The last time Jack Hanson took an airplane, he was a junior at the University of Vermont. To return from a term abroad in Copenhagen, he flew from Denmark, 1 in Iceland, and landed in New York.
But the next term, one of his professors asked students to 2 their individual energy usage. And when Mr. Hanson did the 3, he realized that just one leg of that international flight 4 more energy, and more greenhouse gas emissions, than all the other things that year 5 — the driving and heating and lighting and eating and everything else.
He was 6. "I just couldn't 7 it," he says. "It really is an extreme. It's an extreme amount of energy, an extreme amount of 8___. "
So Mr. Hanson decided to stop 9. Since then, he has traveled by train and bike and car, and has even written a song about the 10 of getting home to Chicago on an overnight bus. But he has not been on an airplane.
And he has never found travel more 11, he says. He knows that some people find this hard to 12, including many friends and family members. They decide Mr. Hanson's approach is 13.
Go more 14, and travel begins to return to what it once was: a slow change of one place to another, a sense of space, an unwinding of time.
"Once you've tasted this way of 15, you understand what it's all about," he says.
