Love Miles expanding the Carbon Footprint

Ah, long weekend is gone. Apart from doing some hiking, enjoying great time with friends and checking out the state of our water tanks I was helping my husband yesterday to do his open uni homework. One of the things they had to do was to calculate their personal carbon footprint. One way of doing this is by using one of free calculators online which quizzes one about your energy consumption, indoor and outdoor water use, amount of waste you generate and/or recycle, self sufficiency, support for wildlife, transport habits and community engagement. The one suggested by the university was Victorian Government's 'Ecological Footprint Calculator'. This calculator breaks down your impact to topics and in the end, generates a report showing how many 'Earths' it requires to support your lifestyle.

Up until now my husband has tried to live in denial about the impact we have. Yes, we have cut our energy use enormously, have installed energy efficient lighting, we only use rainwater, have native garden, recycle a lot of our waste and so on. However, filling in the questionnaire made him realise how big impact we actually have on our earth. The brutal reality was, that with our current habits we require 2.6 Earths to support our lifestyle. Horror!! Where can we improve then? Aren't we already doing a lot of the 'right things'? The biggest impact for us was our transport habits...

And here comes the dilemma. Our families live in different parts of Europe - and us here in Australia. Almost every year, we make a trip by plane to see them, and in some years we also make another plane journey within Asia-Pacific to meet our closest friends and relatives. These are referred to by some people as 'Love Miles'. And they contributed a big part to our footprint. Without 'neutralising' these miles - is there anything else we can do to cut this impact down? Can we be in close contact with our loved ones in the other side of the world only relying on phone calls, emails and Skype?

We talk a lot about changing our lifestyle habits to cut down our impact on the environment. It is easy to change car to a bike or public transport in the city, cutting down meat and poultry to vegetables is also good for ones health, and seeking local and second-hand products is what we do anyway. But replacing your mother's hug to a virtual smile over the internet, and instead of having that night long conversation over a glass of wine with your dearest brother we try to exchange our news over an 1/2 hour conversation over a cracking line. Will the relationship be the same? Can I live with that? And if I can't - what then? Do I have to acknowledge that if I want to be physically close with them, I am going to be the 'carbon baddie', regardless whatever else we do to minimise our impact on this planet. Or do we have to rethink about where we live?

Raising petrol prices are only going to make air travel more expensive in the near future, so annual flights to Europe may not be a viable financial option anymore anyway. Yet, we are not the only people suffering from this dilemma. I would love to hear your comments about how you deal with your 'Love Miles'?