No Planes...

My chosen article to work with (taken from the Guardian):

Iceland volcano: imagine a world without planes

"For the last few days the skies have been quiet. What if they'd stayed that way for ever? 

 

Clear-sky thinking . . . without planes, cities would become foreign again. Photograph: Getty

For the first time in my life, one of my favourite London walks has become the bucolic idyll it always should have been. I'm walking down Syon Vista in Kew Gardens on a lovely spring morning amid flowering magnolias, snake's head fritillaries and, unless I mistake my guess, Chinese witch hazel. The grass is still dewy, but I lie on my back and look up. The sky is filled with good news. One of the world's busiest flight paths, that normally sullies Kew and much of west London with howling jet engines from 6am, is silent.

Yesterday, there were no planes bringing Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles home (he's grounded in the US – I know: it's a national tragedy), and next door wasn't boring you over the garden fence about their Easter in Tenerife (because they're still stuck there). If the skies don't start filling up today as planned, there will be no Kenyan green beans, no mangetout nor sugar-snap peas: we will have to think about growing our own or even contemplating the (excuse my caps, but this is important) Death of the Stir Fry. Interestingly, I've just planted out my beans, so if Sainsbury's and Tesco's want to get in touch I'm sure we can reach a deal.

Best of all, given our weakling culture that teems with endless complaint and bottomless claims of entitlement, there is nobody to sue for this reversal of fortune, not even Willie Walsh. This is one of the few modern setbacks that Britons can't try to pin on Gordon Brown or eastern European immigrants.

"Enjoy it while it lasts," counsels an elderly gent as we share a bench overlooking the Thames and, beyond, Capability Brown's Syon Park. Wise words. I expect you remember when it was as peaceful as this all the time in Kew Gardens, I say to the man. He takes umbrage. "How old do you think I am? I'm only 57 and commercial flights have been flying over here since the second world war. So no, I don't remember what it was like before air travel, thanks very much."

Oh dear. I walk on, savouring the birdsong and bantering walkers eulogising crocuses – restful sounds, so long obliterated by Virgin Atlantics laden with victims of global Disneyfication and Lufthansas packed with businessmen who could just as well conduct their fatuous meetings via Skype from Munich. If Iceland's most significant cultural export (Björk and Sigur Rós notwithstanding) had continued to spew into our airspace for much longer, I might have been able to work out which birdsong belongs to which bird. Thank you Iceland! It has been, as Moyles said in an interview, "A very, very surreal, but pleasant nightmare."

Of course there have been downsides. Five thousand Kenyan workers have been laid off as daily flights from Nairobi to Britain have been cancelled, leaving vegetables rotting in Africa. Families are divided, medicines can't be airlifted, bone marrow transplant operations have had to be postponed. Twitter, Facebook and your email inbox are filled with yip yap from mates stranded in Dubai, who can't think of anything better to do than tell you how bored and broke they are. Worst of all, for a while it looked as if my plans for a night-time safari in South Africa later this month would have to be cancelled in favour of – sweet Saint Christopher, patron saint of travellers, say it ain't so – a week in Devon.

In a sense, of course, all this volcanic ash – if it really exists (doesn't virtually invisible, super-fine dust sound like the airborne version of the emperor's new clothes to you? I'm just saying) – is Mother Earth's revenge: if you mess with the planet, it will return the compliment, big style. This is the gist of environmental scientist James Lovelock's book The Revenge of Gaia, in which he writes: "Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth . . . Now it is changing, according to its own internal rules, to a state where we are no longer welcome."

What he's saying is, probably don't bank on flying to the Algarve for that golf holiday. But what if Eyjafjallajökull continues, like Boris Johnson, to pump out unhelpful emissions for at least another year? What would this world be like without air travel?

The first result, clearly, would be that England's cricket team will lose the Ashes in Australia this winter. Think about it. It's one thing for the England team to fly to Sydney, quite another for them to return to the days when touring teams spent 40 days sailing the Atlantic and Indian oceans before sporting hostilities commenced. What sort of state would Messrs Flintoff and Pietersen be in when they docked after 40 nights at the ship's bar? No state to hold on to the pitiful remnants of England's national pride, that's for sure. Perhaps, and this is just a thought, this Icelandic ash has been invented by Australian volcanologists to ensure another 5-0 pommie bashing. They're using ash to win the Ashes!

Without air travel, Bob Dylan would have to conclude his policy of touring until he alienates every last one of his fans with his increasingly dreadful voice. Air travel facilitates just this kind of existential malaise. In the olden days, rock gods such as Elvis Presley never played Britain – he just changed planes at Prestwick airport. Whereas had he been alive in the last three decades, Elvis would have been touring so incessantly that we would have long since grown heartily sick of him. Air travel takes away so many thrills, making everyone it touches seem boringly everyday. It needn't be that way.

But there would be transformations closer to home, too. Property values in west London, already the area of our capital most densely populated with householders smugly building pretentious conservatories, would rise because of the fall in noise pollution around Heathrow. Those business types until recently jetting in from the US would have to explore the untapped potentials of video conferencing. And the coastal towns you used to fly over on your way to Crete would experience renaissances. Even Southend – though they'd have to do something about the pier.

Cornwall would have to be closed to avoid it being overrun by staycationers. Scarborough would sound as remote and fanciful a holiday destination as the Maldives. Kendal Mint Cake, which is disgusting, would become prized anew, as a delicacy brought back by holidaymakers from this strange world called "the Lake District".

There would also be riots on Eurostar (led by me), objecting to cynical rises in fares, overcrowding, blocked toilets and why-oh-why is it that a French train operator supplies such lousy coffee. In other words, Eurostar and other train operators would be on the receiving end of the kind of surly Brit outrage usually reserved for BA staff miles above Nova Scotia. Rail rage would replace air rage, and government plans for a 200mph high-speed rail network would have to be fasttracked to forestall a surge in on-train killings. On the plus side, you'd get from London to Manchester in 1hr 22min, and Glasgow in 2hr 42min. On the downside, you'd spend the whole journey with your face pressed against the window, mouthing "help me" hopelessly as you blurred past commuters at each platform you passed.

With jet engines rendered useless, we would have to think of alternatives to facilitate long-distance travel. Lovelock imagines high-tech, automated sailing vessels that would travel paths chosen to maximise the thrust of the wind, and giant airships that would ride the trade winds. Either, he recognises, would take longer than a jet to get to New York or Rio, but Lovelock contends it is better to travel than to arrive.

That, I think, is an old-fashioned view which we would do well to revive. Today, flying means being hurled into an overcrowded aluminium tube at 40,000ft with your knees around your ears, Jim Carrey on an endless loop, and muffins that put your eye out if thrown in anger. To arrive is better than to travel thus. Tomorrow it could be different.

Air travel has banalised the globe; we could re-enchant it. Foreign travel would become rarer, slower, and more of a commitment. Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel, reminds us of the old Arabic saying that the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel: "This new widespread 'camel pace' would return travellers to a wisdom that their medieval pilgrim ancestors had once known very well," he suggests. "These medieval pilgrims had gone out of their way to make travel as slow as possible, avoiding even the use of boats and horses in favour of their own feet."

(True, although the Highways Agency has gone out of its way to achieve just the same thing in 21st-century Britain, with greater success than medieval Arabs ever managed: that's why rush-hour commuters on the Aston Expressway or the M25 around Chertsey know all about having the souls of camels.)

We could expect a resurgence in British sea power. Even now, the Royal Navy is sailing to distant climes to rescue beleaguered Brits – a development that makes one want to put on Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance and salute one's union flag waistcoat. More seriously, there would be a renaissance in British shipbuilding: Glasgow, Barrow, Belfast and Portsmouth would make ships like they used to, and we would grow our own beans. Older people would think they have woken up in a world they feared had disappeared for ever.

The world would become a much bigger place, with pleasing results. InterRailing would become as voguish as it was when I was young (back in the 1830s). You would awake again after a night in a damp forest near Hanover, thinking how resourceful you were to bring a grow-bag to put round your sleeping bag, and looking forward to sleeping in clean sheets in Stuttgart after a baffling day on Deutsche Bundesbahn. Or maybe that was something that happened to me.

Cities would become foreign again, rather than mere simulacra of each other. Instead of being all-but indistinguishable from Birmingham, Bangalore would become exotic anew. Picture the scene: after years of travelling by foot, taxi, ferry, elephant, rickshaw, space hopper, horse and circus strongman's shoulders, you would arrive over the brow of a hill and survey the majesty of the Bangalore cityscape below, sharing sheepish smiles with your fellow travellers. And then you would return home, laden with gifts from this newly distant city (silks, spices, call-centre headsets) for friends and relatives. They, for their part, would thank you for the presents and curse themselves for never having travelled abroad.

De Botton reckons that we take air travel too much for granted – like a neglected spouse whom we have long since failed to notice is still quite the pip. "How we would admire planes if they were no longer there to frighten and bore us," he writes. "We would stroke their steel dolphin-like bodies in museums, and honour them as symbols of a daunting technical intelligence and a prodigious wealth." Speak for yourself, Alain.

Back in Kew Gardens, there is no sign of Chris Moyles being flown in like an aid package to bereft Blighty any time soon. What bliss! Peace and quiet are things to revel in, even if not for much longer. It's so quiet that I hear an unseen bee, probably on its way to Vince Cable's apiary in nearby Richmond. That's my kind of air travel."

Some other acticles I looked at:


http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/05/29/iceland.earthquake/index.html

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/04/200000-tons-co2-emissions-avoided-each-day-volcano-grounds-flights.php?campaign=th_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+treehuggersite+%28Treehugger%29


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/20/volcano-ash-night-flight-ban-lifted


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18797-can-we-fly-safely-through-volcanic-ash.html


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/7605797/Volcanich-ash-cloud-Is-the-no-fly-zone-necessary.html


http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/5924433/a-world-without-planes.thtml


http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/home/copelandcrack-1.681091/days-with-no-planes-in-the-sky-1.696638


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/7605797/Volcanich-ash-cloud-Is-the-no-fly-zone-necessary.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18797-can-we-fly-safely-through-volcanic-ash.html

http://www.vizworld.com/2010/04/earthquakes-eruption-iceland-2010-vimeo/