In March 2020, global tourism came to a screeching halt.
Flights were cancelled, borders were closed and soon millions of people across the world found themselves under lockdown in their homes. Countless frequent flyers were grounded, airports all but abandoned.
A little more than a year later, the travel industry has lost
nearly a trillion dollars.
It is a rare opportunity, philosopher Emily Thomas says, to reflect on the meaning and the impact of travel — and how we could, perhaps, return to do it differently.
Thomas, an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University in England, is the author of a book called
The Meaning of Travel, which is a journey into the shared history of travel and philosophy and a consideration of the philosophical problems posed by travel.
Among them are the environmental effects of the millions of journeys we collectively take each year.
Travel and tourism “can be destructive, but it doesn’t have to be,” Thomas said in an interview with CBC Radio’s
Ideas.
For one, Thomas said the COVID travel bust — and the flourishing of Zoom calls — has shown business flights can easily be scaled back even when we're able to hop on a plane again.
“We’ve seen that lots of business travel just isn’t necessary,” she said. “That seems like a really easy way of cutting down our carbon footprint in a way that doesn’t actually damage anyone.”
Tourism can also be done differently: In addition to rethinking the outsized carbon footprint of the average family vacation, Thomas hopes we can reconsider practices such as “doom tourism,” in which travellers rush to locations especially endangered by climate change, such as Venice, the Dead Sea or the Great Barrier Reef.
“The problem is that the act of visiting at-risk places may hasten their demise,” she said.
Trips to the Maldives in South Asia, for example, require long flights and involve harmful activities on the ground — such as car and boat rides, littering or walking through endangered habitats — that together create an enormous carbon footprint that contributes to the climate change threatening the island country.
Is it unethical then to visit such places? Not necessarily, said Thomas, but it is a matter of balancing the various ethical issues posed or presented by such travel. The Maldives, for example, relies on tourism for nearly a third of its GDP.
“Why not bring money into a country if they have beautiful things to see?" she said. "But you have to travel in a responsible way that’s going to leave those beautiful things open for future tourists, and for the inhabitants of those places themselves.”
That could include taking part in carbon-offsetting activities, such as tree planting. Tour companies could also work harder at educating travellers about endangered places, said Thomas, which in turn would increase our appreciation of them.
The COVID era’s encouragement of local travel could help reduce the effects of long-haul international travel.
Another way to mitigate such effects is to reduce the number of internal flights in the countries we visit, and use overland travel instead, said Thomas.
There has also been a mindset change that might well affect how frequently or unthinkingly we hop on a plane.
“There is a tendency,” said Thomas, to think that travel “will always be available to us easily, cheaply." But the lockdown has shown us that freedom of movement is a privilege that shouldn’t be taken for granted.
“When we can travel again, my God I’m going to appreciate it.”
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Ideas staffYou can hear the full interview with Emily Thomas here, or on the CBC Listen app.
