April 22nd, 2023 marks the 53rd Earth Day, so we thought we’d share earthday.org’s post on “How to Do Earth Day” and a couple of guidelines for making our post-pandemic travels more sustainable. Thankfully, the Earth Day organization no longer wants us all to turn off our lights for an hour. A friend of ours used to get so annoyed at the uselessness of helping the planet for only an hour once per year that he would dig out his Christmas lights and turn them on in protest. But there are real changes that we can make, and there are a couple of articles we’d like to share that offer specific actions to make our travels more sustainable.
Our friend with the Christmas lights on Earth Day would almost certainly ask if there’s really any such thing as sustainable travel that involves fossil fuelled flights, cruises. or road trips. Everyone has to make their own call on that question, but for us, the understanding that we gain from seeing other people, places, and cultures first hand offsets the negative impact. We think that Aldous Huxley summarized the most important benefit of travel best:
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Aldous Huxley
If we decide to travel, then it is important that we do so sustainably so that the world that we see is still there for our kids to experience. Exactly how? Here are some suggestions:
- A great place to start is National Geographic’s “How to travel better: a beginner’s guide to sustainable travel in 2023 and beyond“.
- For very specific suggestions, see Sustainable Travel International’s “Top 10 Tips for Sustainable Travel“.
When trying to adopt better travel habits, it’s always important not to accept companies’ claims to be environmentally friendly, and to watch out for “greenwashing”. Greenwashing refers to the marketing practice in which businesses seek to capitalize on the growing movement for environmentally sound products, services, and policies while selling goods and services labelled as green that actually aren’t. The term was coined by New York environmentalist Jay Westerveld in a 1986 essay about the hotel industry’s practice of placing notices in rooms promoting reuse of towels to “save the environment”. He noted that often little or no effort toward reducing energy waste was made by these institutions, although towel reuse saved them laundry costs.
Greenwashing was tied to the hotel business nearly 40 years ago, and continues today. On our recent trip to the Arabian Peninsula we visited the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi for afternoon tea. Their menu noted:
It all sounds lovely (and the tea experience was great!), but upon exiting through the gardens we saw dozens of hectares of lawn being watered. These are lawns that nobody can walk on because there aren’t any paths through them, it’s too hot to walk outside 9 months of the year, and the hotel shuttles everyone around in electric carts anyway! The hotel has over 200 fountains, which is pretty over the top for water wasting. And the “soaring palm trees” are planted in reclaimed land with absolutely no natural source of water, so each tree needs approximately 200 litres of water per day to produce that organic fruit! In Abu Dhabi, 30% of the water is produced by desalination, all done using fossil fuel energy. The emirate of Abu Dhabi is estimated to produce 9% of the entire world’s desalinated water. The Emirates Palace is far more about conspicuous consumption than making things better for the planet!
We’re going to observe Earth Day with a commitment travelling more sustainably, and whenever possible supporting businesses that are truly committed to environmentally friendly practices.