Environmentalist in Business Class: An Analysis of Air Travel and Environmental Attitude

The strong growth in air travel raises the question of environmental awareness among air travellers. This article focuses on the exclusion of serious environmental problems of international air travel from the air travellers' environmental consciousness. It approaches this question, in particular, by exploring international work-related air travel in two Danish knowledge organizations. The article identifies that the knowledge workers, in general, consider themselves as environmentally aware. However, there is no connection between their environmental attitude and their actual travel behaviour. The article shows that a number of other rationalities seem to affect the travel behaviour more strongly than environmental attitude. Subsequently by reviewing other studies, the article describes how the exclusion of air travel from the environmental consciousness is not only the case among knowledge workers but also seems to be a general problem in relation to flying in modern societies. In the discussion and conclusion, the article therefore focuses on the possibility of creating a stronger link between air travel behaviour and environmental attitude.