10 Mar 2026 - Amy
As an academic who studies past climate change, I spend a lot of time thinking about how environments shift, how societies adapt, and how the smallest changes can ripple outward over centuries. Somewhere along the way, that professional curiosity became something more personal. It began to shape the practical choices I make—how I live, how I move, how I travel.
One of the more visible decisions I’ve made is choosing not to fly. A decision which, to my absolute amazement, I made almost 10 years ago!
Before anything else, I want to be clear: this is my decision, based on my values, needs, and ways of understanding the world. It isn’t a judgment of colleagues, friends, or anyone else who chooses differently. Academia is international, dispersed, and demanding. People juggle care responsibilities, time pressures, early‑career expectations, and financial constraints. Flying often makes things possible that would otherwise be impossible.
I don’t see myself as “doing it right” or anyone else as “doing it wrong.”
I’m simply doing what feels coherent for me.
One part of this coherence comes from my autism. I tend to understand things in quite a black‑and‑white way. While many people navigate environmental decisions through shades of grey (they know how to balance impacts, contexts, and compromises) I often find those gradations intellectually interesting but emotionally difficult to inhabit.
For me, once I see a line, it’s hard not to want to stand on one side of it.
Choosing not to fly removes a whole area of internal negotiation. It quiets the cognitive noise. It lets me focus on what I do best: curiosity, careful thinking, and deep engagement with the past—without the persistent hum of “Should I or shouldn’t I?” in the background.
It also, in many ways, delights my autistic self, because I absolutely adore trains and travel logistics. I should probably be paying Mark, the man who writes Seat 61 (my favourite train travel blog, over at https://www.seat61.com) some kind of subscription fee given the amount of time I spend on his website. So, for me the decision not to fly is win-win. I enjoy the logistics of train travel, and I get to ease some of the self-loathing that comes with my over-consumption under capitalism.
Whilst it is a decision I in absolutely no way regret, it is also one I made, as a PhD student, with so many concerns. Would opting out of large international conferences impact my CV? Would sticking to Europe limit my opportunities for fruitful collaboration? Was I making my academic world too small?
Surprisingly, this decision hasn’t restricted my academic life as much as I once feared. In fact, slow travel has added something new and unexpectedly rich to it.
Travelling overland, be it by train, ferry, or a sequence of local connections, turns a conference trip into a small expedition. There’s a sense of momentum, of story. The anticipation builds. The landscapes shift gradually rather than abruptly, allowing time for reflection, reading, or simply watching the world roll on by.
Instead of being catapulted from desk to destination, I get a more spacious sense of transition. I arrive somewhere not just physically but mentally.
One of the biggest gifts of slow travel is the thinking time. Academic life is busy, fast, noisy. The journey becomes a buffer - a stretch of hours where ideas can settle, conversations can replay in the mind, and new connections can quietly form.
Some of my favourite insights have come during these unhurried journeys. There’s something about the rhythmic movement of a train carriage whilst the world blurs by that aligns beautifully with reflection.
Although I naturally see things in black and white, I’ve learned that the world is full of complexity. My choice not to fly sits alongside an awareness that not everyone can do the same, that research depends on global exchange, and that the academic ecosystem is built on mobility.
I hold to my decision because it feels right for me. But I hold it lightly, without expecting others to mirror it.
In the end, my decision not to fly is less about restriction and more about alignment—about living in a way that sits comfortably with my values, my research, and my way of understanding the world.
It won’t be the right path for everyone. It might not even be the right path for me forever. But for now, it’s the one that feels coherent, spacious, and authentic.
And sometimes, the slow road really does lead to the most interesting places.