Is It Ethical to Travel?
New Republic had an article about “responsible tourism” and whether it’s ethical to travel. At all. There are all the benefits of travel; it exposes you to new people, new ideas, new experiences. But there are also all the drawbacks of travel: the impact on the environment, the exploitation of people, the division of haves and have nots.
As lovely as tourism is for the individual traveling and as helpful as that tourism can be for an economy, it is rarely a great thing for the world. After all, “tourism alone—that’s nonessential pleasure travel—is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
Gulp.
We’re a travel family. We go on trips. Sometimes they’re to visit people. Often they’re to visit places. We contribute to that 8% of emissions. When we talk about climate change, we can’t just talk about the ways companies need to change. (They do.) We also need to talk about ways we need to change.
If you knew that staying put at home, keeping your movements to a small area, never taking an airplane, would help reverse the impact of climate change, would you do it?
The author admits that he won’t give up travel, even if he knows it’s the right thing to do. And I don’t think anyone will give up travel reading this post. I’m not giving up travel.
But this whole thing is food for thought.
8 comments
This is a hard one. My family didn’t travel when I was growing up, and as an adult I hardly traveled before I had kids. Now we are catching up. So I feel “but it’s not fair!” bc I’m making up for experiences I never had that a lot of other people did. But we are talking maybe 1-2 trips a year. We’re not outrageously flying every week.
At least by being vegan we are doing our part. (Meat and dairy industries cause ca. 15% of emissions.) And we are stingy with heat in our house, drive hybrids…
Yeah I thought about the question for a moment but also came to the conclusion that I don’t want to give up travel completely. Reducing it I can do. However I live in another country from my family and skype just isn’t the same..
There’s an unquantifiable benefit to travel: when done well, experiencing another place can reduce ignorance and increase understanding. In other words, morph Them into Us. I will continue to travel (not that I do it super often) because I feel it’s a net gain.
Timely post for me, as one of my goals for this year is to travel more with my sons. Since they were born 8 years ago, we have traveled relatively little with them. . . partly due to finance, partly due to lack of vacation time (me), and partly because we just didn’t find travel with young children very relaxing.
I will continue to travel a few times a year. I don’t even have a current passport, so my travel is not international. I believe that the value of travel outweighs the small impact that our family’s foregoing travel would make.
We don’t travel much, and it’s usually by car. But I want to go to a lot of places, which would involve air travel. Sigh…
I’ve thought about this a lot, because I love to travel, though I only fly overseas once every one or two years. I’ve been thinking for a while about writing a post on this. There are so many issues to balance. Not having children eases my guilt somewhat, not – as a friend said recently because I don’t care (I do) – but because I’m not taking kids on my travels (or in fact doing any of the other carbon-emitting activities that would have been inevitable if I’d had them). But living in NZ makes it more difficult too.
Tourism is also a valuable source of foreign currency for many developing countries, and for many is one of a very few options to pull themselves out of poverty.
So much I haven’t written! Maybe I’ll have to write that post after all.
My first thought was that maybe I could use this to justify my paralyzing fear of flying, but then that’s not right either. I don’t fly a lot and would far rather drive somewhere than fly, but I can’t drive to Scotland and I really want to see different parts of the world. Also my dad lives in California and while we COULD drive, it would take forever and use a lot of gas for just two people, so flying just makes more sense. Although I’d love to take a long cross country road trip sometime. I think if it’s balanced, if you’re not private jetting it, if you do stuff to shrink your footprint, then the benefits of travel should still be counted as ethical.
I already don’t travel. So, I’m fine with it. It’s another way I can help the environment- I already work from home and drive a hybrid when I do drive. Travel? We moved a LOT when I was a kid but vacations were not ever a thing my family did, and now that I’ve finally moved to where my friends are I’m fine with not traveling, don’t have any family. And, I truly HATE flying.