MEMORY of being on a plane involves a metal tray sticky with the syrup that coated my pancakes. I was eight years old. My parents and I were somewhere between New York City, our origin, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, our destination. The sky was a crystalline blue, and we hovered above thick, white, fluffy clouds. I fantasized about leaping out of the plane and frolicking among them like characters from Care Bears, a cartoon I adored. From the very beginning, I loved every minute of flying.
But by February 2020—when I took my last prepandemic flight, from a conference in San Diego to my home in New York City—flying had become unremarkable. My memories of the trip are shaded by decades of other flights across North America, Europe, Africa, and the Arctic. When I set foot on the jet bridge in San Diego, I no longer dreamt of playing in the clouds; the flight was little more than something I’d have to endure. Of this journey, my last before the COVID-19 lockdown, I remember almost nothing, not even the airline.
Three years later, leisure travel in the United States has returned to prepandemic levels, and yet instead of eyeing flight deals, I find myself unsubscribing from newsletters that promise me cheap tickets to Nairobi, intriguing fares to the Yucatán, sexy sales offers to the Seychelles. It’s not that I don’t want to travel. It’s that I’ve learned what flying is doing to the planet.
that I took that NYC flight, was the problem. And I vowed to do something about it.
