We head up the road this week on a philosophical trip, to ask and begin to answer the question: Why travel? On an obvious level, because we’re a migratory species, and have gotten good at it over the eons, moving from one place to another. At first it was strictly to survive. Now many of us travel for fun, changing lots of scenery.
However, there is a cost to so much travel. According to a study published earlier this year in the journal Nature Climate Change, tourism—meaning pleasure travel—accounts for 8 percent of all global greenhouse gases.
According to the lead researcher, tourism is “largely a high-income affair,” with wealthier countries serving as both origin and destination for most travelers. The U.S., as you might guess, is number one, though China is heading up that road fast. Making matters worse, in terms of climate impact, this overall trend is likely to continue, with tourism predicted to grow about 4 percent per year, worldwide.
There are other negatives on tourism’s balance sheet, too. For now let’s include environmental costs not already filed under climate change—a dammed river here, another lost species there—and immense cultural costs, including the loss of entire cultures. Did anyone really want world culture to become so homogenized? Isn’t discovering “difference” why we set off on adventures in the first place? No, to that first question, and yes to the second. But how do you keep people down on the farm after they’ve tried their first iPhones and Nikes?
So: How do travel junkies justify doing it? Is it really just about me, me, me, and my desire to impress family and friends with my edgy and unique travel experiences? Ignoring our selfish pleasures, is there any way to look at travel pursuits as positive, on balance?
Admitting—loudly—that we do need to clean up our collective act, and get busy doing just that, Up the Road argues that yes, we should travel. Not the way we’ve generally been doing it, perhaps, and with a different experiential focus. Plus we need to change our travel ethics, on a massive a scale. More about that soon.
We need to keep traveling. Who better to explain why than America’s own Mark Twain, who discovered very large, inviting life both on and beyond the Mississippi. As Twain once said, in The Innocents Abroad:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
Life in the lower 48 these days has convinced me that we need way, way, way more travel, and right now. More charitable viewpoints, less bigotry and narrow-mindedness. I must need more travel, because in recent months, I have fantasized about starting something like a Send Your Neighbor Abroad program—making it easier for you and I to export folks the nation would be better off without, but in a very nice way, by sending them off on vacation. Because travel has a way of educating even the most mean-spirited. As Twain also said, in 1868, right after our last Civil War:
“It liberates the vandal to travel––you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction.”
Amen. And darned if that didn’t bring one particular person to mind.
