The sand where Miriam Gormally plays beach volleyball is in peril. “Any beach you’ve ever visited” is on the endangered list, David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth, the book that brought together all the alarm bells into one loud siren. Our beaches will become underwater relics if we don’t curb carbon emissions this century.
Gormally is an Irish National Beach Volleyball champion, and it's partly because she loves beaches so much that she decided to stop flying. She took her last flight on a propeller plane to Scotland to compete in a final in September 2019. Covid made her decision easier still. "Anyone can quit when there is no temptation," she wrote in a social media post.
Now that flying is back, she is putting her Flight Free for Sport pledge into action. Last weekend she and four fellow volleyball players were due to take her electric car on the ferry from Belfast to Ayr in Scotland for the Small Countries Association championship.
“There’s something very stressful about airplanes. I was always a little bit anxious even before Covid about getting sick. The last thing you want before a tournament is to even catch a small cold,” she says.
Last month she travelled to London by boat and train where they came second in their competition, "which is exciting for an Irish team". The journey there by ferry and direct train was easy. Coming back was a little more staggered with a bus transfer for part of the way, but on the ferry, celebrating their win in the bar felt relaxing in a way a flight never has – it was like already being back in Ireland. A combination of fast ferry and fast train link puts Dublin within four hours of central London.
Gormally is a vegan, has insulated her home and drives an electric car. “I’d always dodged the flying one, at an individual level.” Giving it up has been driven by her idea of what is her fair carbon share. “It’s a global justice point of view.” A transatlantic flight represents the same carbon emissions of an average Kenyan for three years. “Who doesn’t want to just hop on a plane and go somewhere for the weekend? You can’t judge people for that.” But without aviation subsidies and the corporate cash the real cost of flights would have to be paid by consumers and people would fly less.
“What we are called to do for the planet will require sacrifice, dedication and discipline, who better to understand that kind of commitment than athletes?” she says. “And what bigger prize is there than a habitable planet? If various climate actions were recorded and celebrated in the same way that sports competitions are, imagine how much energy and interest that would create? The satisfaction of sacrifice and dedication for a greater prize is the core concept of sports, just as it now needs to become the core philosophy for the prize that is our planet,” she says.
Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests.
*This article was edited on June 9th