Is Green Travel An Oxymoron?

The Worldwatch Institute Vision for a Sustainable World offers 10 Ways To Go Green which include:

• saving energy,
• saving water,
• using less gas,
• buying local food,
• no bottled water,
• thinking before you buy

The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes.

Seems it would be pretty well impossible to be a tourist and not use much energy or water or gas or produce waste.

According to the UNEP’s Climate Neutral Network,

• tourism = 5 percent of global CO2 emissions
• which is more than the emissions produced by billions of people living and working for one year in big industrialized countries or emerging economies.

To truly be “green” should you not go anywhere beyond the range of what it takes to meet your essential daily needs?

I’m pretty lucky that my “usual environment” is the New River Gorge where I can leave my house on foot or bike and access a beautiful gorge, trails, and historic sites.  I can also walk to a charming small town and buy local food at the farmer’s market and local stuff at local shops.

But if that’s all I could do it would get boring especially knowing that there is a big, beautiful world out there.

Richard R. Niebuhr in an essay titled “Pilgrims and Pioneers” writes that tourists are those who “dabble,” making their rounds and traveling into new territory, but not allowing that territory in any way to change or move them.

Pilgrims, on the other hand, make their rounds with a purpose and allow the terrain they cover to move them, indeed to change them.  Pilgrims see things, interpret what they see, and can potentially be influenced by their experiences.  As a result there is an “enlargement of oneself”.

Bruce Kirby writes on The Globe And Mail, – on an individual level, travel is a basic force for good. In our increasingly connected yet isolated existence, exploring wild lands and foreign cultures can create understandings and shrink differences in ways no web page can match. I can’t help wonder what our world would lose if everyone just stayed home.

So it seems to me we should all try to live green while allowing ourselves to venture out of our “usual environment” in hopes that the terrain we cover will move us, indeed change and influence us while leaving unchanged, or perhaps even better, the destination we’ve ventured to.

I guess we could safely say that would be traveling greener than the typical tourist.

One way to travel greener is to pick a destination closer to home, rather than those far flung exotic destinations.  Appalachia is withing 500 miles of 2/3 of the U.S. population.

Maybe you should come check out my “usual environment” and I’ll come check out yours.  And while we’re there we’ll try to:

• use a little less energy
• use a little less water
• use a little less gas
• buy local food and support local businesses
• use a reusable water mug
• think about the impact of where we go, what we do, and what we buy in hopes that we can not only enlarge ourselves but also the destination we’ve been fortunate to experience.

If each of 2010′s 940 million international tourist arrivals did that then maybe we could get tourism down to 4, 3, 2, or 1% of global CO2 emissions?

See you on the trail

Tags: bruce kirby, green travel, richard niebuhr, travel green appalachia, UNEP, worldwatch institute

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Blog, Green Travel Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.