Brithdir Mawr Community

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living and working together
in a sustainable way

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Why we ask you not to fly:

This is to try and explain why we think it really doesn't make sense for people to visit us by plane.
There are TWO issues we see:

1) Flying uses much more energy than going by train:

Flying uses THREE TIMES as much energy per mile travelled (by each passenger),
compared to the energy used per mile travelled (by each passenger) on a train.

The journey time does not enter into it.
If you travel the same distance, going by plane uses 3 x as much energy as going by train.

Even worse, because the exhaust gases (not just CO2) are emitted very high up,
they are much stronger greenhouse gases than emissions at ground level.

The EU standard for this is to say it has the same greenhouse effect as 2.5 x as much fuel burnt at ground level.

These two effects together mean that per mile you travel in a plane,
you are causing 7.5 times as much environmental damage as if you travelled by train.

2) The real problem is that the amount of energy involved in flying
is ABSOLUTELY COLLOSSAL,
and the pollution it causes wipes out all the benfit of our other activities

Let's try to put it into perspective:
We try to be reasonable in our car use,
by for example not making unecessary trips to the shops,
which are only a couple of miles away.

Maybe over the course of the year, by cycling, car sharing etc,
we might save 100 trips,
and therefore perhaps feel that we have done something positive for the environment.

But each car trip, of four miles, is the equivalent to
just one passengers' share of an airplane for just 11 seconds.

Your share of a two hour flight from Europe
is the equivalent of 640 trips to town and back!
And we get hundreds of visitors each year . . .
What is the point of us even thinking of reducing our car pollution if we encourage people to come by plane?

Or, again, another example:

As part of our aim to have a fairly modern lifestyle
without too much environmental damage,
we run our central heating with wood instead of oil.

To do this we plant hundreds of trees each year,
and spend a lot of time and effort cutting wood
(using a windmill-powered chainsaw), managing woodland,
coppicing, and drying wood - work all year round.

In this way, we efficiently use 37 tons of wood each year -
a pile the size of a small house -
and this conscious expenditure of time & hard work
allows us to avoid the huge amount
of gas / oil that would otherwise be used by 15 people a 'normal' lifestyle.

It is a great achievement - as houshold heating consumes
vast amounts of energy and we are actually doing it carbon-neutrally.

But the pollution this saves would be wiped out by just 2 people
flying to see us from Europe.
What is the point of us living this way if we do not try to ask people to come by train?

The root problem is that flying simply uses unbelievable amounts of power, and so causes incredible amounts of pollution.
This is why the rapid growth in short-haul flights is such a cause for concern.

We hope this has explained more fully why we have this policy.
If you are interested in the issues raised, werecommend the book 'HEAT' by George Monbiot (columnist for the Guardian)
which gives an excellent analytical overview of the different ecological problems we are facing, and more importantly, puts them into perspective relative to each other.

best wishes
all at Brithdir Mawr

Part of the Brithdir Mawr Community website at www.brithdirmawr.co.uk