OUT OF THE TUNNEL

Me

Pilots are trained in how to avoid ‘cognitive tunnelling’, otherwise known as ‘inattentional blindness’. The rest of us are not. Does this mean we’re worse equipped, less innately inclined, to spot life-saving connections? Inside a negligibly tiny space, surrounded by airtight metal and the intricately mapped highways in the sky, the pilot’s awareness is supposed to reach outward, to the not immediately obvious but potentially key for survival. ‘If a light starts flashing in the cockpit,’ a pilot called Chris tells me, ‘the natural tendency is to focus on that one threat until it’s been dealt with. When lamps two and three begin to flash, you might not see them, because you’re concentrating on the first danger you spotted.’ To counteract that instinct, they are taught to sit back and, at least for a second, take a breath; to oversee the situation as a whole, access what they’ve learned, and then, with a view as broad and informed as is humanly possible, respond.

In an interview in 1999, poet Adrienne Rich spoke of the ‘humanly possible’ as an expression, questioning it in the context of the ‘horrible culture of production for profit’. ‘What’s humanly possible,’ she said, ‘might be what we bring to the refusal to let our humanity be stolen from us.’ Which part of these responses is human — which ones define us as the humans we are?

The pilot training, a seemingly specialist set of skills, is interesting to me for many reasons, only one of them being that I’m culturally addicted to flying but it now scares the shit out of me. Emergency signals are also flashing everywhere and all around: on the news, in my chat groups and social-media feeds, on the supermarket shelves, themselves shocked at being empty; the signals flash in different languages, with varying degrees of emojis and sass, depending on the subjective distance to peril, but undoubtably they’re all relaying versions of the word ‘danger’. They’re all equally sure that this, this new thing, is the most urgent threat and we must deal with it first.

During the second UK lockdown in 2020, Adam and I attend a webinar about climate justice and the airline industry, during which Todd, a pilot, and Finlay, an aircraft engineer, speak. ‘I want to talk to those guys,’ I say to Adam, who’s sitting next to me on the couch, a miniature version of our lounge among hundreds of miniature versions of hundreds of other rooms on the screen. We were supposed to introduce ourselves in the Zoom chat, and where we were, geographically, but I forgot to write ‘England’ next to ‘Bath’ and this provokes amusement. Why on earth would I assume that anyone knows where this Bath is — and that I’m not making a poor joke about life in lockdown — when I didn’t know, less than a decade ago?

I have this desire to speak to them because of more than one vested interest. Partly, there’s a fascination with the professions that quite literally brought me here, to Bath, a small city in the south-west of England in which some people walk around in Regency-era clothing and others sleep rough inside the nooks of every other shopfront on the high street, questions about how those working in aviation have facilitated my choices and I theirs, in the loop of luxury capitalism. By flying the planes, they also brought us to crisis and collapse, as little and as much as I did, in being flown. Then there’s the other choice they made: a decision to leave aviation, and their selves as they were made by it — what it might tell me about what constitutes that self.

The Engineer

People who have been in the climate movement far longer than I have tell me that it was never this colossal; never did it have as much momentum as in 2019. When Covid-19 began to spread, our very essence (a movement: a collective of bodies in motion) became an impossibility. The physical incarnation of our collective power was criminalised for the sake of our own safety, and we could no longer hear each other breathe; we could no longer perceive that extra-sensory electricity (extra because beyond our individual peripheries, not because it couldn’t be felt) of a gathering of people tearing at the status quo. What scares me is the time that passes — that while the government obsesses about getting ‘us back to normal’ (‘us’ meaning the economic machine that kills most of us), people continue to die from heat-strokes, from droughts and ensuing food scarcity. Ecosystems continue to disintegrate, making further pandemics more likely. Our physical togetherness has been outlawed to save us, but within the abysmal inequality of late capitalism, who really counts as ‘us’ — which self does this emergency response serve?

The day I speak to Finlay, there is a book about the interlacing crises on our kitchen table. In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, activist and researcher Andreas Malm investigates the difference between government responses to the climate crisis and to the pandemic. ‘Here is a factual property of global heating,’ he writes, ‘it does not appear out of the blue and then retreat to wherever it came from, as Covid-19 was expected to.’ The sudden onslaught of Covid has made it fit more neatly into the category of ‘emergency’, but there is a danger that not only enlaces this one — it shares its roots, and exacerbates the suffering it causes. In La Guajira, Colombia, a region in the north of one of my homelands that I’ve never been to, the Wayuu people recently called on the UN to intervene in their fight against Latin America’s largest open-pit coal mine. The pollution and influx of workers to the mine inflames the impact of Covid on the Indigenous population, whilst the virus in turn ramps up an existing environmental emergency, leaving people without water, for drink, for hygiene, for basic subsistence. There is no time to wait for this to be over, whatever ‘over’ might mean (it doesn’t look like the virus will quickly ‘retreat to wherever it came from’), and what if it’s the perverse focus on one aspect of a larger crisis which obstructs a wider view?

Finlay is in Scotland. He’s living at home, currently unemployed and dedicated to activism. His Scottish accent triggers my linguistic sponge, although it’s been five years since I lived in Scotland. Because I didn’t learn to speak in English, there’s no natural, or unnatural, way for me to speak it — my voice does as Romans do, anywhere and everywhere, in a mix some people find curious, others take as a personal challenge to unpick. Now, I’m worrying that he’ll think I’m doing it on purpose, so I watch out for certain words and, as a result, forget how to say ‘how’. When Finlay trained as an engineer, he went in with the ambition of working in renewable energy, but upon graduation struggled to find a job in that sector. Instead, he was offered an internship then a graduate role as an aircraft-engine designer with one of the largest engineering companies in the UK, and the world’s second-biggest aircraft-engine manufacturer. ‘I just couldn’t turn it down,’ he says. He accepted the job with the hope of helping develop more sustainable engines. ‘That’s how I justified my decision,’ he says, ‘I was going to be changing the industry from within.’

Going through my notes later, I notice that the word ‘justified’ is underlined. I think I was wondering if Finlay used the same word at the time; if, when he was making the decision to take the job with a big polluter, he saw it as one that needed justification. It could also be my bias around the word itself, that I’m projecting, telling myself that writing about change, in the smallest way, somehow makes up for the big changes which seem impossible to push for right now, from our cluttered kitchen table.

I’d assumed that using less oil in an aircraft decreases the carbon emissions, but this is only true if the same or fewer planes are flown. A smaller cut doesn’t spill less of someone’s blood if it’s one cut among a thousand. ‘It’s really about the price of oil,’ Finlay explained to me. The people at the company he worked for ‘are mostly good people trying to do the right thing, just not quite understanding what the reality of the situation is’. With more-efficient planes, flying has become more affordable; those who can, fly further, and more frequently. Although people had seemed interested in the sustainability group he set up at his workplace, it became clear to him that the employees were ‘being deceived by the company’. ‘They’re told, you’ll have a job, it’s stable, but that’s an illusion because either the industry, as it currently stands, is dead or the planet is.’

This false sense of safety is, evidently, not exclusive to aviation. The ice creaks under so much weight. It groans under our food supply chains, screeches around the basic integrity of our houses and coastal cities. ‘It’s fine,’ governments say, ‘we have ambitions to do something about the persistent sound in thirty years’ time.’ What’s striking is that the history of aviation was written in the language of risk assessment; we wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t. They’re still saying it will all be well.

The company Finlay worked for describe themselves as an ‘environmental, social, and ethically sustainable business’. Their website boasts about how, altogether, their engines have amassed ‘100 million flying hours’, a number I find hard to swallow, like leftover food which your body is telling you might have gone bad. For someone looking at this figure as a passenger, wanting to be reassured that they’re in capable hands, the figure looks steady, it holds you fast with the brute force of quantity. If you’re horrified of climate violence, it looks like the company is bragging about murder. On the other hand, I didn’t even know that the company builds aircraft engines — I had, in fact, no idea who did, and that’s also a question, isn’t it? Who was carrying me, all this bloody time? Which one of these readers am I, looking at the 100 million flying hours?

I knew, well before talking to Finlay, that technology doesn’t offer us a lifeline, not if by ‘us’ we really do mean all of us, which people by and large tend not to mean. I knew that it doesn’t address the root causes of the crisis, but may well extend them further (where do raw materials for this green technology come from, if not from the Global South, now facing a ‘greener’ colonialism?), penetrating deeper, rotting whatever is left.

The aviation industry’s obsession with tech fixes did remind me of other instances of dangerously selective attention. At a glance, the purpose of climate activism looks something like this: we need to halt further global warming by bringing down the emissions that contribute to it. Climate activists do this, largely, by demanding action from governments. This, in turn, can’t be done without getting enough people (people with a voice) to see the climate crisis as a true emergency. This, essentially, means making people scared. It involves shocking those who need shocking out of torpor. In some ways, it’s simpler: the alarm, the house on fire. They are images we understand, although so many struggle to apply them to our own lives. I started feeling uneasy about this narrative in October 2019, during Extinction Rebellion’s second large protest in London. One morning, a group of activists climbed on top of a train at Canning Town station. This led to chaos on the platform, with stressed commuters, desperate to get to work, shouting abuse at the protesters. One activist was dragged onto the platform and attacked, while other commuters stepped in to protect the protestors. I was in Trafalgar Square when it happened, handing out water biscuits to people who were locked together blocking roads, and I remember wondering, why there. A majority of XR UK (which was, and to my knowledge remains, a decentralised movement) disagreed with the action, which had mainly affected working-class, mostly non-white, people, but this was a campaign that grew, to a great extent, out of grief, fear, and anger. Its focus was overwhelmingly on ‘waking people up’. Those protesters had done what they thought was needed to puncture everyday life. That urge, it seemed, had excluded any other consideration.

It’s been almost a year since then. We’ve all moved online — the meetings, the workshops, the family dinners. Sometimes, on a weekend, people go out with placards saying #NoGoingBack. It’s an acknowledgement that normality outside of corona was already unacceptable, but who’s holding the placards? Who’s able to go out protesting at this time? Again, how far does the crisis stretch — how small is this tiny space?

The Former Pilot

Todd wanted to fly aeroplanes since he was five. ‘Flying fighter jets for queen and country was the dream,’ he tells me, and he does not smile when he says it. He’s a few years younger than I am, in his early thirties, and there’s sun bleaching his screen when we speak. He describes his childhood as a bit rough, growing up on a working-class estate, and always with flying as the next step, as well as the ultimate goal. In order to get him through the training to become a commercial pilot, his parents remortgaged their house, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Two and half years into a job with a commercial airline, he was ‘medically grounded’. Later, he would be diagnosed with Lyme disease, which he contracted from a tick in Richmond Park. ‘They’re becoming more common with the milder winters,’ he says. During this time, he began to attend occasional meetings, to get involved in protests, whilst remaining part of his professional community. Until the pandemic, he says that he could still imagine working, perhaps not as a pilot, but within aviation. Now, during this hypervigilant time, which looks like sleep for some and is life-threatening for so many others, he describes his relationship to aviation as a ‘love affair in which [he] was betrayed’. Having taken a step back, having paused for that breath, he began to question everything he’d ever wanted.

I’m thinking of the almighty words: the Writing, as it took a plunge into my life and never popped back up. One day when I was seven or eight, I happened to write a poem which my teacher did a song and dance about, and I suspect that on this day I said to myself: this, this is what will make it okay to be you, in spite of every other way in which being you needs urgent improvement. There have been times when I’ve looked up and spotted alternative lives, things that need doing. I could, potentially, help with these things, but they’re not part of the story I decided on when I was eight. This too is a sort of tunnel vision: a narrow view of yourself in a reality that needs you to be so many things, to allow and invite every facet of you that may bring you closer to others.

In between interviews with aviation people, I’m now involved in organising yet another online meeting. This one is about how to make social justice an explicit part of the principles in our local climate-activist group. It is the autumn after George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protest wave. The city we live in is overwhelmingly white, a place where many are worried about ‘environmental issues’, but which is also used as a weekend getaway for Londoners with disposable income. The city voted against Brexit, but I often do wonder why, for its own freedoms or for everyone’s? Would they be content if those freedoms stopped at their threshold? At first, it appears that those at the meeting generally agree with the notion of social justice being intrinsically linked to climate action. There is effusive nodding when we talk about communities at the front line of climate collapse. Still, we fail to make any of it official — we fall short of making any concrete commitments, of saying, loudly, that ‘racism and climate collapse are one and the same’. Someone argues that we need to remember we’re an environmental organisation. The climate crisis needs to remain our priority, someone else argues, and it’s clear that they’re referring to the atmospheric science of CO2 and methane, not the climate crisis as a whole — not the bite it has on people’s lives. Anti-racism need not be an explicit ambition, as long as we’re inclusive in our work, they say. Emphasising the roots of climate collapse somehow derails the urgency: we don’t have time to pay attention to how this happened.

In the moment these things are said, the people for whom the system never worked are discounted, made invisible once more. This is ancient, timeworn history, of course, and the racism within the environmental movement goes the other way as soon as guilt sets in. This summer, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote about how strange she felt, as a Black climate activist, hearing white people argue that climate action had to be halted in favour of supporting Black people, as if people of colour weren’t disproportionately affected by climate and environmental collapse. ‘So it’s not just time to talk about climate — it’s time to talk about it as the Black issue it is,’ Heglar wrote. Climate collapse has been a racist issue for at least five hundred years. Colonialism made it so.

And none of this is new, and always new for someone. In this group, I’m one of two people of colour. As an ethnically mixed, queer person in a hetero relationship, I often experience myself being what people want to see — my body and outward presentation reflect back what makes them most comfortable. To some extent, we are all adapted in each other’s eyes. People prioritise one identity or another depending on which one makes most sense to us, which self in the other could provide safety and make communication possible. With power structures being what they are, whiteness and heteronormativity are so much more often than not the framing narrative, the way things ultimately land. I’ve always been made to feel welcome in this group, always listened to, but it’s equally true that an inability to see a bigger picture itself excludes, as does the erasure of someone’s multifaceted self. Telling any person of colour that anti-racism needn’t be explicit in climate activism erases them from that activism, as does telling queer people that LGBTQ+ rights needn’t be an official part of climate justice, or disability rights for someone with chronic illness. The bigger picture, in fact, involves both who we are and how we are tied into this crisis. Crisis response and identities emerge as intimately linked.

Which dangers are being missed, if the focus lies on only one level of threat — only the one flashing light, noticed through the bias of particular identity strands, certain affiliations? What kind of tunnel vision is this, which allows people to believe they’re fighting the climate crisis whilst only fighting one symptom of it?

The Pilot

But how to see those ‘100 million flying hours’? The day of my conversation with Chris, I visit flightradar24.com, a website which tracks the number of aircraft in the sky over any particular part of the earth, at any given time. I haven’t looked at it since the start of the pandemic, and the number of tiny yellow fireflies on the map remains astounding. Airlines are screaming for subsidies, the livelihoods of thousands are at risk, but the planes still appear legion. They twitch slightly, chomping through miles, seemingly nose against nose, but really so distanced, in a meticulously planned net. I remember looking at the map of routes in different airlines’ flight magazines as a child, this intricate web, and not once feeling a sense of dread.

‘How’s it going with your pilots?’ Adam asks. ‘It’s two pilots and one engineer,’ I say, ‘and none of them are doing those things right now.’ This makes me question how I think of them. Once you know someone’s a pilot, you think of them as a pilot, perhaps more than with most professions. A doctor is a doctor in a way that a window cleaner isn’t only a window cleaner. Late capitalism does this to us: it encourages us to identify with our jobs, with privilege and status as the main driver. An article in The Atlantic calls it ‘workism’: society holds up identification with one’s job as something to strive for, as opposed to work for the sake of survival. No wonder that it’s difficult to let go of when you realise that there’s something terribly wrong with your job. Your identity has been steered toward this narrow path; letting go becomes life-threatening.

On a Monday afternoon in early January, I ask Chris if he can remember a time when flying wasn’t the focus — the non-negotiable core of whatever else was going on in his life. The laptop floats on a sea of tissues. If someone walked in, they might think this is a therapy session and I’m bawling my eyes out, but it’s only a cold I came down with on Christmas Eve — I’ve taken two tests but still am not sure it’s not Covid. The official list of symptoms is one thing here, and one thing in other countries, as my dad reminds me regularly. If it’s not on the list, it isn’t a symptom of Covid, but who decides what goes on the list? How are the red flags agreed upon? Chris takes a while to answer. It even looks like the question bores him. ‘At some point,’ he says, ‘I wanted to be a vet.’ I tell him that at some point, I wanted to train dolphins.

Unlike Finlay and Todd, Chris is still employed by an airline, which is why we’re not using his real name in this piece. Climate activists aren’t looked on kindly in the industry. So far, he’s managed to keep his involvement under the radar. When we speak, he’s just been called back from furlough, but not yet been asked to fly again. A while ago, he tells me, he had to attend a lecture about threats to aviation. Climate activists and deportees were mentioned as two of these. ‘In what way are people who are being deported threats?’ I ask. ‘It’s what they might do during the journey,’ he says.

Again, as so often these days, I get a feeling of standing at the bottom of a well, discerning only a small circle of sky. There’s an immensity up there, but I can’t see it, can’t make it any larger. I press my hands against the wall and feel rushes, courses, and a pinch, but I am in this well and the depth prohibits any wider vision of how exactly that pain connects to mine.

The lecturer, Chris says, also mentioned James Brown, the Paralympic gold medallist who climbed on top of a plane at London City Airport in October 2019. A few of Chris’s fellow pilots laughed at this. One of them said that if it happened to them, they’d probably fly off with the protester on top of the plane. ‘This is what the naughty kid at the back of the class felt like for all those years,’ Chris says, because if you no longer belong, you become dangerous. Paying attention to a greater danger, you run the risk of yourself becoming a risk. Todd told me how it had taken him eight or nine months to leave the social-media forums he frequented as a pilot. When he posted about the climate crisis, most people were casually dismissive; some were outright hostile. In pilot threads, climate activists such as Greta Thunberg were mocked and presented as pin-ups. Eventually, he left for the sake of his mental health.

What is humanly possible?

I don’t feel like the naughty kid at the back of the class. The people with whom I disagreed about how to take action never mocked me, and because I am mixed, this grants me the privilege to pass. We are all trying our best to respond. Still, I am caught in-between, because my fears didn’t fit. My nerves flailed and stretched in too many directions. They strayed out from the track we were so urgently on. It’s terrifying that even within groups that so desperately care to preserve life, this happens so very easily.

Multiple-Issue Lives

The last time I flew, I tried to remember what it used to feel like, and couldn’t. I pressed a hand against the armrest and scratched its pockmarked plastic, knowing it, and rejecting it under new premises. The airline showed an advert for its environmentally friendly food and ambitions to cut down on plastic. As the engines started, the sound entered my body as something perfectly within the order of things, but my brain received it otherwise. It felt as though my nerves were no longer inside that aeroplane but further out, with the harm the plane causes. I don’t want to say that they had lengthened, or grown, but that they were never confined to my body, and I had previously only perceived a fraction of them — that it’s the image of myself that has changed.

Phantom limbs cause real pain. One explanation for this, proposed by pain researcher Ronald Melzack, is that pain is an experience, a subjective response that happens in the brain, rather than a reaction in the periphery. Because the brain has an idea of where the body ends, it continues to feel a missing limb. In other words, pain is linked to how we see ourselves, and where we see ourselves ending. If fear is, among other things, the premonition of pain, what does pain’s subservience to self-image tell us about fear? According to one image of myself, there was nothing threatening in that cabin. Looking strictly at the faces of passengers, at the attentive gazes of stewards and my body strapped routinely to a seat, at everything in its place, threat could only come from outside of the system, in the form of an anomaly, a mistake. If I saw myself as more than this, as part of the whole that is being destroyed, the cabin itself was the threat — the harbinger of pain. The plane took off. My nerves kindled, aching and burning but not snapping. I was now, it appeared, afraid of flying.

If we can change perceptions of where we end, how much more will we be able to feel?

According to a study of airline accidents in 2005, stress impairs how a pilot appreciates information in the cockpit, their ‘cue perception’. With greater stress, there’s less attention to go around, and certain cues are left unattended in service of greater efficiency — of getting things sorted quickly. ‘However,’ the study says, ‘some of the cues deemed irrelevant are sometimes relevant, and the “efficiency” achieved comes at the price of embracing an incorrect interpretation of the unfolding scenario.’

Do we simply do this, when we are afraid? And many of us are so very afraid. Does our field of vision, and feeling, immediately shrink until we have only attention for the danger with our name on it? Until we can only interpret the scenario through a narrow lens?

In a moment of crisis, such a theory of human behaviour lies close to hand. It becomes easy to think of it as simply what happens to us, to revert to finite definitions of ‘human nature’. What is then ignored is the vested interests present in this version of what humans are. Someone stands to gain from you identifying with your job only, and not with the rest of your humanity, which may challenge the very premise of that job. Courting single-identity lives, striving for inclusion in single tribes, benefits capitalism because a limited self is easy to control in the service of unlimited growth and accumulation of power. As the pandemic is making abundantly clear, it’s an immense privilege to be able to take that crucial breath, to have the time and a moment’s peace, the access to enough stories, to take thorough stock. When it comes to big life choices, few people get that chance; they are too busy surviving. This plays into the hands of the few, the powerful, and those who’d want us afraid. It’s easier to crush a single-issue movement than a movement of endlessly entangled threads, as multifaceted as we are ourselves.

Returning to the ‘humanly possible’, here’s Adrienne Rich again: ‘Human beings aren’t merely determined by capitalist production — Marx never said that. These are conditions “not of our choosing” in which we can make history.’ Tunnel vision may be a human tendency — that impulse to get stuck on one solution, which also implies one vision of ourselves and others — but human beings have many instincts, and we’re not defined by a single one.

It makes sense that those industries with the most to lose if we do what needs to be done to avert the worst of global heating — fossil-fuel companies, aviation — would become breeding grounds for judgement and paranoia. This is part of the same narrowing, an amputation of feeling and of being. Those industries — any group, any tribe — are still populated by people who are always more than one thing. Finlay, Todd, and Chris are all involved with an organisation, Safe Landing, that works for a just transition for the aviation industry, championing the rights of workers in the change that will inevitably come. In that sense, their selves are still sewn into the fabric of flying. When I spoke to Chris, he hadn’t decided what to do and didn’t know how he would feel once he sat inside a cockpit again. I asked Todd if he remembered what it felt like last time he flew a plane. He said: ‘it’s me at my best.’

Writer Amin Maalouf has described a person’s identity as ‘a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.’ Our bodies and ourselves are the parchment, woven through with coils of feeling. In a complex system, no corner is separate; there are in fact no corners, no real endings at all. Fear may increase the risk of narrowing our field of vision, but that fear, for the world seen and unseen, that urge to preserve and to respond in its defence, are just as much a part of the drum.

Whenever I feel pushed toward a sharp edge, to define what I am ‘about’ once and for all, to be anything less than the mix and in-between-desires that I am, the words that come to mind are always those of Audre Lorde. ‘There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives,’ she wrote in the essay ‘Learning from the 60s’. This text was delivered as a talk in 1982, six years before James Hansen gave his speech about dangerous climate change to the US government (which in turn marked the beginning of the fossil-fuel industry’s full-frontal attack on climate science), but the words appear as a blueprint for the kind of response the climate crisis demands. Elsewhere in the same text, Lorde writes: ‘The answer to cold is heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia.’ Neither is there for the climate crisis, because all of the above, along with an economic system which protects corporate greed, helped create it. It’s not easy to recognise this, when we’re afraid and seemingly quicker fixes are offered. Neither is it impossible. Because we are always multiple, responding in multiple ways is in fact more humanly possible — it’s the kind of action that makes us human, and cares for the human in others.