Travel as a Transformative Experience

The Chinese New Year brought out more travelers than before the pandemic. Even as they wake up to the climate cost of airline travel, more and more people are flying abroad. How is that possible?

If challenged, most people justify travel as a uniquely valuable experience. Either it brings us closer to important people in our lives, or it helps the inhabitants of far-flung places to understand each other better.

The Climate Costs of Distant Travel

The carbon cost of travel makes tourism expensive for the environment. Each long-distance flight increases our personal carbon footprint by about a tenth based on American data (where the average person has an annual carbon load of around 15 tons).

Tourism is not necessarily a negative for the environment. Extensive natural parks were created in Latin America that aimed to attract ecotourism, for instance. These reserves favored the resurgence of many indigenous wild animals and promoted a thriving natural habitat that draws carbon from the air.

Whatever the net climate costs of tourism may be, there are some categories of leisured people who have always traveled extensively. Their thirst for travel has not slowed down due to contemporary concern about climate change. Why not?

Long-distance travel fits in with many other aspects of elite lifestyles, from owning many vehicles to living at multiple addresses and following the annual movement patterns of jet-setters. Up to now, wealthy people were often admired for their lavish lifestyles. Their environmental recklessness will get more attention in the future given that the richest people have carbon footprints thousands of times those of average citizens.

Travel as Elite Behavior

Many wealthy people express concern about climate change. Yet, their lifestyles are in conflict with these concerns.¹ If you happen to own homes in distant places, you are almost obligated to visit them. Otherwise, what is the point of ownership? Elite lifestyles also involve seasonal rituals, whether it is skiing in the Alps or summering in Martha's Vineyard. Such rituals express elite status, and abandoning them would involve a loss of prestige. This helps explain why they are so resistant to change.

Apart from such conventional behavior, members of the elite set a trend in long-distance leisure travel that is adopted by the general public. Many aspire to travel far from home at least once a year.

If pressed for an explanation, tourists would emphasize that travel has the potential to change their lives in positive ways.

Travel as a Transforming Experience

The annual vacation in an unfamiliar place can have beneficial psychological effects. These are many and varied. By changing the environment, a person puts their regular life on hold, providing an opportunity to reset and relax.

In practice, vacations can be quite demanding, even stressful, particularly given the many problems with flight cancellations over past months. Yet, the mere experience of living in an unfamiliar society is inherently stimulating. This is particularly true if one communicates well with the local population. A traveler can return with a rich experience of how others live and an understanding of varied ways of thinking about what is important, or unimportant, in our lives. For example, residents of poor countries they visit may derive greater social support from members of their local community than is common in wealthier countries.

Foreign travel can promote peace and harmony in the world. If we get to understand people who live in very different countries, it is hard to hate them, much less support a war against them. These social benefits of travel may be intangible but they are also immeasurable.

While foreign travel can be extremely rewarding for the recipient country, as well as the traveler, this ideal is not reached by those who spend their time in the safety of gated resorts that vary little around the globe. So, how can one justify the environmental costs of travel that weigh heavily against its social benefits? In theory, it is possible that we may yet enjoy the benefits of distant travel without the environmental degradation it brings.

The Dream of Sustainable Air Travel

Green air travel may currently look like a pipe dream given that flying has a large carbon footprint. Electric planes are one possible solution although current models have limited range and are more suitable for use as local taxis rather than for international flight.

In the future, long-distance flight may be powered by hydrogen fuel that is derived using renewable energy sources (i.e., green hydrogen). When that happens, environmentalist-minded travelers can have their cake and eat it too!