Tonight I've been watching Serengeti on the TV. In 2008 I visited the Serengeti as part of 6 week tour I did through Africa from South Africa, through Namibia (or Nambia as some of us came to know it!), Botswana, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania. That was part of a bigger round the world trip that I did. It was at least 29,000 miles and involved long flights. In 2017/18 I did a trip around Eastern Europe and South America. Not quite sure of the mileage for that but I suspect it wasn't too far different from the first trip. On that trip Brazil made it 40 countries that I've visited and going to very few of those was by a means of travel that wasn't a flight.
Whilst this month I've signed up to Plastic Free July, for me this has to be part of a wider commitment to making changes to reducing my impact on the environment. Travel is one of the biggest impacts that we can have after procreating. I have absolutely no intention of producing offspring and by that very choice I've done the best thing that I could so far for the environment but that shouldn't stop me addressing the other areas of my life. Food and travel have to be the next areas I tackle.
Travel is a great passion of mine. I really love discovering new places, learning about new cultures, meeting new people and feeling part of a global community. There are many more places that I want to visit than I have already. One thing about travelling is that you meet other people who have travelled and so you always learn about new places you've not been to. It's inevitable that the more you travel, the longer the list of places you want to visit gets!
There are a number of different carbon calculators available online that can be used to determine the effects of your travel. However, other than walking, it's pretty clear that an accurate calculation of your carbon footprint is difficult. Actually, even walking isn't easy to calculate because you wear clothes and all of these have a carbon footprint and you could have gotten your energy to do the walk from beef or veg, which have very different carbon footprints. A solo long distance car journey could be worse than a short flight. The carbon footprint of producing a car or an aeroplane should all feed in to the calculations. but where does this stop? I don't know and trying to figure this out around a month ago left me so bewildered and had such a negative effect on my mental health that I decided I had to take a step back.
What I do know though is that I can't give up travelling and I want to limit the effects that my travel has on our planet. As such, I have needed to reach an agreement with myself on what I will allow myself to do. Fortunately I love trains. As such, I have decided that the vast majority of my holidays will be reliant on this form of transport. Having travelled on trains throughout Europe I know that this means that a lot of our continent (I will always think of myself as European) will be accessible to me. Similarly, I'm good on buses too and the last weekend I had a brilliant trip to the Champagne region of France with my friends Cathy and Chris. it was a bus tour that went through the Eurotunnel and was fab. Being a bus it had the added bonus that we could carry our champagne purchases home easily with us!
However, I have friends in many countries that other than by a long boat trip, the only reasonable form of transport to get to them will be flying. As such, I'm going to permit myself one long haul flight every two years. Other than necessary connections there or back, those trips won't be allowed to include internal flights. To give you an example, next year I want to go and visit my friends Sunita and Kate in North America. Sunita is in Vancouver and Kate in Eugene (Oregon). I would love to visit Seattle and as that's in between the two, I think I'll fly to Vancouver, then I can get the bus to Seattle and a train to Eugene, Yes, I could fly between Seattle and Eugene, but I figure I'll see so much more of the country by being at ground level. However, I won't be able to fly back directly to the UK from Eugene so a connecting flight will be permitted. Short haul flights are out. I'll need to find a way to travel on land/sea to access European cities.
This will be a sacrifice for me, but I genuinely can't justify an approach to reducing my environmental impact that doesn't include reducing my time in the air. Weirdly I'm actually quite excited by the thought of more train travel and who knows, I might even try cruising at some point!
No comments:
Post a Comment