Notes from a recent Europe trip

This post was first published here.

I don’t know about you, but travel for me is mostly about complicating the picture I have of the world. Especially travel to places vastly different to the one I’m living in. I spent a couple of weeks in October traveling in Europe. Here are some notes and reflections from the trip:

1. My neighbour on the train from Paris to Barcelona was a woman doing her PhD in “the political, legal and moral accountability of transnational companies as an essential tool for a just ecological transition.” She was also working part-time in a sustainability training firm called Ecolearn, whose focus is on “training in sustainability to initiate business transformation”.

2. On a shared car ride (via Blablacar) from Granada to Cordoba, beyond fields of olive trees and farm land on both sides were large swathes of something flat, dark and shiny. From a distance what seemed like plastic turned out to be vast fields with unending rows of solar panels. The new green beside the original green.

3. I shared my Blablacar ride with a PhD student studying the impact of climate change on the migratory patterns of the common cuckoo (the bird that leaves its eggs in another bird’s nest, she explained), and a teacher-artist traveling to an Agro-Ecology/Art festival, for a workshop on making art using material sourced from nature.

4. Earlier, in Germany, a German couple I visited talked about their plans to install solar panels on their roof. The city council did not allow this in the “old town” due to strict regulations around building facades, and this couple and some others were pushing them to make an exception for solar panels.

5. On Heidelberg’s Haupstrasse, where street musicians usually entertain passers-by, I spotted some masked activists holding tablets that displayed videos highlighting the cruelty of meat production and large-scale animal farming. When I paused to take a picture, one of their (unmasked) group-mates asked me what I knew about the mass production of meat and its effect on the animals and the environment. A long lecture followed, in German.

6. At the SAP headquarters in Walldorf, where I worked for 19 years, around 40% of the car parking slots in the multi-storied parking lots were now reserved for electric or hybrid cars. Back in 2019, this was perhaps 5%, a few token places for a handful of early adopters.

7. The farmhouse I stayed at in Lanzarote offered only plant-based food and recommended using limited water for showers. (The island has no ground water and receives very little rain.) The owners shared a Spotify playlist with songs that run for three minutes. You begin the shower with the song, and end when the song finishes.

Put together, what did I make of these encounters?

For someone new to Europe, these signs may not look out of place. But having lived and traveled here during the first two decades of this century, I find these changes pretty remarkable. And I do not see this kind of ground-level awareness and engagement (on climate related matters) back in India. As a society we middle-class Indians are attracted a lot to economic growth, and while on that path little else seems to matter. (Europe, by contrast, is past that growth phase – some would say it is even regressing – plus the culture here has always been more oriented towards a good-relaxed-life than the relentless pursuit of growth. On this trip I was surprised to see shops in Spain close for the afternoon “siesta”. I half-expected this to have changed, given Spain’s economic challenges – GDP growth is slowing down, unemployment rate is the highest among EU nations – but these folks won’t give up their afternoon naps. How refreshing.)

These anecdotes give a different touch to the dominant media narrative about the setbacks or challenges to the green transition in Europe. The challenges are not insignificant (the benefits of more solar power will be limited until the electricity grid is upgraded significantly to store and transmit all that energy, for instance), but the changing attitudes on the ground (and the de-central initiatives being undertaken) allow us to imagine a different future.

So while we subscribe to the data-driven approach and follow journalism that draws more on data, such exposure to the on-the-ground reality seems necessary too. Stats matter, yes, but anecdotes add fascinating and insightful details to this picture of the world we carry in our heads.

I left Europe wondering whether the island of Lanzarote gives us a hint of what life will be like in many places a decade or two from now. Very little water, conditions unsuitable for agriculture… we may have to adapt our lives the way such places today adapt to environment-driven constraints. Keep that Spotify playlist handy.