If you haven't already, you must read Thomas L. Friedman's book Hot, Flat & Crowded (2008) - see here. It's the book that got me seriously thinking about this topic. The book focuses on the environmental crisis, how bad it is, and what needs to be done about it. Something that made me increasingly uncomfortable as I read, was how extensively the author seems to have travelled. His book is riddled with sentences like 'At a meeting in... While presenting at a conference in... While hiking in... While visiting a conservation project in...' Sentences that seem to include all continents and most countries on the globe. These details seem incongruent. How could somebody so knowledgeable and so inspirational about tackling climate change be so blase about what must be a truly massive carbon footprint? Is it that his global influence justifies his personal impact? Is it just like Al Gore and his Inconvenient Truth? I wasn't sure about this.
But, he did say something very poignant, that I was sure about. One of Friedman's main motivators in tackling environmental issues has been his travelling the world and seeing the amazing and endangered places, ecosystems, plants and animals for himself. He talks about the Amazon rainforest, and the orangutans in Indonesia... I think about the places I've been; the forests of northern Japan, the moors and mountains of the Scottish Highlands, the red heat of the Australian Outback, the palm trees and surf of Maui's beaches, and the underwater coral reefs and wonders offshore.
Being there for real, experiencing the reality of these natural wonders on a true, immediate, and sensory level - that's how I know these places are bigger than us, and far too precious to sacrifice.
With modern life being increasingly urban, man-made, and managed to meet human/economic requirements... How many people get the chance to truly experience the natural world, and from that know how important environmental issues are? Thomas L. Friedman's personal experience and connection with places has motivated his writing and his politics. My personal experience and connection with places has motivated my own small efforts in this direction. Air travel does need increasing justification. But travel in and of itself does not.
When it comes to environmental issues and the hard choices we're going to have to make, travel might be one of the very few effective motivators for change that we have.
Image from NASA Goddard Photo and Video
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