Spendthrift Shoestring

FT on Green Travel

It's amusing, and also heartening, to see the hippieish line "The world in our hands" on the front page of yesterday's Responsible Traveller Financial Times special report. It does feel as if we've moved into a different place as far as green concerns go, with ever-smaller circles offering recalcitrance to an increasing sense of environmental urgency.

My favorite parts of the special report were Rohit Jaggi's piece on aviation industry movements toward greater environmental responsibility and Robert Wright's article on increased interest in train travel, which quotes Mark Smith, a.k.a. The Man in Seat Sixty-One. The report also has an article on cruise ship industry efforts to go greener, as well as a longish list of eco-friendly hideaways in India, the Gulf, Greece, and Latin America. Very good stuff. It's wonderful to see it in the FT.

The Carbon Offsetting Fetish

I think carbon offsets are great. I do. I'll never bash them. That said, I was thrilled to see Tim Leffel's take on the sloppy embrace of green issues in US consumer travel magazines.

Especially good was his job on the rush toward singling out air travel as somehow the most evil activity in environmental history, a rush that completely ignores lifestyle choice balance and lets car travel off the hook.

I'm reminded of a very good friend who asked me a few months ago how she could get from her major European gateway to the Yucatán without flying. I told her that if she were able to snag a repositioning cruise from England to South Florida and then find a way to drive around the Gulf of Mexico and south to Mérida, she could do it. But at what cost? I'd love to find a way to calculate the carbon emissions of such an itinerary versus the two flights that would deliver her from Europe to Mexico.

I agree with Leffel when he suggests that we need to think beyond flying. We need to think about how we travel and how we behave when we're not traveling. Carbon offsets are part of the puzzle, but they're not the redemptive answer, nor should they be made into a fetish.