250 (or so) Provocative Words: Finn Johnson

The IMPACT Sustainable Tourism Conference opened with a climate warning: we have 8 years before our choices on climate go from preparation to reaction. The climate writer Robert Sandford gave a timeline of less than a decade to either purposefully restructure our industries and lifestyles towards sustainability or have them changed by a more volatile world.

This timeline is a gut-punch confirmation of the urgency of climate action. Much of tourism, for instance, exists entirely within our carbon-intensive paradigm (ie. take a gas car to a jet-fuel plane to a diesel tour-bus). Essentially, we have a lot to do in a very short amount of time. This placed my mind—and I would imagine the same happened for others in the room--in something of a frantic state. When we have to solve a tremendous number of things very quickly, I think we start to ask “what more can I do to solve this?” For instance, I need to buy an electric vehicle, I need to eat impossible meat, invest in ESGs, stay at a ‘green hotel’, or buy carbon offsets.

The feeling was that we need to make it possible for travelers to do all those things and more. And that we need to do it quickly. It was during this process of building out a big list of climate to-dos that a very important point was made. In the middle of the conference, one of the speakers commented that “we often ask ourselves what more we can do, but maybe we should be asking what we can do less of.” If we’re being honest, that takes us to some tough questions. How are we traveling, how much, and how far? There is a lot to gain through travel. We can, at best, find perspective, appreciation, and recognition of shared humanity through expanding our horizons. But intentional travel and flying to Europe every summer are not necessarily the same things. Maybe thinking about less means taking those questions seriously.?

We are, like Sandford said, on the cusp of transition. We also have the chance to be purposeful in our actions and to direct our energies strategically and thoughtfully. That comment was an excellent reminder that we should take the time to ask ourselves, even in this critical next moment, not just what needs to be done, but what doesn’t.?