Travelling almost 45,000 miles from Australia to Winnipeg, with many detours in between, is itself a voyage of epic proportions. But Sacha Shaw, a climate researcher and journalist, completed that journey without air travel, relying only on boats, trains and public transit.
Shaw, a researcher at the University of Sydney's Environment Institute (SEI), set out on his worldwide slow-travel experiment from his hometown of Melbourne in early 2023. His goal was to travel with a reduced carbon footprint and challenge the status quo that permits only a small privileged minority to fly. Shaw is ending his journey in Canada with two stops, one in Winnipeg, where he plans to meet the Canadian side of his family for the first time, and another in Montreal, where he might settle.
"In the context of the climate crisis and emissions… I wanted to challenge the way we relate to flying,” Shaw said.
Only a small fraction of the global population travels by air, he added. “So, there's massive justice issues.”
Numerous studies conducted over the years have highlighted the inequity. In its report Elite Status-Global Inequalities in Flight, the climate charity Possible showed less than 20 per cent of the world’s population has ever been on a plane. And only 10 countries account for about 60 per cent of the total aviation emissions, including U.S., China, India and Australia, the study shows.
Shaw sees value in travel, so long as it isn’t unduly contributing to burning fossil fuels which causes global warming.
The recurring question for Shaw has been: is there an ethical way to travel? Even before he set out on his grand adventure, he avoided flying and tried to travel by train.
Shaw made his way from east to west, through 44 countries and four continents. His solo adventure started at the port of Darwin, in Northern Australia, where he stayed for one month, bumming rides from sailors. A sailboat called Captain Rainbow took him to his first destination, Timor-Leste. This was one of three legs he did by boat; the longest was from the Canary Islands to Martinique.
At times, the journey was harrowing. During his ocean debut from Darwin to Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, a storm damaged the boat he was on, setting him adrift for two days until he was spotted by a helicopter and saved by the navy.
After surviving his first boat rescue, Shaw was finally ready to cross the globe with stops in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China and India. From there, he travelled through the Middle East, eventually crossing into Europe and ending up in North Africa. He then crossed the Atlantic Ocean to land in South America.
Even with two privileged passports from Canada and Australia, not all countries were easy to cross. The hardest country to get into was Iran. He ended up sleeping on the floor of the police station and was questioned multiple times.
“I had about a two-hour interview in a very small room with a big portrait of the Supreme Leader looking down at me. It was very intimidating,” he said.
At the Turkish border, Iranian authorities believed the HIV prevention drugs Shaw was carrying were ecstasy, a major risk for any gay person like Shaw, as homosexuality is punishable by death in the Muslim country. Chinese authorities went through all his books to see if he was taking out pro-Tibetan literature.
Shaw used different methods of transportation, including buses in Europe and the Middle East, trains in China and India, and both boats and trains in South Asia.
He is in the process of calculating his carbon footprint, but his journey hasn’t been as sustainable as he’d expected. “Different trains sometimes use coal power or dirty fuels, but it was the boats that have really blown up my carbon budget,” he said, because boats consume significant fuel.
Along the way, Shaw witnessed the negative impacts of climate change and environmental destruction in many countries, from flood devastation in Pakistan to coastal erosion in Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Jakarta faces both sinking land and air pollution, which he experienced firsthand.
“I remember reading one of my books, and you could see it as I entered the city because the chapters were noticeably browner and darker due to the pollution that had settled on the pages,” he said.
Political inaction and repression by those in power, and not only climate change, contribute to people’s suffering. Shaw was arrested twice in Gabes, a coastal city in Tunisia, while taking pictures “of some very brutal and terrible pollution that they just let float into the ocean."
Global leaders’ contradictions were also on full display at COP29 when he was told he had to fly to Baku, Azerbaijan, to attend the climate conference after the country shut down its land borders. “That's a bit of a hypocritical move. I was like, I'll just cover it remotely. The politics of climate change is very much a big problem,” he said.
The key to fighting global climate negligence for Shaw is to push the awareness that we're all environmentally connected to promote solidarity between countries so as to help people struggling even for the most basic necessities. The political level might seem fragmented, but for Shaw, there’s more than that.
“On another level, we're so fundamentally connected that it's impossible not to recognize that. I think if we all start to recognize our interconnections and our interdependencies, we'll start responding to this environmental crisis,” he said.
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