How to travel without destroying the planet

Travelers hold a unique perspective on the global environment. They go to great lengths—literally—to climb to the snows of Kilimanjaro, snorkel around the marine life of the Great Barrier Reef , cruise to Antarctica , walk among giant redwoods or lounge on the exotic beaches of Southeast Asia .

So they are among the first to notice when things go awry. Not just awry in the sense of a thunderstorm that ruins a day’s excursion, but in the sense of a lengthening and strengthening hurricane season that threatens to destroy entire cities like New Orleans . Awry in the sense of a yearlong drought that increases the risk of wildfires, limiting chances to hike through large swaths of the western U.S. Awry in the sense of glaciers that are slowly melting away.

Whether you want to call it global warming, climate chaos or a trough between ice ages, there’s no longer any disagreement that something is out of whack. A February 2007 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.”

If you believe the great majority of the world’s scientists (including the more than 1,200 contributors to that U.N. report), human activity is almost assuredly playing a critical role. Specifically: Our use of fossil fuels to heat and cool our homes, propel our vehicles and power our appliances is releasing too much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping heat near the Earth’s surface. The result is a slight but nonetheless noticeable increase in temperatures across the planet, which causes all kinds of havoc on land and water.

Climatologists have been ringing alarm bells about global warming for more than two decades. Finally, we may have come to a point when ordinary people stop talking about the weather and start doing something about it. An Inconvenient Truth , the Academy Award-winning movie version of the environmental slide show that Al Gore has presented in countless cities, can claim a large share of the credit. The documentary’s depiction of the damage already done by global warming brought home the issue in a vivid way that abstract projections about the future never could. For many of the approximately 3.6 million people who saw the film, the debate surrounding global warming was no longer “What if?” but “What do we do now?”

Since the movie’s release, more concrete evidence of global warming has continued to amass. In December 2006, the Indian island of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, sank below the rising water level in the Bay of Bengal. The low-lying South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu expects it might be next; it has signed an informal agreement to evacuate its entire population of 11,000 to New Zealand if sea levels continue to rise. Eight World Cup skiing events were canceled this year as a result of too little snow in the European Alps. Mount Kilimanjaro has lost 82 percent of the snow and ice that once covered its peaks.

Damage control

For the traveler, these changes create a sense of urgency: How to see some of the world’s marvels before they are lost to history. But that’s a two-edged sword. Travel itself is, objectively, antithetical to environmentalism. One trip to Great Smoky Mountain National Park confirms it—this American jewel has been cherished to near-death by crowds, strip-mall sprawl and automobile exhaust. If similar numbers of tourists were to suddenly decide they had to see the Great Barrier Reef before warming ocean temperatures kill all of its coral, it would merely accelerate the damage.

There’s no getting around it: Just moving about does harm to the environment. Cars use gas, planes use jet fuel (a shocking amount of it while on the ground), and ships pour tons of sludge into the ocean. Even the Transportation Security Administration is compounding the problem. Ever since Sept. 26, 2006, we’ve been required to keep our toiletries in landfill-clogging three-ounce bottles—and if that weren’t enough, bundle them all together in a zip-top bag, yet another disposable product made from petroleum.

It could even be argued that so-called ecotourism, which often involves driving jeeps into untamed areas and mucking about with the local flora and fauna, is more harmful to those environments than a bus tour that stays on the paved road. Free spirits often deride those who see the world through the window of a bus, but motor coach tourists usually honor the environmentalist’s creed by taking nothing but photos and leaving only a few Easy Spirit footprints. Though buses certainly release carbon emissions, and some bus tourists do litter, the overall impact to the environment is probably less than that of rugged mountaineers who trash the slopes of Mount Everest with their used oxygen bottles.

Even more ironic is the mounting concern that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is actually speeding the demise of the planet’s most venerable places by designating them World Heritage Destinations. World Heritage status carries with it no funding, but brings an onslaught of tourists that many of the 830 sites “of outstanding value to humanity” are unable to sustain, especially the ones in developing countries.

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