Should you fly to join us?

We wanted to share our opinion here about the ongoing fly/no fly debate.

Obviously, we’d recommend avoiding flying if possible. However, we want to make sure not to dogmatise flights as a non-negotiable principle. If you live far from Pachaland, then we’d recommend taking the following elements into account when making up your mind.

Prioritise your flights (if any)

Do you have flights planned this year, whether for short city- or work trips? Make sure to prioritise them and avoid flying whenever possible. Challenge the actual need to travel. Most meetings and trainings for instance can be replaced by a call. If you were planning to come to Pachaland just to learn a specific skill, then we’d recommend looking for a class online as an alternative, or find a place closer to you. If you were planning to reconnect more broadly with nature, or to activate some kind of internal long-lasting impulse, then the overall net effect of your flight to Pachaland might not be that negative after all.

Make longer trips

We enforce minimum volunteering stays of two weeks. However we encourage even longer stays. There is an office on site with fast Internet for those of you who would like to extend the duration of their trip by working remotely.

Compensating is not enough

More and more people start compensating their flights by paying an extra fee. While we think this is overall good practice, we believe it is not sufficient. Not sufficient at all. First of all, the small suggested fee generally doesn’t reflect the actual carbon and biodiversity cost because it only takes into account the fuel burnt. The building of the aircraft or the airport infrastructure and logistics costs for example are not taken into account. Secondly, paying a small fee generally doesn’t hurt enough. It’s almost too easy. It’s just another way of outsourcing the reality of the damage. Thirdly, trying to merely compensate a flight is just another way of trying to sustain. Sustaining is no longer sufficient. The urgent need now is to regenerate, to leave things better each time.

Upon confirming their visit to Pachacamp, all visitors are required to commit to compensating their travel C02 cost 10 TIMES by planting themselves the corresponding amount of trees during their stay. We’re using this tool to help us make the math. Quick example: if you’re coming from London UK, you’ll probably need to plant about 120 trees during your stay to achieve this goal. Up for the challenge?

By enforcing this, each visitor has a huge impact on net carbon sequestration. And obviously that’s a big win for our project too.

Your actions once back home

We think you’ll come back home different. No long paragraphs needed here. In a nutshell, if like most other visitors some kind of irreversible tipping point occurred in yourself, or in your family, you’ll be looking at our modern systems from a different angle and we’re pretty sure you’ll become an actor of change. This probably offsets your travel CO2 costs a little more.

The danger of principles and dogma

A last word on principles. We can sometimes be tempted to share with everyone that we recently became vegan, stopped flying, or sold one of our two cars. While we applaud such well needed changes, we do want to draw people’s attention on the potential conflicts within those same behaviours. Have we heard about holistic planned grazing and the apparently positive net effect on carbon emissions of raising cattle this way? Have we heard about the recent sciences claiming plants actually also do have neurons and sensibility? Is it better to take a short flight once a year and live in the countryside, or to completely stop flying but still live in the city?

Our point here is that judging and comparing based on isolated and out-of-context concepts often ends up being irrelevant and counterproductive. Also, knowledge and science continue to improve over time. If we believe in an infinitive world, we’ll realize that very little is 100% certain. Let’s not dogmatise a few specific activist symbols just because they are trendy. We need to look at the overall picture as much as we can, and sometimes trust our intuition a little more.

Help us improve this page

We know this is a controversial topic these days. This is why we’d like to hear your feedback. Please let us know what you think and what we forgot to take into account. We believe in collective intelligence and would like to keep improving our reasoning.