“Do you feel, you know, some vibrations, under your bed?” This crewman on this ocean liner was clearly trying to seduce me.

“Of course, from the engine,” I sad.

I have been sleeping for the past thirteen days within a great machine. I can feel the mechanical throbbing all night long, and the intermittent hum through my pillow. Several hundred workers, mainly from Indonesia and the Philippines, dwell in the bowels of the ship—on the numberless decks below level one. Long, white corridors; no windows.

“Well, the problem is the boiler,” the crewman told me. Yes. It cannot be much fun to live for eleven months at a time next to a boiler. What does one say to that? This is what modern ocean travel has come to: driving across the ocean in what is essentially a giant luxury car.

When you think of the word “ship”, what images come to mind? It is an inspiring word, a positive word; it speaks of adventure, of passage, of potential. Of harnessing the elements for motion. Voyage, freedom. Or sometimes, slavery.  What are the realities of twenty-first century ships?

(more…)

Flying is becoming socially taboo. The tide of anti-airplane sentiment is still relatively low in North America, compared to in the UK, where nearly half of the citizens are vowing to fly less for environmental reasons, and one in eight teenagers supports the idea of a ban on “travelling by air for leisure purposes.” Are we, as David Beers in his July/Aug 2008 Walrus piece suggests, at the end of an era?

Common predictions suggest that even if it isn’t totally socially taboo to take a plane, it still may be financially impossible to do so for the majority of people in Canada and the US, due to the dwindling supply of fossil fuels. The languishing airline industry will continue to merge and shrink (albeit with a few companies supported by government, according to the “too big to fail” principle). Flying, many forecast, will be the exclusive privilege of the elite once more.

At present, though, many of us still do fly. How can we fully appreciate this gift? We have tapped nature’s reserves of millions of years, billions of hours of sunlight, in order to skip across the globe. No generation in history has been able to experience this on the current scale, and it’s possible that no generation will again, at least in the way we enjoy. What have we learned from our time in the air? Can we, as a global civilization, get something out of this experience besides increased CO₂ levels?

(more…)