After a year of loss, anxiety, and unwelcome change, I’d love a spring getaway — as philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his book America, “Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.” Sounds like he’s advising me to take a road trip, right? To Flagstaff, maybe, then up along Colorado’s Western Slope and over to Salt Lake City before bending toward home. A long, rolling mindwipe through the healing beauty of the West would be good for me mentally, emotionally, even spiritually. Perhaps for you, too.
But what about ethically? After all, we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and we should no longer operate as if blithely unaware of travel’s complicated, adverse impacts: the way fossil fuels worsen climate change; the eco-damage caused by tourists trampling our lovely places to find their selfies; the social stratifications reified by the privileges of leisure travel. Any trip I take is likely to exacerbate some of those problems, however slightly, and it’s time I reckon with that. Now, I’m not saying I won’t take a trip anyway; like many Springsteen-Americans, I’m a sucker for our national mythology of the road. And travel can certainly dispel our longueurs and rekindle our passion for life. That’s a powerful truth. At the same time, a lot more ought to go into travel decisions nowadays than surfing discount lodging sites and curating your road-snack mix.
In fact, simply acknowledging those complexities is a good start, because so many people don’t bother to. “We’ve always thought that tourism is something that’s nice and fun, and yet it’s extremely complex,” says sociologist Marta Soligo, assistant professor in UNLV’s hospitality college, where she directs tourism research for the school’s office of economic development. Tourism is rife with interconnected chains of consequences that stretch from macro factors like the environment and inequality to micro issues such as tourists behaving as if it’s someone else’s job to clean up after them. “I think that just understanding that it’s complex is a great step,” Soligo adds. You can’t help fix what you haven’t admitted needs fixing.
Sounds simple enough in concept — except that for many of us, travel represents an escape from the tiring rigor of just this kind of often-frustrating and ambiguous brainwork.
For one thing, an enlightened traveling mindset requires an asymmetrical balancing act, as you pose incomprehensible, global-scaled problems against your personal need for a mental and emotional refresh. According to an online tool that calculates the carbon footprint of one’s travels, my proposed road trip through Northern Arizona, Colorado, and Utah — roughly 1,600 miles — would generate just over half a metric ton of CO2. That’s a serious output for one guy, even if it barely registers against the annual global exhalation of fossil-fuel emissions, which tops 34 billion metric tons. How do I even begin to quantify the real-world repercussions of my trip against its entirely speculative mental-health benefits? These reflections can quickly devolve into a headache of competing abstractions with very little actionable clarity. No surprise that too few of us think hard at that level.
And climate change isn’t the only supersized issue involved. If I rent an Airbnb in any of my destinations, am I contributing to housing inequalities there? If I join the warm-weather swarms at a popular — and now terribly understaffed — national park, jostling against the other fannypacks for a perfect cell-cam sightline, what am I, or the park, really getting out of it?
With questions that large, there are no easy answers, only individual ones, but I propose that the effort of wrestling with them at least underlines the urgency of doing the small, positive acts I can accomplish. Fortunately, as one blogger put it, “traveling responsibly is not all-or-nothing.”
OKAY, SO YOU can’t control worldwide climate factors or the vast, tidal despoilings of consumerism. What can you do?
The website Two Dusty Travelers suggests you begin trip planning with a thought experiment:
Picture your favorite place to travel, or that one spot you’ve always wanted to visit. Imagine how you interact with that place and its people when you’re there. Next, imagine that everyone else who visits that place acts exactly the same way you do. Now fast forward 20 years. What does your place look like now?
It’s a useful exercise in orienting your behavior before you bug out. After all — as we Las Vegans know from decades of being heavily touristed-upon — one of the powerful inducements of travel is the way it can unbutton your inhibitions, encouraging you to cut loose in ways you typically don’t. Often, that’s fine; other times, not so much. “Something I’ve noticed is that we don’t think that much about the fact that when we travel, we’re going to someone else’s home — literally,” Soligo says.
A bit of light web searching will call up plenty of tips for being a decent visitor, many of which savvy readers of this magazine surely already observe: Do use public transit, reef-safe sunscreen, and refillable water bottles instead of clogging up your destination with plastic; don’t disturb wildlife for the sake of a selfie, try to haggle every merchant into a lower price, or give money to children, which “can perpetuate a cycle in which children are sent to beg rather than school,” says the Center for Responsible Travel. Generally, avoid being a jerk of the my-tourism-dollars-pay-your-salary variety.
Taking it further, you can be more intentional about the way you distribute your economic largesse — patronize locally owned lodging and restaurants instead of retreating to the familiarity of brand names. Buy goods from local artisans.
Research the area you’re traveling to, beyond the official tourism sites. What are its cultural traditions, its Indigenous histories, its foodways? This will not only make you a better tourist, it will enrich your experience. For those more committed to this notion of “slow tourism,” you can sometimes schedule classes or even book lodging at a farm, where you can help with a harvest and make your own food products — agri-tourism, it’s called. “The financial aspect (of this approach) is very important,” Soligo says, “but so is the fact that you get in touch with local traditions, especially at a moment when we’re completely detached from nature.”
She says research shows a rising trend in travelers seeking a more ethical experience, though they’re still hampered in some ways by the information that’s available. If a resort claims it’s eliminated food waste or cut back on water use, it can be hard for a regular person with average research skills to determine what’s accurate and what’s corporate greenwashing.
At the same time, this kind of deliberate, ethical travel remains beyond the reach of many. “We have to realize that travel is often a privilege,” Soligo says, “and sometimes if people want to travel, they have to settle for a cheaper trip, and that’s where mass tourism comes in.” So, there will always be monster cruise ships polluting scenic Caribbean ports, and endless skeins of budget travelers overrunning national parks in search of their own mental refresh.
For me, I guess, these tips for ethical travel don’t comprise a simple checklist of feel-good acts as much as an index of my willingness to do something, however indirectly, to mitigate the real-world impact of my leisure travel.
But what if I want to tackle the climate issue more directly?
SOME AIRLINES, TRAVEL sites, and other entities allow travelers to buy “carbon offsets” for their trips. That is, you can calculate how much carbon your trip will generate, and for a few extra dollars you can buy credits in that amount, which typically go to support an eco-friendly facility or pollution mitigation project. For a recent round-trip hop I made to Los Angeles, Southwest Airlines determined that $2.85 would cover my trip’s carbon burden while supporting efforts like a forest management project in Alaska, a Guatemalan nature reserve, and wetland revitalization along the coast of Pakistan. Meanwhile, the website that determined my road-trip’s carbon output offered to let me ease my conscience for eight bucks in carbon offsets.
If that kind of affordable absolution sounds too easy, it probably is. “In most cases,” the New York Times’ Wirecutter site reported in December, “carbon offsets do not capture or reduce real emissions, and they have a dismal record when it comes to actually averting future emissions.”
For one thing, it takes a head-scratching amount of math to figure the true impact of emissions, termed the “social cost of carbon.” As explained by Wirecutter, that means estimating the global impact of one ton of carbon, including agricultural effects and changes to human health. After all, my road trip emissions probably won’t simply hover above Flagstaff forever. The current social cost figure is $51 per metric ton of CO2. But we’re not done mathing yet. For the truest measure, you need to factor in global economic disparities, to determine “a fairer distribution of financial responsibility among countries with very different income levels.” That figure, which everyone agrees is provisional, is a whopping $246 per ton. In which case, my road-trip offset — for a half-ton of carbon, as you’ll recall — would bump, in real-world cost, from a mere $8 to $123. Yowch. That’s my entire road snack budget.
But, in the end, that’s modernity for you: Every private decision or act is scaffolded by massive, change-resistant systems against which we are, individually, mostly powerless. The important thing is to avoid resignation. “On the one hand, every single gesture counts,” Soligo says, “meaning that, if every tourist does their part, things can be improved.” And on the other hand? Just know that a true, widespread lessening of travel’s impacts will have to happen at the macro level of government policy (as if) and capitalistic behavior. Which means we have a lot more ethical wrestling ahead.
Meantime, maybe I’ll tell Flagstaff you said hi.