Foraging for climate-conscious travel information: Where is our trusted guide?
Despite warnings of climate catastrophe, declarations of climate emergency, and the guilt and angst they stir up in many people, most of us still want to travel.
Herb Hiller sees the need for a trusted and authoritative source of climate-conscious travel & tourism advice.
It’s a “Good Tourism” Insight. [You too can write a “GT” Insight.]
The cities and the countryside of the Global North grew wealthy through colonial times. Riches extracted from the Global South made leisure travel possible.
The nations of the North became depositories of looted treasures that filled museums for educated travellers from each other’s countries to admire up close.
The industrialised world generated the most visitors and also welcomed the most.
We saw how travel & tourism makes significant contributions to national income and jobs; always in the places tourists come from, and often in the places they go to.
As well as investing in science, research, technology, finance, and globalism, the North also created the industrial revolution that led to the release of greenhouse gases.
Don’t miss other “GT” content tagged with “Tourism and climate change”
Capitalism discounted the cost of waste from its industrial production and dumped it onto public lands, pumped it into oceans, and released it into the atmosphere.
So long as the seas, other sacrificial regions, landfills, and limited access freeways disadvantaged only the underclasses, the system held together.
But climate change has bitten the hand that feeds it.
Now, since COP27 in 2022, climate-conscious reform is finally being taken up by places that receive visitors in numbers as large as those that they generate — in the Global North — rather than leaving it to the Global South to cope with.
Our climate-conscious travel concerns are rising
Lay people are learning what scientists already know; that climate action calls for global buy-in.
While national policy makers dragged their feet and the tourism industry greenwashed ahead, the educated and well-off people of the Global North grasped two critical aspects of what climate action in travel & tourism entails: … continue reading this “Good Tourism” Insight (and many others) at The “Good Tourism” Blog.
