In the age of flight shaming and traveler’s guilt, the editor of Intrepid Times argues that the best travel experiences come when we leave the moral absolutes back home.
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About eight years ago, I moved to Madrid. I was very much in love, but not yet with the city. The girl I’d just started seeing had landed her dream job in Spain. It was a three-month contract. Despite the newness of the relationship, she invited me to tag along for a bit and see how it goes. (We are now married and have a one-year-old.)
I was traveling in China when she got the job, and neither of us is a planner by nature. We had secured no accommodation in advance, and so we spent a week at an obscure hotel near Barajas Airport, our savings gradually dwindling, while trying to find a place to live.
By the time we found a suitable home, my girlfriend’s day job had already begun. On my first proper day in the center of Madrid, I found myself lugging four enormous suitcases — all my girlfriend’s and my worldly possessions — into a series of Ubers as I traipsed from hotel to accommodation office to apartment, moving us both in.
Picture a tourist standing on a leafy Spanish street. He is walking, or rather shuffling, with two huge suitcases and a backpack slung over each shoulder. He takes five steps and then abandons the suitcases, rubbing his sore palms. He walks five paces back, retrieves two more suitcases, brings those to the original suitcases, and then lugs those forward some more. Lug, wheel, repeat. Lug, wheel, repeat. This was me in Madrid, for one May afternoon. But I fear it’s all of us now. Few of us are able to see the streets we’re standing on, because we’re too busy lugging baggage back and forth.
We want to see nature. We do not want to destroy it. We want to travel far. We do not want to pollute. We want to see countries less fortunate than our own. We do not want to be arrogant colonisers. The experience of travel is fraught with contradictions — and how could it be otherwise? We are products of a sedentary civilization built by a nomadic species. We are deeply attached to our home, and yet, at least many of us, are perenially restless, either in the process of travel or daydreaming about it.
Those who travel are often sensitive people, and this may explain why the travel community (I am trying to avoid saying industry) has allowed itself to be unfairly saddled with moral anxiety that it does not deserve. This is most obviously seen in the phenomenon of flight shaming, where travelers who do fly are browbeaten into feeling guilty about it, while those who do not are encouraged to make their train trip an opportunity for moral posturing. There’s nothing wrong with taking the train — it’s often a cheaper, more comfortable, and eminently more exciting thing to do, but to see one form of travel as morally superior to another is not only unjustified by the numbers, but it plays right into the hands of the biggest carbon polluters of all.
Commercial aviation makes up 2.5% of global CO2 emissions. Its environmental impact is greater than this when considering the other non-CO₂ effects, such as contrails and nitrogen oxides, involved in flying, yet the overall impact of flying is still consistently overestimated by the general public. According to a study in the Netherlands, over a quarter of fliers now admit to feeling ashamed of their jetsetting ways. Feeling ashamed. Of flying. Of experiencing one of the greatest technological achievements of our species. There are many bad things about the era we live in. The access to cheap, efficient flights and the way this can bridge cultures and foster understanding is one of the good ones.
Why does it matter? Surely being conscious about the environmental impact of our individual choices is a good thing? Without a doubt, but all of that carbon counting frames the environmental challenge as one of individual lifestyle, when in fact it’s a matter of corporate responsibility and government policy. Your anxiety about how you travel benefits no one as much as the oil companies, who paid PR firms to make you feel that way. (For further reading on this, see “Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook” in The Guardian and read “The Carbon Footprint PR Scam” on Mashable.)
The environmental discussion, as it stands, not only lets corporations off the hook while making individuals anxious, but it also elides complex questions of how we can best leave a positive impact on places we visit and be conscientious humans as we’re traveling there. A polite person who helps an elderly passenger lift their suitcase into the overhead compartment of a budget flight is, to me, a good traveler. A tourist who seeks out a locally run restaurant, speaks a few phrases of the local language, and leaves a tip is probably going to be welcomed by locals in most of the world, regardless of how they chose to travel.
Moral anxieties about travel do not end with the journey. Our choice of destination, how we conduct ourselves when we are there, and even how we recount the story afterwards have all provided opportunities for some travelers to feel guilt and shame, while others parade their apparent virtue.
Overtourism is a genuine problem — everyone going to the same places all at once puts pressure on infrastructure, prices out locals, and leaves a mess. It’s also a problem because it means herds of tourists follow artificial paths to artificial sights, spend the money with major companies, and are not challenged, educated, or enlightened by raw, unscripted experience. Travel with no uncertainty is not travel at all. And yet here, individual choice, coupled with sensible regulation and responsive policy, can make a much more significant difference — both for you, and for the places you visit.
You will almost definitely be helping no one by crowding into Rekjayvik at peak season, but even in Bangkok, even in Barcelona, quiet streets where restaurants are packed with only locals are easy to find if you simply wander for 10 or 20 minutes. You may experiment with using TripAdvisor as a vampire would use an atlas of garlic, warding you off from the places everywhere else goes, so that you may stumble upon those places that still exist for their own sake.
Ben Aitken turned tourism stats on its head and wrote about the 10 least popular (for tourists) cities in the UK. This is the kind of creativity that individual travelers can exert that genuinely makes a difference. Go to places, or parts of cities, where people will be surprised and grateful to see you. There is reality and authenticity everywhere
Having made it far from home. Having traveled beyond the tourist traps. Having made the effort, many travelers are still anxious about sharing the stories they have uncovered. “It is not mine to tell,” they say; it’s something we hear often from readers who would love to write, but feel their travel experiences are not sufficiently their own. They have been made to feel that their superficial characteristics somehow exclude them from participating in the most ancient human tradition of storytelling.
We cannot but travel as ourselves. Your height, the symmetry of your face, your age, accent, state of health, and indeed wealth, inherited intelligence, allergies, religion, and phobias all shape and define your experience of the world as well as the world’s experience of you. The complexity of individual experience cannot be reduced to a few easily observed and defined boxes. Every story you share, you cannot help but make your own.
It’s time to leave the mental baggage behind and aspire to simpler ways of being a good person as you travel. Learn some phrases in the local tongue. Read at least one book by a local novelist (in addition to a good travel book!). Tip well at small, independent restaurants. Fret less about yourself, impact less about your impact. Think more about where you are and who you find there.
