"... Far more apparent in this year’s roundup, however, was the running theme of 'responsible tourism.' Words like 'sustainability,' 'green,' and 'conservation' were shoved into every other euphoric blurb... In Sicily, grassroots groups have pledged to use less plastic. In Uganda, proceeds from gorilla trekking permits go toward conservation efforts.... It’s all bullshit, of course. A 2018 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change announced tourism alone—that’s nonessential pleasure travel—is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The traveling public is freaking out. It knows about flight shaming; it loves Greta Thunberg; and it’s ready to bid au revoir to Volvic, Dasani, and plastic straws. But it still wants to sit on a beach in Aruba. This puts travel media in a tricky spot.... It’s easy to make fun of people putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds. And the Times’ spin on sea-level rise at Grand Isle, Louisiana—'Does a place appear more hauntingly beautiful when you know it’s disappearing?'—was tastelessly macabre.... [A]s the world becomes ever more distressed by over-tourism... the travel journalists we rely on for hot tips and insider advice will simply conjure new ways of assuaging our guilt.... I like travel as much as you do, and I’m not stopping either. Where’s the line between hypocrite and addict?"
From "Why Tourism Should Die—and Why It Won’t /'Sustainable' travel is an oxymoron" by Chuck Thompson in The New Republic.
Also in the article, some quick info on why it's probably impossible to have solar powered jetliners and why virtual reality traveling doesn't make you feel like you're really there and what an addiction expert thinks about the author's idea that travel should be called an addiction.
I'm going to try to answer the question "Where’s the line between hypocrite and addict?" I'll say it's whether shame works.
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"Chuck Thompson is the author of comic travel memoir Smile When You’re Lying, and the former executive producer of CNN Travel."
Shame only works when the target of the shaming feels the shame.
" [A]s the world becomes ever more distressed by over-tourism.."
Who is this "world" that is becoming ever more distressed? Actual people? Not the author, apparently. Purely anecdotal but the small group of people I know that LOVE to travel are not concerned about this one bit. Or, at least, they don't express that concern when talking about the next place they want to travel to.
Aruba is the shithole of shitholes.
I've been there. It's a tiny desert island with a small tourist strip. The local markets sell rotten produce and smelly, putrid meat. Nothing is produced on the island.
The tiny strip is well watered and green. The rest of the island is notable for gravel and goats.
The only redeeming features of Aruba are that it's hot when the NE is cold, you can swim with parrot fish and pretty young women often go topless.
Other than that, it's a complete shithole.
"Purely anecdotal but the small group of people I know that LOVE to travel are not concerned about this one bit."
So plug that into my effort to answer the question "Where’s the line between hypocrite and addict?" If you are right, then it's an addiction.
Simple. Throw in the ‘green’ commentary on travel adventures keeps the green fascists off your back.
Maybe that accident at the bio weapons plant in China will cure this problem finally, which is that some people like a planet better when it has way fewer people. I think that’s just a value judgement, but they live by it, sort of.
Good point. It does play out that way. The people I know talk about experiencing a place, learning about it, the people, the culture, etc., but they aren't there long enough to get much more than a superficial understanding of it all.
Addiction. Signs point to Yes.
Strong approach: People need to stop traveling, but they also must send the money that they would have spent to the people in those places around the world who've become dependent on the travel industry.
Intermediate approach: Travel needs to become very expensive and limited to the elite. Ordinary people need to get the message that they are immoral if they travel, and that will make places less crowded and more worth the expensiveness that the people who most want less cluttered places should be able to afford.
Weak approach: Just think a bit about the environment, do something symbolic of your caring, and keep enjoying travel if that's what you like. And maybe consider whether you really do like travel all that much. Maybe you're conned by the travel industry and other influencers into thinking travel is great. Step off the fantasy if it's not yours.
I have a stirling engine that coffee in an insulated cup can keep running for an hour. You could power an airplane with that. They already carry coffee.
Nobody’ listening. Cows taste good. Pigs taste good. Going places feels good.
Maybe go pick on China for having coal plants? Make sure you go there to do it...
Other green energy sources for airplanes might be dunking birds and crooke's radiometers.
I always liked the Jewish concept of being written into the Book of Life. Well a humanity free planet has billions of years written into the Book of Life, and when we are gone, the planet will re-jigger itself to a new beautiful form. Remember that it was 8 degrees F or so warmer than it is today for hundreds of millions of years before the modern age vacillating between ice ages and interglacials. There were something like 30 species of great apes that flourished during that Edenic time. The planet doesn’t really mind being hot.
There was a line of thinking that was cancelled for being racist, but nevertheless had some archeological support, that intelligence was a reaction to the inhospitable conditions that started four million years ago. A warm planet is sort of a paradise for great apes, and survival required little, if any, planning for the future. That was the theory.
"Good point. It does play out that way. The people I know talk about experiencing a place, learning about it, the people, the culture, etc., but they aren't there long enough to get much more than a superficial understanding of it all."
I picture an blind drunk alcoholic going on about the subtle notes in the aroma of wine — leather, cork, jockstrap, bandaid...
"Where’s the line between hypocrite and addict?"
The problem isn't the answer, it's the question. It's not addiction for the morons who believe in all this climate change crap. For some it's hypocritical behavior. For others they just don't care. As a fiend of mine in Madison who has no kids says "Conservation is for breeders." The rest just really don't believe.
I wouldn't worry about it Professor. Pretty soon nobody will want to go to a lot of tourist spots because they have been turned into shitholes. My wife and I wanted to go to San Francisco at one time, but now it is literally a shithole. London? To stabby. Paris? Overrun with refugees camping in the streets.
Why all the moaning and keening about air travel but no one bitches about cruise ships? Is there any form of consumption that is more pointless and wasteful? You put the giant tacky hotel on a gargantuan ship and sail it around. How is that defensible if “the world” feels guilty about the carbon footprint of travel?
There's always sailboats.
"It's not addiction for the morons who believe in all this climate change crap."
The professor and NYT readers simply accept AGW as an irrefutably established fact because they have been told it is by what they take as authoritative sources. But, authoritative sources have been demonstrated to be full of shit repeatedly. Especially in regards to predictions relating to AGW and the climate.
I must on occasion socialize with in-laws who several times a year take cruises (ocean and river) all over the world. They naturally assume that the rest of the world is simply captivated by their tales of mundane travel experiences. They make sure to mention how Trump is so hated throughout the world that they must disguise the fact that they are Americans from their fellow travelers and those in foreign lands.
Travel for them - just like their incessant talk of their solar power and electric cars - is simply an opportunity for the to signal their virtue and relative wealth. For leftists, the personal is obsessively political.
Mezcal is band-aid.
The thing is, the same hypocrisy is found in every line of progressive thought.
Reason #N+1 why bringing the Chinese out of there darkness backfired. Thanks NWO!
*their
$1789 round trip from Atlanta to French Polynesia for two people. Economy class with two stops, not exactly the lap of luxury. Still, I can see why the hoi polloi are seeking a way to exclude the proles.
They want everybody to go to school with people of the same color and background to prevent any stressful feelings being around 'others'. They want us to stop making food or wearing clothes from other cultures for fear of appropriation. You should not celebrate any holidays other than those of your own ancestry. And now you should stop going to other countries- especially those who depend on your dollars to actually live. You can read about other cultures from books. While you hide, and open those books in places no one sees you actually reading them.
Who comes up with this stuff? How badly are we teaching this next generation to think in our schools? This badly.
They think the world is going to end in 12 years. That we're going to run out of food, or have too many people. I'm told my home will be under water in 12 years. I have to tell you- you are all welcome to a party at my house- 12 years from today. We'll watch the Super Bowl together. Here by the ocean, in Florida, where it'll be a nice 72 degrees in February. (normal temp). You should travel from wherever, to get here. And we'll feast on things thought to be long-extinct by then. And for those of you in need- we'll keep up with the latest diet fads that improve the planet and have a menu for you that includes locally grown, organically raised Shat (sheep/cat meat).
I tend to read the 'hottest places to visit this year' lists and wipe those places off of any personal list. I don't get a lot of time for vacations (my own decision to work too much). But at this point in my life, I tend to go back to places that I loved at some point in previous years.
If something brings me pleasure and moves me, I think I owe it to myself to go back and recharge. There are a handful of places that made the cut during my life. We (my wife and I) tend to go back to those now. Life is short. I don't have the time (currently) to use it on a list made up by a stranger working in the world of the NYT.
I don't worry about me destroying the planet. Not with Greta Thumbinmouth jetting and boating and driving from tip to tip of the planet, while UN appointees have multiple cocktail parties in her honor. It's a horrible joke.
"But the plane is flying there anyway."
"[A] fully solar-powered, fast, heavy aircraft may be impossible or close to it.” No kidding! (Says the retired aerospace engineer.) Somewhere I have a cartoon of a pedal-powered jumbo "jet." The interior view shows rows and rows of Peletons, each topped with a sweating, spandex-clad tourist. A giant, illuminated sign at the front of the cabin flashes: "NO SLUFFING!!!"
This is a quarrel between people who are on the same side in politics (affluent liberal urbanites and suburbanites).
But it will be turned into a right-left fight because people can only think in those terms.
I hate it when that happens.
People will be saying, "I am a traveler, not a tourist. My journeys are environmentally sustainable and socially responsible, as well as spiritually fulfilling. The real problem is those fat old White people and their stupid shuffleboard cruises."
Save expensive travel for those teenage "gap years" everybody seems to be taking nowadays, or make it a once a decade extravaganza (if you can), rather than something for every year (or several times a year).
@Wilbur: indeed, it is so. South Park parodied these attitudes in the episode "Smug Alert".
Remember that it was 8 degrees F or so warmer than it is today for hundreds of millions of years before the modern age vacillating between ice ages and interglacials. There were something like 30 species of great apes that flourished during that Edenic time.
Apes appeared about 30 million years ago, and there are currently 6 or 7 species of great apes.
How about a little empathy people?
How are our betters supposed to maintain their aura of superiority over the plebes if they can’t visit exotic locales?
I cannot rest from travel, I will drink life to the lees.
Tough shit if you have a problem with that.
I fear that the coronavirus will make travel a moot issue. Who wants to sit for hours in an airplane during a pandemic?
Who wants to sit for hours in an airplane during a pandemic?
Thousands of Chinese trying to GTFO.
They think the world is going to end in 12 years.
@Temujin, point of information. They predicted that we have only twelve more years until planetary collapse two years ago. So we have only a decade left. I intend to spend it traveling.
I think it would be nice if NYT-travel-section type tourists were shamed out of traveling. The people who make livings off of 'em probably wouldn't appreciate it, though.
And to be fair, they're not always just annoying when you run into them. Sometimes they're highly entertaining - e.g., when they happen upon another one of their species in hotels, cafes, restaurants, airport shuttles, etc., and you overhear the ensuing travel-status-signaling death-match.
Before this post I might have guessed that Aruba was something vegetarians ate.
That tourism travel is responsible for 8% of all human greenhouse gas emissions is so obviously a falsehood that the rest of the BS isn't even worth considering. Somehow I suspect that number is quite a bit smaller than 8% of all fossil fuel burned, unless one charges the one tourist with a whole 747's fuel load on every flight.
stevew: Who is this "world" that is becoming ever more distressed? Actual people? Not the author, apparently. Purely anecdotal but the small group of people I know that LOVE to travel are not concerned about this one bit. Or, at least, they don't express that concern when talking about the next place they want to travel to.
It's probably a very restricted virtue-signaling niche. These people aren't going to stop traveling, either, but I assume they concentrate in the high disposable income end of the travel market, and the business owners who developed the "sustainable tourism" shtick saw a way to get more of that money flowing their way.
AA to stevew: So plug that into my effort to answer the question "Where’s the line between hypocrite and addict?" If you are right, then it's an addiction.
Massive question-begging alert.
Solar-powered airplanes...don't fly at night.
Gulf Shores people.
Wouldn't a carbon tax to offset the externality created by long distance travel be a very strong first step in addressing this problem in that it would force both hypocrites and addicts to internalize the costs of their consumption? Certainly it would have a major effect in reducing long distance vacation travel. Why don't you ever mention this obvious option?
Blame capitalism! Now that just about half of the planet is middle class all these brown, yellow and black people think it’s their turn to go see the pyramids, Rome and Paris. How uppity.
"Over-tourism" - the phenomenon of people who aren't you wanting to go to the places you want to go to.
Traveling and going to new, interesting, even exotic places is something that many enjoy. But, the reasons for traveling are often different.
For some it is just another item on their bucket list to check off.
Others it is status making and something to brag about or hold over other's heads. "See my trip to Aruba, Bali etc etc et...don't you wish YOU could be there /smirk"
Some it is an educational experience and desire to see famous objects up close and personal instead of in photos. Chichen Itza. Eiffel Tower.
Tourism can also be an economic boost to the local economy. We have a regular tourist presence centered around hunting, fly fishing, outdoor activities of many kinds.
Whatever the reason, I don't care what other people do. I prefer shorter and closer to home experiences. A world tour would be awful. Taking a cruise ship to anywhere. Terrible. (I have don't this and hated almost every minute.)
Proust said it best. "The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Very much like the photographers and their amazing photos in the BBC post Althouse put up. New eyes. A different way of looking at buildings and the world around where they are.
...as the quest for power by the chattering classes seizes on a non-emergency as a reason to tell everyone else how to live. Not for the first time.
The future of tourism: replicas. Replica Parthenons, replica Eiffel towers. With a cast to play the locals (or indigenes or whoever lives/lived there).
Because, really, it's all fake anyway, just a show put on for your amusement (and their enrichment).
Plus this added bonus: time travel to (replica) destinations that no longer exist!
Of course it's just advertising schlock. But you do have to give it two stars for at least attempting to appeal to the better angels of our nature. However if you truly desire an environmental vacation then go on a carnival Cruise ship with leaking sewer pipes and enjoy the fabulous hallucinations from the norovirus. A natural high
"I'm going to try to answer the question "Where’s the line between hypocrite and addict?" I'll say it's whether shame works."
Not following you here. Shame does not work on addicts. And shame does not work on hypocrites. In what sense can it be taken as a criterion?
Here we have people whose worldview is a constellation of contradictions, nibbling away at a single loose thread in the vast inanity. The claim made by the "scientists" is that it is already too late, we have already loosed so much CO2 into the atmosphere that 3 or 4 degrees of warming and dozens of feet of sea rise are inevitable by the end of the century. We're all gonna die! (That part is true). And here we have the Woke, the "believers" of this claptrap, telling themselves that if they could only bring themselves to stop taking so many vacations, the Saudis would just leave all that oil in the ground. I really have to wonder, how is it possible for someone to be that stupid and still be able to afford plane travel?
Jupiter, those are good questions. I stump my lefty friends when I point out that BY THEIR OWN THEORY a planetary-scale change is already inevitable and underway.
"Nibbling at loose strands" is exactly their approach--no need to reconcile the contradictions and gaps in their understanding, as long as they can appear concerned.
Narr
Mitteleuropa again, in '21 if not this year
The NYT makes much if its subscription and all of its ad money from international travel, multi-million dollar real estate, clothes, services, and jewelry only the 1% can afford, and feature stories and entire magazine sections (T Magazine) dedicated to promoting these consumption appetites.
Their editorialists live like sultans in beachfront mansions.
And they are sustained by a billionaire in Mexico whose telephone fortune is made on the backs of illegal immigrants and the American taxpayers who subsidize their lives while the immigrants wire money back home.
So I'll take hypocrisy for 200, Alex.
One good thing to come out of the Greta Thurnberg phenomenon--Western environmentalism was never about the environment, it was about helping affluent white liberals continue to live their environmentally destructive lives guilt free.
Greta, hypocrite though she may be, is shining a light on their hypocrisy. And that's a good thing. These jerks are in no way willing to live the lives they insist someone who isn't them live and by exposing them, Greta may ultimately help to kill off this joke known as the green movement.
Ann Althouse said...Intermediate approach: Travel needs to become very expensive and limited to the elite.
Most people who travel would like travelling a lot more if fewer people traveled.
Worrying about the lives and behaviors of 7 billion other people must be truly exhusting.
How fortunate we are to have the Chuck Thompson's of the world to lecture us about what a disappointment we are to him and Greta Thumberg every. Single. Day.
"trying to sober up by switching from gin to beer." This is bound to work, considering that light beer is 97% water.
How about we just determine what level of load, whether, carbon dioxide, crowding, pollution, lack of water, etc., we can tolerate on our tiny planet, and then limit the rampant, tax-supported breeding to conform?
Grand Isle Louisiana isn't disappearing because of global warming. It's disappearing because channeling and flood control efforts have hugely decreased the amount of sediments coming down the Mississippi River. Land removed by erosion isn't being replaced. The land mass in the delta has been shrinking for decades-- nothing to do with AGW.
All the status travel places are on prole bucket lists. So that now the status way to travel as defined by NYT is to be anxiously and conscientiously concerned about green or at least to make remarks along those lines which means that the airport phenomenon kicks in where every place is like every other place. CNN, green anxiety, looking into phones, crowds, luggage, franchise foods. Still there are places which have cultures that are different and might change you or entertain you. - Darkest America away from the coasts, Civil War battlefields. Or here's a historical quest: you find out how the land you own (house, farm, NYC apartments) was transferred from the Indians to you. To make the quest exciting, you could promise that if it was unfair, you will give it back. It wasn't all unfair, there was empty land that the Indians sold knowing quite well it would become farms. That land was empty because of massive die-offs due to diseases as might happen again due to the corona virus. But it wasn't all empty land and there were unfair land grabs. So which category was your land in?
Intermediate approach: Travel needs to become very expensive and limited to the elite. Ordinary people need to get the message that they are immoral if they travel, and that will make places less crowded and more worth the expensiveness that the people who most want less cluttered places should be able to afford.
Who gets to define who is "ordinary?"
I'm getting on a plane in a few weeks. IF I die, consider it a start to the New Renaissance.
think about it, all those deaths, all that wealth passed on.
Any word from Rick Steves?
I like to travel and don't give a damn about my carbon footprint. The shaming won't work on me.
"Greta, hypocrite though she may be, is shining a light on their hypocrisy."
She isn't a hypocrite, as far as I can see. She's just an arrogant ignoramus. Somewhat excusable, in a person her age. At least she hasn't raped anyone in a hot tub, that we know about. She may eventually be able to put all this behind her.
Join the Army; travel to exotic, distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them.
Join the Army; travel to exotic, distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them.
Or at least have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
I have a friend who works in Manhattan who says he likes high gas prices because it makes his commute easier. He’s a liberal Democrat, of course.
In 50-ish days, my Wisconsin-based traditional, cisheteropatriarchal family will will embark on a journey to spew vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, ending at the environmental hellhole that is Fort Lauderdale, FL. From there, we will embark on a giant, glitzy, horribly over-thought hotel on a hull and proceed to spend 7 days tooling around the Caribbean, visiting shithole countries where they have carved out massive developments and environmental offenses to cater to the pasty, overweight 'Muricans who want to spend their hard-earned, capitalist-opressor fiat money on sun, food, and experiences that are overpriced and unavailable in Wisconsin in the dead of winter.
I will utilize, cherish, and dispose of the single-use plastic bottles which will keep me from bringing home too many of the native viruses and bacteria in my intestines. I will lavishly wash my hands in water, wasting as much as I feel is necessary to remove pathogens from them before I touch any food or mucus membranes.
And I am going to enjoy every f***ing minute of it, Greta and the NYT Travel section be damned.
"Where’s the line between hypocrite and addict?"
Personally, I can't be a hypocrite because I do not believe AGW hysteria is anything other than a Malthusian plot perpetrated by Marxists to destroy free market economies so as to further their goal of world enslavement. Moreover, if I should be wrong about AGW, I am absolutely certain that free markets will solve the problems when and if the problem is sufficiently serious. Science, technology and engineering are not static but are continually evolving to solve real world problems, and AGW isn't even a blip right now. If it should be in 80 or a hundred years as some predict, we - the scientists, inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs who actually develop, produce and implement the technological advances that allow the most complicated problems to be solved - will solve those problems in due course using technologies that likely do not currently exist and also are probably still unknown unknowns. Frankly, I think the Marxists are partly pushing AGW precisely because we have solved the "peak oil" problem through drilling and fracking technology, coupled with atomic energy generation advances which have the world awash in energy to such a degree that we can afford to waste money and resources on pipe dream projects like Solandra and other “green” programs that often consume more energy than they produce. Cheap energy producing massive wealth across society is a major problem for progessives, socialists and communists which is the reason for the need to demonize fossil fuel use. The same with the food supply: instead of running out of food as Erlich predicted over and over, we have so much of it that we can actually afford to convert grain to fuel and thereby increase the energy glut without even marginally affecting the food supply. It would be fools and progressives (okay, there is some redundancy there) who have no faith in the future. No one looking at the world in 1920 had a clue about jet air travel, space flight, atomic energy, computing, cell phones, television, GM crops and the thousands of other technologies that were developed over the last century and make life so much easier today. Why does anyone think people today have a clue about what technology might be available to address the presumed AGW problem in 2100? Without question, if AGW is a real problem then the world would be better served if the climate change crowd spent the next 10 to 15 years nailing down the relevant variables and developing a model to understand how everything interacts, i.e., what variables need to be manipulated to solve the presumed problem. Then scientists can focus on specific objectives rather than simply applying the Malthusian solution, which in a nutshell is everybody give up everything and go back to the Stone Age because we don’t know what we’re doing? It’s madness and I won’t play the game. BTW, the wife and I are doing a three week road circuit of Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Austria this summer. So all the hysterical scolds can just bite me.
Then scientists can focus on specific objectives rather than simply applying the Malthusian solution, which in a nutshell is everybody give up everything and go back to the Stone Age
Not everyone going back to the Stone Age which is the problem. Only the icky.
Shouting,
That's odd; I've been to Curacao and it's not a shithole place. Or at least wasn't, pre-Venezuela-breakdown days. In specific regard to your "rotten produce", there is/was a delightful floating market in Willemstad where Venezuelan vendors sailed over daily with wonderful fresh stuff. That may all be gone now--haven't been there recently, hence the disclaimer.
Then, too, part of the non-shitholery is surely due to the fact that there are still a fair number of Dutch there quietly running the infrastructure in the background.
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