Scope 3 Serenity: A field guide to not connecting the dots

Every August, two images fail to occur in the same mind at once. One: a dark black and brown haze over the hills behind the house, the anchor saying "unprecedented" in the register she'd use for a weather delay. Two: a boarding pass to Bali, and the sincere thought “this is what I deserved.”

It isn't arithmetic these people lack, they can calculate frequent-flyer miles to the decimal. It's architecture. The mind has built a load-bearing wall between "the planet, generally, which is suffering" and "my flight, specifically, which is earned."

We call the comfort this wall provides Scope 3 Serenity, after the corporate carbon-accounting term for emissions caused by everyone else in your supply chain, the ones you're responsible for exactly until someone asks. Personally, it's the peaceful conviction that your own combustion is somebody else's inventory. The fire is a Scope 1 problem for the forest. The flight is a Scope 3 pleasure for the self. Proximity, not logic, is what the nervous system tracks: a blaze reads as event, a boarding pass reads as self-care, and the two are never filed under the same category.

The disappointment arrives later, rarely at the airport. It tends to land mid-holiday, a rooftop, a push notification about the fire breaking through, about a flight delay elsewhere, and the second home of the neighbours being evacuated. Not sadness that the world is burning, which is bearable and even fashionable.

Adaptation, in our observation, rarely means fewer flights. It means better feelings about the same flights: an offset, a caption about "reconnecting with nature" posted from above several other people's nature, a sincere resolution to fly less next year. Not hypocrisy, maintenance.

The fire and the flight have always shared a page. It is only ever the reader who has been on two.