To read travel magazines or watch Anthony Bourdain’s shows or browse Instagram today is to come away always with the sense that travel, intrinsically, improves both the traveler and the world. It is to be inundated with familiar quotes that cumulatively tell us that as a concept, travel does not contain multitudes, it contains only positives. Not all those who wander are lost. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
There is, of course, some truth in this, as there has been since the dawn of this thing we call travel. As Nigel Cliff writes in the introduction to his translation of Marco Polo’s The Travels, the 13th century explorer’s book “enlarged Westerners’ geographical knowledge…It gripped their imagination, challenged cherished beliefs and expanded pinched horizons.” Since then and on smaller, more personal scales all the time, beliefs have been challenged and horizons expanded via travel.
Travel can crush bigotry, perhaps more effectively than any other activity. It’s hard to go somewhere with its own strong culture and come away with the same confidence you had before in the special distinction of your own. Traveling through the Singapore Airport alone will dispel any notions Westerners might have of the West’s superior ingenuity.
Just as it dispels bigotry, travel can instill humility—a flip side of the same coin. A classic example from my own travels: When I visited Da Nang, Vietnam, I ordered an Uber one evening from my little hotel to a well-regarded restaurant on a busy multi-lane street abutting the Han River. The Uber pulled up next to the restaurant but on the opposite side of the street. I exited, then realized I had no concept of how to cross the multiple lanes of traffic standing between my dinner and me. The stream of motorbikes mixed with cars was relentless. There would be no window of opportunity, as far as I could tell. I considered ordering another Uber just to get me to the other side of the street.
As desperation lurked, a local man walking by gestured at me to follow him. It was horrifying, like I imagine that initial jump into a skydive might feel like, but I did it. He frogger-ed me safely across, gestured again, and walked off. We never spoke. It was an act of supreme haphazard kindness. And I felt like a grateful idiot, a grown woman who didn’t know how to cross the street on her own.
“There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in his 1883 travel memoir, Silverado Squatters. To be the foreigner; everyone should experience this. Everyone should be stuck somewhere sometime where they’re lost and don’t speak the local language. What more visceral way to grasp that the world doesn’t revolve around you.
In these ways, yes, travel is a force for good.
However. This essay is about the however, and its implications for how we travel (or don’t) in the near future.
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For all the expanded horizons and newfound humility, the fact remains that some travel is as useful as a necktie. And at least neckties don’t dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with every use. We may derive enjoyment from a beach vacation, but it hardly matters whether the sand we sink our feet into is in Aruba or Indonesia, because we aren’t experiencing either place, not really. When we stay in resorts, we inhabit a generalized resort sphere which exists independently from the local society surrounding it. No deepening of cultural understanding or empathy or humility to be found. The higher end the resort, the easier the cocooning.
Guided group tours provide more opportunity for expanded horizons than the resort vacation, just barely, showcasing cultural sites while shielding tourists from the culture itself, and insulating them from any of those pesky humility-producing encounters.
I once stood in a slow-moving line at the Barcelona airport while a few places in front of me, an American woman talked loudly about her trip with another woman in line, also American. The first woman’s tour had included several southern European locations, concluding with Barcelona. It was mildly irritating to overhear, but whatever, Americans love to talk to other Americans in foreign countries. Momentarily, a Spanish employee came out to explain the holdup to those waiting in the line. She spoke English with a strong accent that was hard to understand given the echo-y circumstances of the departure hall.
“Speak English!” the woman who had been talking loudly yelled out. Set aside for a moment that the employee was, in fact, speaking English. The onus should have been on this American woman to understand Spanish. She did not speak Spanish, of course. And it obviously hadn’t occurred to her during any point in this trip to feel cowed by this fact.
This woman had learned nothing from immersing herself in another culture, mainly because she hadn’t done so. If you insist to me that travel improves people, I hold up this woman in response.
Finally, when we talk about the good of travel, we are always talking about the traveler. We aren’t thinking about what travel does to the people who live in the places that we temporarily descend upon. We aren’t thinking of the small-scale farmers who have their land taken away by their own government, with little or no compensation, to make way for a resort. We aren’t thinking of the water shortages tourists cause (the average tourist consuming many times more water than the local). We aren’t thinking of the trash piling up in a municipality with little capacity to deal with it. We aren’t thinking of the fishermen who lose the offshore reefs they so depend on. We aren’t thinking of the overtourism that makes cities uninhabitable for their own residents.
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Like most things with which humans involve themselves, travel can be either a positive or a negative, depending on how it’s harnessed, although the balance shifts when we begin to factor in climate change (itself the result of human activities that were once thought to be only positive). Even the good travel damages the environment, and is therefore bad, by at least one important metric.
The mindset that travel is fundamentally a force for good took hold long before its role in climate change became clear. Subsequently, travelers have doubled down on it, using it consciously or not to excuse the emissions of every new trip. Now that travel is well known as a contributor to our current climate crisis, our approach to it lags behind the reality of it.
Just the transport part of tourism accounts for around 5 percent of all global carbon emissions, according to a recent report by the World Tourism Organization. Is travel worthy of this expansive carbon footprint? Only sometimes.
Last fall, while on a research trip, I needed to get from Cannes, on the French Riviera, to Brighton, England. I could have taken a direct flight to Gatwick, just 28 miles from Brighton. But I’d made the decision that in a concession to the exigencies of climate change, if train travel presented as an option, I’d take it, even if it extended my travel times. I booked a train from Cannes to Paris, then the highspeed Eurostar from Paris to London. From there, it would be an additional hour-long train to Brighton.
When I’d mention the upcoming trip to people, they’d ask in all earnestness why I wasn’t just flying. That’s how they always said it. Why don’t you just fly. When I told them, I’d invariably receive a perplexed expression in return. They needed a beat to process it.
These were all people with a high level of concern about climate change, likely with a belief that it reigns as the most serious threat to human durability. These people support the Green New Deal. Almost to a one, they also regularly engage in long-haul flights. I have been one of these people. I still am, to a large extent, the pandemic era notwithstanding.
Being a climate-conscious individual who would also jump at a chance to visit Bali requires a certain amount of built-in hypocrisy, in the same vein as those who support public education but send their own kids to private school. Or who want the government to provide shelter for the homeless right up until the moment the government does so in their neighborhood. A whole generation of frequent travelers supports lower carbon footprints, but decline to acknowledge their own bloated ones.
This holds true too for the business traveler. A person who has not traveled internationally for business may not fully understand just how common it was before Covid for an employee to fly from New York to London for a single three-hour meeting, then board the return flight home. I’ve heard of people doing the same thing between New York and Tokyo. These meetings often take place at some conference space near the airport, precluding the need for the business traveler to exit “Airspace” at all before the return trip home. Such meeting attendees almost always fly in business class to such appointments, exacerbating the environmental damage.
This nonchalance is no longer tenable, and the hypocrisy of our travel behavior will soon run up against new realities. Several national governments are already imposing flight taxes, while overrun municipalities are beginning to limit the number of tourists they welcome. A couple of countries are in the beginning stages of requiring airplanes to be powered by renewable fuels. Airlines are under some pressure to do away with frequent flyer programs, which encourage a profligate approach to flying. These changes are sure to increase trip prices, possibly putting them out of reach of many casual travelers.
Covid has introduced us to a world in which travel is no longer a priority. One option would be to lean into that. At any rate, the time has passed for us to always just fly. A consideration of which travel is worth the true costs of it is coming due, whether we willfully ignore it or not.
