After Timothy Morton delivers his keynote address at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland on Friday afternoon, he will get on his bike and pedal home to his wife and daughter in Davis, Calif.

"At least there will be no jet lag," says Morton, who will be delivering what may be academia's first carbon-free trans-Atlantic conference keynote.

A professor of literature and the environment at the University of California, Davis, Morton will be the featured speaker at a three-day conference of the U.K. chapter of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, founded in 1992 to promote the exchange of ideas and information about how humans relate with the natural world.

His audience -- an anticipated 200 scholars and artists -- will gather at 6 p.m. B.S.T. (10 a.m. California time) in a large lecture hall in the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower for the 50-minute keynote, titled "Animals, vegetables, minerals, and other alien beings."

Rather than delivering the talk via videoconference, which requires a costly video link and makes it hard for a speaker to know how an audience is responding, Morton pre-recorded his remarks months earlier before a live audience of about 30 students and colleagues on the Davis campus. The Edinburgh audience will be able to ask Morton questions, however. Following the pre-recorded speech, Morton will participate in a 20-minute live Q&A session via videoconference from a classroom in Olson Hall on the Davis campus.

Total cost of the keynote: $650 for taping and editing, $75 to express-mail a DVD to Scotland, and $150 for the video link line and videoconference equipment for the Q&A.

Roundtrip economy-class airfare from Sacramento to Edinburgh, in contrast, is running as much as $4,000 in the era of $170-a-barrel jet fuel prices. Meals and an overnight in an Edinburgh hotel would add a few hundred more to the tab.

"It seems like such an enormous no-brainer," Morton says of the distance keynote concept. "It would save lots and lots of money and save the planet at the same time."