Jiva Healing

I am not going to go through the complexities of why climate change is happening and what its effects are, and why you should care… if you don’t already know you should watch Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Needless to say, air travel creates a lot of carbon dioxide emissions and is one of the main contributors to global warming, so what is the answer to reducing the impact of flying?

The first consideration must always be to reduce your air travel where possible by using alternative modes of transport – take the train, boat or drive, and try to holiday nearer to home. This year Jiva Healing offered free massages to people who traveled to our retreat in France by train – but obviously this does not work so well for our retreats in Goa!

We are aware that our most significant environmental impact comes from people traveling to our retreats by air, so we have been investigating how we might go about offsetting those emissions. Last year we supported a local charity in Spain to compensate for our clients’flights to our retreat in Menorca. The charity, CeroCO2 sponsors reforestation programs in Costa Rica, calculating your emissions against the likely CO2 savings from the projects they sponsor, and charging you accordingly.

This year we are choosing to offset emissions by buying and protecting virgin rainforest through www.coolearth.org. This is because the rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to the Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists. In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York.

Stopping the loggers is one of the fastest and cheapest solutions to climate change and Cool Earth allow you to buy a section of rainforest which is stewarded by local people to ensure it is not destroyed. You can even view your bit of rainforest on google earth.

That doesn’t mean we should stop worrying about flying, but be aware that it is vastly more beneficial from a carbon saving point of view for us to concentrate some of our offsetting efforts on preserving the existing rainforest rather than just planting new trees. Think about buying some rainforest next time you travel…