I’m surprised no one has yet commented here on the state of immobility in air travel brought about by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland last week. The ash cloud spread across Northern Europe has caused tens of thousands of flights to be canceled. Removing air flight changes the mix of transport modes available to travelers and shippers for the affected regions. This is an important social experiment which demonstrates the effect that a future loss of transportation mobilities we now take for granted would have on societies and economies, and how everyday life would have to be adjusted to adapt.
Editor update: Alain de Botton imagines a world without planes
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As I write, Eyjafjallajökull’s ash cloud surpasses Europe and approaches Western Asia and the Mediterranean, a natural “black swan” that took everyone by surprise. The momentous immobility in air travel activity that the ash cloud caused, as Rob Shields describes, prompt questions of the power relations between culture (mainly technology) and Nature, as Lebbeus Woods implies. The ash cloud (i.e. Nature) could not care less about the geopolitics of air space. So with a prevalent financial and economic crisis that disrupted the urbanization of land, one might want to consider the ash cloud as a natural crisis disrupting the urbanization of air (and thus disrupting air travel mobility).
In the state of environmental unbalance that Earth had reached, paralleled by a shaky capitalist world order, the consequences of Eyjafjallajökull’s eruption and its ash cloud might not be remedial, but they might prove to be retributional. The air space becomes the new conflict space between nature and human, a poststructuralist undertaking of nature against humans’ “conquest of the sky.”
The ash cloud may have seemed to be about nature and another thing we call culture. But it was not just the volcano, the ash but the weather, the winds, the ways that airlines had resisted limits being set in the past, safety protocols, technocratic bodies that decide on flight safety, engine manufacturers, governance, satellites, and all the interpretations of these that to give rise to fluid facts of safe airspace, on the ground, and some spaces in between – always fluidly working together in a political-economic-ecological mess. So, it was more about the always minglings of naturecultures or may be technonatures – of orderings, and disorderings.
Having just had to cancel a field trip because of this closure of airspaces, it a useful event to discuss what this seems to get at in terms of a kind of ‘right to mobilities’ of air travellers, of the complexity of just-in-time low-cost airline organisation, of regulations of airspaces, visas, and much more. And as well, the ways that travel might be made different. But also, how many people have taken for granted air travel as a way of moving between places – even when it is easier to travel by train, or bus. It says something about air travel, consumer demands in terms of travel, the power airlines have in economies, the ways disruptions are so easy.
See: http://www.hiddeneurope.co.uk/now-the-dust-is-settling
For an example of a CNN journalist taking a taxi instead of even thinking of a train. It is a little example. There are many others where travel becomes an adventure, may be a painful one, and less a right.