Holidays, Mushrooms and Hypocrites

Back from holiday, with some new energy for getting the London Letter into reality. For the geeks, the holiday was camping in the UK, in the rain, albeit with a hired car to get around and see the sites (I don't own or drive a car normally).

Some good news from FoE Head Office - they've hinted that they want to replicate the London Letter nationally. Previously they'd wanted to mirror it in Yorkshire, which I understand is of a similar composition to London (in terms of MP numbers, and so on). To get a national open letter springing out of our Londoncentric one is wonderful.

And now onto a dilemma.

I recently got in touch with an old school friend (thank you Friends Reunited) and by chance needed to stay overnight in the city where he now lives. I stayed at his place, and we had a good evening catching up on the last 14 years of little to no contact.

He told me that he's getting married, which was wonderful news, and some weeks later I received a text message from his best man, inviting me to the stag do. Again, really good stuff.

And now I find the stag do is in Köln (Cologne) in Germany, which means flying out there for the weekend. Some years ago I would never have thought twice about this (other than my general fear of flying - there's something about being trapped inside a metal tube 11km in the air ...). Now, though, I'm highly sensitised about 'unnecessary' flights, and I suddenly find myself considering this as a dilemma - and one which I've already failed. (Yes, I'm going.)

The movement to a more sustainable society does of course need its hypocrites and failures. We all know people (perhaps ourselves) who are motivated to prove we're better than somebody else at achieving something, or at proving other people wrong, or those people who would never normally care unless they get a chance to be virtuous over those who try to bring some element of virtue into their day to day lives.

So here I am, a moral martyr. A practicing environmentalist. A qualified environmental policy manager. Someone who works during the day, and campaigns with their underpants outside their trousers in the evenings, on the environment. Someone who knows better, who chooses holidays at home, but who is unable to say "no" to a friend seen just once in the last 14 years over the issue of a short haul flight.

I contrast this with Mayer Hillman (http://www.psi.org.uk/people/person.asp?person_id=30), who at a public meeting I chaired in December '05, stated that he'd refused to visit Canada to see a life-long friend, because he didn't want to fly over fears of climate change, and how his relationship with that friend had soured somewhat.

There is your hero, your paragon.

And here am I. The hypocrite, the benchmark against which to measure yourself. The talk is there, but the walk has lost its swagger.

These times are a turning point in terms of our characters, the way we want our friends and family to perceive us - are we the pious lot, denying ourselves the earthly pleasures, Lot fleeing Sodom, the nuns and monks of a new religion, the Religion of the Carbon Copy God? Or are we the normal people, "doing our bit", Ildeth (Lot's wife) turning to salt for one last hurrah, making none of the really brave decisions, dangling our toes in the water, but never really plunging in for that bracing swim?

And if I, we, can't make those decisions, why should our business leaders and politicians?