As I write this it is 6am and everyone else in the house is sleeping. The sky is a glorious orange pink and it is the start of my new working day, an adjustment forced by the school closures. Later on I will take over ‘teaching’ the kids from the other half (he is working the ‘late shift’), when I will do my best to make sure they don’t return to school semi-feral, and claiming they have forgotten how to write.

I am normally up at this time anyway, but it’s usually to begin my travels. The next couple of hours would be spent driving to Dumfries, the Highlands, or the airport. It is strange, though also slightly liberating, to think that for the next few months, the furthest I might get is the local shop.

Moving to Perth from Inverness was an education in many ways, not least, in terms of navigation. When living in the north, most of the meetings I needed to attend were in Edinburgh or Stirling, so I used to take the train. This was efficient and environmentally friendly, but unfortunately left me with no mental mind map of where towns and cities were in relation to each other. 

It took me a while to realise exactly how far some of my team were travelling every day in order to come to work, and how many places my new role would require me to visit. In 2019 alone, I travelled the equivalent of 88% of the distance around the world, visiting 148 new places, and clocking up 21,793 miles (Google is both useful and terrifying…).
When the scale of my Lantra commuting eventually began to sink in, it became clear that as a charity operating in the environmental sector, we really had to take steps to reduce our mileage. Regardless of who was paying for travelling expenses, it was a cost to the environment incurred by working for Lantra.

But what to do? There were initially concerns that changes would be difficult to implement. It was unrealistic for all the team to immediately switch to public transport, for example. The local infrastructure just wasn’t extensive enough within this region, and we frequently need to carry materials for shows or career days, which would be more difficult to take on the bus or train.

So, after some discussion, we agreed to start by pledging one car-free day per week. What that would look like in practice was very much left to the individual to plan, and as a result some different, and innovative, approaches were adopted. One of the team worked from a partner organisation that is much closer to their home and whose work aligns with ours. They were still working for us whilst based there, but they were better able to share ideas and expertise with their host when physically based in the same place, benefiting both organisations.  Two other team members (part-time) condensed their days, working longer hours but less days overall.

Those that did work from home, found it worked well in the main. We ensured they had a comfortable and safe place to work, and there was an online test they had to complete in order to ensure that they were compliant with display screen equipment requirements. Obviously, there were additional costs to the employee in terms of heating their homes through the day, but the savings in travel costs more than made up for this in each case.
But the transition wasn’t straightforward. Some in the team felt they had to almost constantly be in touch with colleagues when at home, in case anyone thought they were taking it easy or ‘skiving’. It was also harder to remember to take breaks, so as a result they now put their lunch slot in their electronic diary, a visual break that is visible to others and a handy reminder to stop!

Personally, I had initially looked forward to the opportunity to avoid the daily commute, but unfortunately, I found that when I did work from home, I ended up raiding the food cupboard every ten minutes and seriously over-caffeinating. So instead, and as the member of staff that is closest to the office, I committed to running (well, jogging), the ten-mile round trip to work once a week. This was not fun. I am not one of those people that enjoys running, but I do enjoy crisps, so I persevered.

Together, and even though we are a very small organisation, we calculated that in a year we would have reduced our carbon footprint by 5.17 tonnes.  

But did I feel the above was a sacrifice to ‘save the planet’? Not at all. Even when I was jogging (okay, half jogging, half walking), I felt like I connected more to my new hometown, which is really a rather lovely place to live. I enjoyed once a week being able to take some time to appreciate the changes in nature occurring around me. People said hello during my commute, and I started to recognise more and more local faces and personalities.

Reducing our carbon footprint led to other gains for both the individual and the organisation.  By being flexible in how people conduct their work, we provided an additional ‘perk’ to being Lantra employees. Something that we wouldn’t achieve through a team day planting trees (though we may yet do this too).

So, in light of current restrictions, and for those enjoying working from home for the first time and considering making a change when they return — was it worth the extra hassle?
Well, for those who are able to make the change, or who just wish to travel less, researchers have found that adopting a more sustainable lifestyle represents a pathway to a more satisfied life. One study examined 39 pro-environmental behaviours and found 37 were positively linked to life satisfaction (one exception being the use of public transport).

For those who depend on the car for their work, it is still worth using our enforced time at home to look at how we might make changes there. Researchers have also found that the strongest positive relationships were between life satisfaction and those behaviours involving a cost in money, time or effort. So, for example, participating in local pro-environmental activities was far more predictive of life satisfaction than using the stairs instead of the lift, despite the environmental work requiring more effort and time.

Another study found that people who freely choose to live frugally (though emphasis was certainly on the ’choose’ part) report a higher satisfaction with life than those who don’t – which has been found across several different studies. So rather than there being a cost to living sustainably, the more effort we put into reducing our carbon footprint, the more we personally gain. 

There isn’t a one size fits all approach of course, but perhaps if those of us facing a very different office this morning can try to focus on the gains we make by working differently rather than on what we might have to give up or do without, we will be better motivated to carry out any further pro-environmental actions that we have been considering at an individual level for a while, but never found the time to implement . 

Of course, these are scary and uncertain times, made worse by the realisation of how little we can control the actions of others. When social distancing and the ‘stay at home’ message is being ignored by some and a wave of camper vans hits our remote and rural areas, what can we do? What can we do when others seem to be panic buying “essential” items in bulk?

Well, many have done quite a lot. The use of social media to highlight frustration at these issues has led to extraordinarily quick responses even if at the time it felt ridiculously slow. But when we consider that we were only asked to start working from home a week ago, and already schools have shut and ferries are only taking essential travellers, things are moving extraordinarily fast. We as individuals might not be able to physically drag people back home, but we can call out poor behaviour when we see it, and more than ever, people are listening and acting.

We can all still go for at least one walk a day (keeping a distance from others of course), and hopefully, as people walk more in their local area, they will start to feel more ownership of it. This is the perfect time to connect to nature and observe the changes all around us. The better we value our local environment, the more likely we are to help protect it in future.

Of course, we don’t all have lovely countryside on our doorstep, and maybe when the virus threat lifts, communities will come together to change this. So, they won’t ever again feel that they have to escape their surroundings, no matter what the guidance and cost.
If so many of us are able to work effectively from home (even if there might be a bit of a learning curve ahead for some), maybe we can rethink how we have designed the areas in which so many of us live, and how we choose to travel though them.

The car doesn’t have to be king.