As with all great adventures, things do not always go as planned.

The Arctic has always loomed large in my imagination. Its chiseled ice landscape is the polar opposite of the drought stricken continent I was raised in.

Doing a solstice flip on 21 June 2019, I flew from wintery Melbourne to the Archipelago of Svalbard, arriving there on their Summer Solstice. I hoped to see zillions of polar bears and capture fantastic photos of this glistening ice-crusted world.

Flying is one of the most carbon-intensive things you can do and as such greatly contributes to climate change. The CO2  emissions resulting from a return flight from Oslo to Svalbard are enough to melt 1 m² of summer ice per passenger. I dread to think of how much ice was lost by my travelling to Svalbard. I failed in an epic way to protect what I held most sacred.

As I write this on 8th January 2020 over 107,000 square kilometres of Australian bush has recently been incinerated by bushfires. Twenty-eight people have lost their lives. Over a billion animals have perished, habitats have been irretrievably lost and species face extinction. Climate change is widely accepted as the cause of these catastrophic fires.

So as the Arctic melts away at an unprecedented rate and Australia burns to a cinder I feel the guilt of Flygskam/Flight Shame hit me. How can I ever board a plane again knowing what I now know?