Climate v Academic Careers

Last week my producer Ally Pelphrey and I attended the Balticon science fiction and fantasy convention over Memorial Day weekend and then I flew to Orlando to meet with a colleague, spend a couple days at Disney, and help a friend move.

This kind of travel is a bit selfish — I get to hug old friends, take a selfie with a the Gay street sign in Baltimore, and do things that can only be done face to face, like lifting heavy boxes to load a van. I’m doing this because I want to.

But in general, academia requires me to travel if I want to maintain my career. The 3 years of the pandemic demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt real-world conferences and events are necessary for healthy collaboration and inspiring new directions in research. They can’t be replaced with virtual events — the networking just isn’t the same and the doors opened are fewer if they are there at all…. And who among us has succeeded at virtually attending a meeting in Japan while living at home a dozen time zones away?

There is something amazing about taking flight, but our joy may be deadly to the planet. Credit: Pamela L. Gay

When researchers who care about our climate see this, they start doing research.

In a new paper in the Journal of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, researchers lead by Marie-Elodie Perga review the carbon footprint of researchers attending conferences between 2004 and 2023. Based on the distribution of…