I hate public speaking, even if the speaking is down a phone line from my house to a studio, so when I’m asked to talk about my work I usually say no, on the grounds that I have a face for radio and a voice for print. There are subjects, though, on which you can’t just file the article and then retreat to the study; subjects on which you must do the talking as well as the writing. Climate change is one of them. 

  That’s why, though I bottled out of one interview, I have agreed to four over the past fortnight, to talk about why I’ve stopped flying to work. (You can find the latest on the podcast of the Nine til Noon Show hosted by Greg Hughes on the Irish station Highland Radio: it was on Wednesday’s show, and our conversation begins at -0:40:32.)

  At the end of August I wrote a piece to try to get a few things clear in my own head: what did I think about climate change, about the contribution flying was making to it, and about the contribution I was making as a travel writer by encouraging other people to burn more oil at a time when we should all be burning less? Writing the piece was also a way of explaining to my wife why I had turned down a trip to New York on which (if we’d paid her air fare), she might have joined me. I decided, and my wife agreed, that I should stop doing jobs that entail flying. It’s easier for me to make that decision than it is for younger writers: I’m 61, I still need to pay bills, but I no longer have a mortgage and my children are grown-ups.

  At the start of September, I offered that piece to The Daily Telegraph, where, it turned out, the digital editor on the travel desk, Oliver Smith, had been asking himself the same questions. Olly has decided to limit himself to one return flight a year, and, in a forceful piece that went online on September 11, he explained why. That piece was initially behind a paywall, but it isn’t now, so please read it. 

  My own piece went online on October 3 on the Telegraph Travel site, and appeared in print a couple of days later. Among those who responded to it via Twitter was the writer Paul Miles, who said: “I stopped flying 10 yrs ago. Tricky as my niche was tropical islands. No longer. My early non-flying trips often involved ferry from UK to Scandinavia (Bergen, Esbjerg) but they’ve ceased now. It’s time to reinstate those crossings!” 

  This week, Gavin Haines, another travel writer (who, like me, used to be on the Telegraph staff and then went freelance, though he’s only 35), published a piece on the website of the campaign Flight Free UK, explaining why he had promised to avoid all flying in 2020. Please read that, and consider joining the campaign. I joined it myself yesterday, and my wife is going to sign up too. We have family commitments that will probably necessitate a return flight in 2021, but otherwise we’re aiming to be wingless wanderers.*

  At a meeting in London this week, members of the Association of Independent Tour Operators briefed journalists on what’s new in their programmes for the coming year. Later, before presentations of awards for travel writing, the association’s chairman, Derek Moore, addressed the gathering. He said his members needed to encourage their customers to fly less and stay longer, and should be looking forward to a boom in rail travel.

  Is the travel trade waking up? I hope so. Not before time. But then I’ve been shamefully dozy myself. Besides the articles mentioned above, I’d urge you to read one by Nicholas Crane, geographer, television presenter and a past president of the Royal Geographical Society. He decided as long ago as the mid-1990s, having studied the science, that he should do everything he could to avoid using aircraft. In a piece in 2006, 13 years ago, he was arguing: “There isn’t any option but to give up all non-essential flying.” I would have read that piece closely; I must have done: I was an editor on the desk that published it. Now, I’m finally heeding it.

*Update I see from a piece in The Guardian today (October 19) by Andy Pietrasik, the travel editor, that the writer Dixe Wills is another non-flyer. Pietrasik says that his team recognises “the need to help tackle the climate emergency by reducing the number of flights we all take”.

*Update, June 25, 2020 The link to the show I mentioned in the second paragraph no longer leads to the session in which I talked to Greg Hughes. Another of the interviews was with Ivan Yates on the Hard Shoulder show on the Dublin-based Newstalk Radio. When I talked to him, I failed to register that he said aviation accounts for 14% of global carbon emissions; the best guess is around 2%.