Earlier this year I declined an invitation to fly all expenses from Sydney to Geneva to speak for 15 minutes at an international cancer conference. There was a hole in my calendar. Geneva is a hop from Lyon, where I have good friends. I have a son in London who I haven\u2019t seen for a while. It was tempting.\u00a0 But the carbon footprint and the derisory speaking time got to me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Last week, I flew to Wellington, New Zealand, to speak about the media hyping of prostate cancer testing. Antipodeans love having venerable Old World sages open their meetings. Muir Gray was made for the role, but instead sent his carbon footprint apologies and charmingly spoke to us from his English kitchen via a digital movie file he\u2019d filmed and hit “send”. He could have probably done it live too, via a projected skype image at virtually no cost. Maybe it was after his bedtime.<\/p>\n
Far from feeling short changed, the audience loved it and reverentially hung on his every erudite word, applauding at the end.<\/p>\n
I have offered this solution before. But you can feel the icy sub-text cloaking your host\u2019s \u201cI\u2019ll get back to you on that.\u201d\u00a0 They want a \u201creal\u201d speaker.<\/p>\n
But if more people took Muir\u2019s principled stand, untold tonnes of carbon emissions might be reduced. And at what cost? Of course, it must not stop with speakers. Instead of paying exorbitant conference, hotel and travel fees, why not set up networks of high speed, well appointed video hubs in major cities where delegates in civilised time zones could listen and interact with not just one Muir Gray class speaker, but perhaps dozens of them.<\/p>\n
If we stay up ungodly hours to watch sport, why not stay up for a state-of-the-art interactive video?<\/p>\n
In two weeks I\u2019m flying to a three day BMJ meeting in London, where the same friends and son inducements will ice the cake. As an Africaphile, imagine I might accept an invitation to speak for 10 seconds in Zanzibar or Bamako. I\u2019m not ready to give up on travel entirely, but if we\u00a0 piously applaud carbon taxes and warm to exemplars like Muir Gray, what ought we all to do about it ourselves in our work travel?<\/p>\n