Eyjafjallajökull throwing its lava around. According to the photographer the highest flames reached about 1000 meters above the crater. Photo: Örvar Atli Þorgeirsson/Flickr.
As in so many other countries, Sweden has been lagerly affected by the Islandic volcanic eruption. During the last week tourists have been unable to return home, meetings have been cancelled and missing deliveries have put some industries in tricky situations.
Of course this means a lot of trouble for a lot of people, but I think the volcano has opened our eyes to some things we haven’t thought about in a long time, and brought up some interesting discussions.
Reduced emissions
Some argue that the volcano has actually managed, in just a few days, to do what politicians and others in power have said must be done but failed in doing: to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases by changing human behaviour.
According to estimates made by scientists, the cancelled flights spare the atmosphere hundreds of thousand tons of CO2 emissions every day, even considering the emissions from Eyjafjallajökull itself.
Less noise
This, of course, is just a temporary reduction and won’t make any significant difference for the climate in the long run. But it is nevertheless a full scale experiment of what the effects of reducing flight transports could be.
Reports from the neighbourhoods surrounding some of our largest airports also show that people living there experience an enormous difference in their everyday life. Without planes landing and taking off all day, they can suddenly sit in their gardens without being bothered by noise.
Acting fast
This past week also shows how much easier it is to go to action when something happens as fast and as concrete as the volcanic eruption, in contrast to climate change and peak oil which are much slower processes, easier to ignore for the moment.
Now people have had to adapt in just a few days, and have come up with amazing solutions.
Volcanohelp
Last weekend the two Swedish students Måns Gårdfeldt och Jonas Larsson started the web service Volcanohelp which helps people who are stranded somewhere because of the volcano to find a ride and a place to stay. It’s fascinating to see how people find each other, offering seats in a bus from Croatia to Stockholm or a car going from Paris to London. Some of course see their chance of making good money, but there are also lots of people just trying to help each other. A nice act of solidarity, and maybe this can awake new ideas about how to travel, even when the volcano has calmed down?
