I last flew in 2019, a night flight from LA to London. While the passengers slept or dozed in front of in-flight movies, I slid a window blind up and peered out. A few metres from my face, two huge jet engines were hammering out burning hot CO2, Nitrous Oxide and a cocktail of other gases, buckling the air behind us. Miles below us I could see Greenland, a wilderness of ice and dark rock.
We have all seen the satellite images of the shrinking arctic ice cap, the retreating glaciers, the floods and the fires; but to see the ice, the emissions, and my culpability juxtaposed so starkly was an epiphany for me. The single worst thing I could do in the climate crisis was to take a flight. Yet here I was, individually emitting a quarter of a tonne of CO2 equivalent per hour. [1]
An alien looking down on our planet could see these aircraft not as a method of transport but as machines designed to heat the planet, with human bodies just ballast to give the engines something to push against. The enormity of this hyper-consumption has been normalised and sanitised by the aviation industry, with the willing collusion of most of the population. To question our routine flying, in the rich world, is to meet with defensiveness and special pleading, often followed by aggression.
Photography increasingly studies spectacular outcomes of the climate and ecological emergencies. My recent work attends to the daily detail of the hyper-consumption bringing these about.
With ‘No Step’ I examine the visceral power and physicality of the jets which endlessly ply the skies over London, freezing the individual fine detail of these metal tubes in flight and their endless repetition.
