On Travel by Tony Wheeler

Author:Tony Wheeler [Wheeler, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522874488
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

Damage

Comfort has its place, but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you’ve come to mow its lawns.

David Sedaris, humorist and writer

Travel is never harmless. Overall, I believe the positives outweigh the negatives, whether it’s for us personally (we come back tanned, relaxed and, hopefully, a little wiser) or for those we’ve visited (hopefully we’ve left them a little wealthier and possibly a little wiser as well). Unfortunately, that education and wealth transfer undoubtedly has some costs attached to it; there’s ugly tourist development as well as ugly tourists. Sometimes there’s nothing worse than sitting next to the development without being involved with it, suffering the drawbacks without enjoying the benefits.

I’m not too worried about the idea that some locations are in danger of being loved to death. Barcelona and Amsterdam have complained recently that they’re ‘over touristed’. Venice is another visitor favourite that’s long been cited as being at risk. But Venice can look after itself. It’s too bad if it’s been turned into a real-life Disneyland, but if tourists weren’t keeping it alive, the Italians certainly wouldn’t. Irrespective of Robert Benchley’s famous telegram ‘Streets full of water. Please advise’, nobody really wants to live long term in a flooded city.

Dubai, on the other hand—now there’s a real-life Disneyland with some big question marks hanging over it. If you were going to build a bunch of artificial islands just a metre or two above sea level, and you had heard somewhere that increased carbon dioxide output could lead to global warming and rising sea levels, would you work even harder at pumping out more of it? Does burning energy to artificially cool the hot beach sand for visitors’ tender feet or building an indoor ski slope when the temperature outside is usually 40 degrees–plus sound like a good idea?

Today’s concern is that we’re not just going to love certain destinations to death—low-lying ones could easily end up underwater anyway—but that we’ll knock off the whole planet. Of course, there are lots of contributing factors to global warming, but our habit of incessantly going places will certainly hasten the rapidly rising carbon dioxide levels, and thereby help to melt the ice caps, raise the global air temperature and wreck everything.

Air travel may not yet be the biggest contributor to global carbon dioxide output—the airline industry likes to claim that it’s only 2 per cent or so of the total—but it’s certainly growing rapidly. Aircraft may continually improve their efficiency with more seats, better aerodynamics, less thirsty engines and lighter construction, but a 10 per cent improvement is no help when there are also 20 per cent more wings in the sky. Looking out the terminal window at all the aircraft parked at their gates, or pondering how many more aircraft lined up ahead have to get into the air before it’s your turn on the runway will show you just how pervasive air travel has become. For a truly frightening illustration of the sheer size of the

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