What Is Sustainable Travel? 3 Powerful Sustainable Travel Examples
Sustainable travel is more than avoiding plastic straws or picking up your litter while hiking. Your travels may take you to thundering waterfalls, towering redwood trees, or a gorgeous valley where wildflowers are in bloom. Once there you may wonder: How can I participate in sustainable travel to preserve this place?
Letting this thought grace your mind is a great place to start. When we get curious about our part in preservation and destruction we’re led to real solutions that protect real places, people, and ecosystems. In this blogpost we’ll make a case for why sustainable travel is important and what it actually means to travel sustainably.
What Is Sustainable Travel?
I always feel like the Bad News Bears team captain when I tell people that it’s almost impossible to travel sustainably. In simple terms, doing something suitably means “using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged.” With our on-demand culture, many people take short vacations that deplete natural local resources, squash local culture, and leave places worse for future generations. From jet fuel polluting the air to tourists stamping out the wildlife of a place, it’s impossible to be perfectly sustainable. But we can travel as ethically and eco-minded as possible with a little curiosity and mindfulness. Next time you’re traveling, keep the following sustainable travel ethos in mind.
Sustainable Travel Practices To Adopt
1. Eat A Plant-Based Diet & Live A Vegan Lifestyle
To begin, let’s clear up the confusion and talk about what veganism really is. Many people wrongly assume that veganism is a diet, but it is actually a social justice movement that compels you to change your diet. People who practice veganism don’t consume animals or their secretions such as dairy or eggs, consuming plants instead. But what does eating plants have to do with traveling sustainably? Supporting animal agriculture supports the demise of the environment and wildlife while being one of the biggest industries fueling the climate crisis.
Imagine chowing down on a hamburger after a long hike, or ordering dairy-based ice-cream during your city stay. You probably haven’t thought about the land that had to be cleared to grow animal feed, or the wild ecosystems that had to be bulldozed to house the animals. This quote sums up the harms to forests, wildlife, oceans, and other bodies of water when it says: “A result of clearing all this land for cattle, sheep, and other farmed animals is that ‘livestock’ production is now the single greatest driver of habitat loss and destruction globally (Science of the Total Environment, 2015).
It is also the leading cause of species extinction, ocean dead zones, and water pollution. Indeed, scientists now agree that a mass extinction of species is rapidly underway; they are calling it the Sixth Great Mass Extinction of Species on Earth, with up to 200 species going extinct every day. And it’s being caused by us.” These aren’t things that we should be inflicting on the communities in places that we love to travel to.
A Plant-Based Diet Is A More Sustainable Diet
A plant-based diet needs to be globally adopted, and it needs to be adopted quickly. Research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75%. That would be an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and we could still feed the world, in a better way. Can you imaging having more green spaces?
Plant-based options already exist around the world and are staples in cultural diets. Choosing plant-based meals over animal-based ones is one of the most powerful ways to travel and live more sustainable.
👉 Not sure where to start? Check out my FREE guide to finding vegan food anywhere in the world. Find free vegan starter guides here.
2. Leave Sealife In the Sea
It’s temping to “taste the local cuisine,” especially when traveling by the coast. Trust me, I wasn’t born vegan. But our taste for sealife is depleting the oceans at an alarming rate. Outside of harming the fish themselves, fishing causes 63 billion pounds of marine animals to be injured or killed as “bycatch.” It’s term used to describe the staggering numbers of fishes, birds, seals, whales, sharks, crustaceans and other sea animals who are indiscriminately captured, maimed, snared, suffocated and more as “collateral damage” in ocean fishing equipment.
Additionally, the Guardian says: “Ghost [fishing] gear is estimated to make up 10% of ocean plastic pollution but forms the majority of large plastic littering the waters. One study found that as much as 70% (by weight) of macroplastics (in excess of 20cm) found floating on the surface of the ocean was fishing related.” And plastic straws? They accounted for 0.025% of the 8 million tons of plastic found in the ocean yearly. If you’re serious about suitable travel, leaving sealife in the sea — and plastic out of it — is a powerful action to take.
👉 Learn more about how fishing hurts the oceans.
3. Embrace Used Travel Gear
In order to live more sustainably, we must go beyond just recycling items that we’ve already used; we must stop purchasing new products. Sadly, recycling isn’t as “green” as you may think that it is. A Guardian investigation has found “hundreds of thousands of tons of US plastic are being shipped every year to poorly regulated developing countries around the globe for the dirty, labor-intensive process of recycling.” Often times our trash gets shipped off to the very locations that we’re thrilled to visit, yet once we get there the human health issues and land damage will remain hidden to us.
How To Source Sustainable Travel Gear
The United States alone generates 34.5m tons of plastic waste each year, which is enough to fill Huston’s Astrodome stadium a whopping 1,000 times. Alternatives to fueling this waste crisis lie in a different mindset that encourages us to use what we already have, trade/borrow what we need from within our community, and buy second-hand items before buying new.
If you absolutely must buy something new (because sometimes we do — let’s be real), try to buy something that is locally-sourced and made on a small scale. If you’re not sure how to tell if something was made with the planet and mind, follow the thread to figure out where it came from, who made it, and who will profit off the purchase. Before making a travel purchase I see if it’s something that I already have, can borrow or trade with a friend, or find used.
👉 Learn more about sustainable travel purchases and gear in my sustainable travel resources checklist.
The Harm Of New Travel Outfits
When it comes to travel (and just everyday life) our waste doesn’t stop at plastic items. It’s understandable to want high-quality hiking gear, hiking shoes, and layers that really work. But our clothing purchases hurt the planet too.
The EPA reports that Americans generate 16 million tons of textile waste a year, which ends up equaling just over 6% t of total municipal waste. It’s been reported that “On average, 700,000 tons of used clothing gets exported overseas and 2.5 million tons of clothing are recycled. But over three million tons are incinerated, and a staggering 10 million tons get sent to landfills.”
Having a new outfit to wear once on vacation will never be worth the damage it ultimately cases. In order to travel more sustainably, always think before you buy and pause before you purchase. Your wallet (and future generations) will thank you for it.
More Sustainable Travel Examples
You may be wondering why I didn’t talk about flying when it comes to sustainable travel. This isn’t to say that examining our travel methods isn’t important, as I am a huge proponent of human-powered travel. In fact, I’ve featured a 17 year old who rode her bike across the country and a family that traversed the PCT by foot with their 9 month old baby on the Unruly Travel & Living Podcast to inspire and empower you to do the same.
In addition to how we get around, it’s important to think about where we stay once in a location, and turning to natural buildings is a great way to lower our footprint. You can read Atulya Bingham’s reflection called Should Everyone Move Off-Grid? for more on that matter. Another way that we can protect the planet is by opting out of capitalism as much as possible, like some folks have done by pursuing a off-grid lifestyle.
Tackling The Issues That Matter Most (Travel vs Dietary Impact)
But back to those pesky flights. You may be surprised to learn that aviation overall accounts for only 2.5% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions while animal agriculture produces 65% of the world’s nitrous oxide emissions (which has a global warming impact 296 times greater than carbon dioxide). Animal agriculture also generates 15% to 51% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, which is greater than all the transportation emissions combined. In essence: how we get around matters, but once we eat while we’re there matters more.
Researches at Oxford University have found that eating a plant-based diet could reduce an individual’s carbon footprint from food by up to 73%. Lead author of the study Joseph Poore says: “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use.”
