Is Travel Doomed?

I’ve been trying to answer this question lately, and it was one of the things that pulled me into the Ecotourism and Sustainable Tourism Conference that has been running in Vancouver this week. Well, that and Anna Pollock.

In an industry characterized by a boggling degree of blah blah blah , Pollock is a real sparkplug. She heads up The Icarus Foundation , a non-profit that is working to make Canada a climate-friendly destination. The group published a report earlier this year that tried to get a handle on the staggeringly huge challenges facing the travel sector. Pollock pulled data from that report in a lunchtime keynote yesterday, and threw out a few challenges and nuggets, including:

• To come even close to meeting a 30 percent reduction of carbon before 2020, the tourism industry must somehow head off the release of 2.2 billion tons of equivalent CO2. She called this “one hell of a weigh-loss program.” Indeed. I’m afraid it simply means parking jets, folks.
• So anyway, the industry needs to do this even as global international arrivals and departures crest the 1 billion mark. And more airplanes. “In 2007, there are 19,000 airplanes in the sky,” she says. “But by 2027, we are talking about 35,800 airplanes. That means more airports, more freeways, more parking lots, more aiport hotels, more kiosks, more hamburger stands.”

• We are moving from an industrial age to a networked age. “We have a swarm model — complex adaptive systems, small simple agents with limited intelligence, local decision-making capability, and a communication path to nearby peers that can outperform a large centralized processor. It is robust and flexible.”
• Enough, already, with all the nomenclature, it’s a distraction. Ecotourism, sustainable tourism, responsible tourism, authentic tourism, aboriginal culinary tourism etc etc. “We are so busy looking inward and trying to define what makes us separate that we are not uniting and solving the big issues.”
• Simplify the Message. “Guests don’t want to know if the place meets 1,0001 criteria. They are on vacation. Use plain language, like ‘good tourism’ or ‘tourism cares.’”
• Incentivize: “The destination that makes the brave decision to only market ‘green’ suppliers will win in the next five years. Encourage every guest to embrace an ecological mindset.”
• Stop Building: “See the value in non-development,” Pollock urged. “Start to see the opportunities where not developing a piece of pristine land will pay you more than developing it. I can see a time where you will be paid to become stewards, but only if you show leadership now.”
• Slow Down: “Stop trying to do too much too quickly. ‘Slow travel’ is going to see some of the fastest growth ever seen,” she said, noting the irony.
• Engage the Locals.
• When Appropriate, Go Virtual: “Some people will choose to experience places in a virtual way,” Pollock said. “This community should not see that—or telepresence—as a threat. It may be our biggest ally.”

Also, I hadn’t seen this YouTube visualization of global aircraft arrivals and departures over a 24 hour period. Pollock briefly threw this up on the screen. There are a couple of these simulations out there, but this one is just fascinating to watch:

I am convinced that the jet age will inevitably begin winding down in the coming decades. It’s hard to imagine, but passenger aviation will return to the days where it was a rare experience, the purview of the affluent. Setting aside peak oil, I could imagine air travel becoming a socially taboo behavior as the “relocalization” trend pushes ever-deeper into mainstream consumer behavior. Frequent flier cards could eventually become anachronisms, like slide rules.

High-end video conferencing will solve some of this. Imagine a new category of business that provides very-high-quality and secure telepresence services to companies, a kind of virtual conference room and post-meeting “bar” for socializing and networking, available by the hour, for less than it costs to fly.

But all that won’t deal with the carbon-age hangover that is the personal relationships we maintain all over the globe, with family and friends. These people will still want to visit each other for many decades to come, and even after high-speed rail networks finally, inevitably spiderweb across North America, there is still that damn ocean in the way for many. Remember, you can’t hug over Skype.

Airbus A380 thumbnail photo credit, Rich Eason. 747 image by Wolfgang Binder.

What “Green” Really Means

Here’s my latest, a piece about my own community’s wrenching struggles to deal with growth and change — change in both the cultural fabric and the climate itself. It’s a broad-ranging investigation of the in-between moment we all find ourselves in, where there are no easy answers, where fear, entitlement, and good-old-fashioned denial can dominate the conversation, and where we don’t always agree on what “green” really means on the ground. Here’s the key passage:

“The one thing that may kick-start the island’s flagging economy, help reverse affordability, downshift greenhouse-gas emissions, soften the coming blow of peak oil, and preserve miles of forest and meadow from the march of estate-home sprawl is the very thing that many Bowenites came here specifically to escape…”

Before you dive in, I need to correct an error, introduced in editing, that suggests the gases methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide can potentially cause cancer. The passage should have instead referenced “butadiene, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.” The editors regret the error. Really, they do.

With that out of the way, here’s the link:
Turf War, Vancouver magazine, November 2008. [PDF File, 1MB]

Your List of Demands, Please

I’m working on a presentation for Interesting Vancouver that I’m loosely calling the New Bill of Rights. In case you haven’t heard, we’re in a bit of a pickle, and while we each bring our own personal-life baggage to this perilous moment in history —ie, challenging legacy decisions regarding housing, vehicles, and so on — the time has come for bold thinking and big moves. The time has come to sweep away fear — of social backlash, of deep bright-green change — and turn up the volume. The time has come to hit the fast-forward button and demand our leaders use whatever means necessary to put the pieces of a better world in place.

We’re half-way there. I sense a rising chorus of individual voices out there who are literally crying out and scraping and scratching and clawing towards a bright-green society. They’re doing it one household at a time with more deliberate behaviors and more conscious purchasing decisions, or perhaps they are reaching over the back fence and dabbling in neighborhood-scale organizing — a process I call culdesactivism.

What this collective longing needs is a unified set of goals and principals, a list of things that are entirely within the realm of possible but kept at bay by the larger challenges of market subsidies and public policies engineered to preserve the brown status quo. We need to not think of this as a “wish list” but rather as a set of entitlements for the greater public good. We need to demand that greener choices exist, and that they come without premiums of price and life force. We need bold leadership to pour resources into these, to help avert catastrophe. Here are a couple to get you started:

1. I Have the Right to Efficient, Comfortable Public Transit. Here’s one of 206 new next-generation trams just rolling out in Berlin. It’s made by Bombardier, a Canadian company. There’s nothing like this in our cities. (Photo: IsarSteve.)

2. I Have the Right to Know What it Really Costs.This is the Pharos Lens, a project of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. The lens is a concept hang-tag that would live at retail and convey to consumers, at a glace, a product’s various impacts. It’s a pilot program, and so far limited to the building-materials market, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t see this sort of thing on a package of pasta, or a pair of jeans. Food products come with a “nutrition label” for reasons of public health. It’s time we start thinking bigger to have the tools we need to make more informed snap decisions in the marketplace.

Now, what are YOUR demands? What would be in your New Bill of Rights? What is it time to stop pining for and simply demand with one loud voice? Perhaps if enough of us dive in, this might evolve into a kind of a petition to our leaders. Jump in the pool via the comments box, below.

Almost Green Prologue

Excerpt from Almost Green: How I Built an Eco-Shed, Ditched My SUV, Alienated the In-Laws, and Changed My Life Forever, James Glave (Greystone Books, 1998)

Prologue

My name is James, and I drive an SUV It is a golden-pearl Premium Edition Lexus RX-300, with all-leather interior, genuine walnut wood dash, seven-speaker Nakamichi sound system, seat heaters, moon roof, and sport racks. It is a high-riding icon of luxury, a mobile conspicuous-consumption statement, a prosperity public-address system—the sort of vehicle that valets named Chip park in front of five-star Indian fusion restaurants. Let me be clear, though, that the RX-300 is not an indication of my hard-won success as a writer. It’s a hand-me-down from my father-in-law, who offered it to my wife, Elle, and me as a gift just as our 1994 Volvo station wagon threatened to die with our two tired babies in the backseat some night on a lonely New Mexico byway well beyond the fringes of Sprint-Verizon’s digital safety net. Although we are extremely grateful for the gift, the Lexus was perhaps not our first choice for a
family four-door; it conveys a not-entirely-accurate message about who we are to those who don’t know us.

This became clear to me one day when I had lunch with my friend Dave, a former colleague whom I greatly admire. It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, and we were
sharing a laugh over a certain local restaurant critic whom we both felt could benefit from a little more journalistic backbone. Dave was describing his most recent sighting of the foodie scribe in question: “I’m sitting in this sidewalk café, right? And up pulls you-know-who in this total asshole Lexus SUV.”

Hilarious. For at least a few months after that day—at least when out of earshot of our small children—Elle and I referred to our pearl-white and gold-trimmed palace on wheels as “the
asshole.”

And please forgive me, Padre. Because even though you have that framed photo of George Bush, Sr., in your office, and even though you forward me e-mails asserting that global warming is a “swindle” and a “liberal conspiracy,” I do really love you, and I so appreciate your generosity. But the more I read up on the damage I am doing each time I motor through
another tank of regular unleaded, the more I can relate to Dave’s point of view and the less comfortable I am getting back behind the wheel. Because I am the one running a scam.

We have hung on to your wheels for reasons that contradict our gradually increasing consciousness and have everything to do with cash flow and guilt. We don’t want to offend you, and we don’t want to finance something else. I don’t think we can keep dancing like this forever, though. One day I’m going to have to break it to you, Padre, that I think your very generous gift is gradually torching the lot of us.

For now, assuming Pops doesn’t care either way, Elle and I are looking to downsize. With the kids now out of strollers and diapers, we’ve finally decommissioned our bulky toddler infrastructure. We are in the market for a small car. I’ve brought my preschool-age son, Duncan, and his five-year-old sister, Sabrina, into the loop, and they have already begun window- shopping with me as we tool around the twenty-five-square-mile island we call home, just off the sparkling West Coast city of Vancouver, B.C., Canada. One recent morning, on the way to the day care, my son asked me to explain the differences between our six-cylinder white elephant and the zippy little DaimlerChrysler Smart Car that had just passed us headed the other direction.

“Dad,” he asked, “why don’t we have a Smart Car?”

Let me briefly mention here that, like many young boys, my Duncan is infatuated with internal combustion. If it drives, digs, or flies with some flavor of refined petroleum, well, he’s
all over it.

“They’re fun, aren’t they?” I replied. “We don’t have one because they’re too small. There isn’t enough room inside one of them for our whole family.”

“Why not?” Sabrina chimed in.

“Well, there are four people in our family, and the Smart Car only fits two people. So we would have to take turns or sit on each other’s lap, and that wouldn’t work very well, would it?”

“Oh. ok.”

I could have left it there, but I didn’t. “It is possible to have a car that’s too big, though. Mummy and Daddy think this car is too big. That’s why we are hoping to trade it for a smaller one.”

“Why do we want a smaller one?” asked Sabrina. “Well, honey, you know how we always stop at the gas station to buy gasoline? This car is pretty heavy—it’s much heavier than it needs to be—and so it uses up more gas than a Smart Car. Gas is expensive, and it is also very bad for the Earth.”

“But Dad,” said Duncan, “why is gas bad for the Earth?”

Long pause here. Jesus, where do I begin?

“Hmmm. ok, when we burn gas it makes the car go, but it also makes the Earth get hotter. And we’re worried that if we burn too much gas, the Earth will get too hot, and it won’t be such a nice place to live when you two grow up.”

“So our car is too heavy for the Earth?”

“Yes, that’s right. We want to get a smaller car that all four of us can fit inside—one that uses less gas. One that’s nicer to the planet.”

“But not a Smart Car?” confirmed Duncan.

“Right. Not a Smart Car. There are lots of other kinds of smaller cars out there.”

“What kind of car do you want?” Sabrina queried.

“Well, Mummy and Daddy would really like to get a car called a Prius,” I said, offering to point out the next one we passed.

“A Prius? Why do we want that one?”

“Because it doesn’t use as much gas, so it’s nicer to the planet. And we can all fit inside one.”

“Why don’t we get one of those cars right now?”

“Um, they are expensive. They cost too much money for us, sweets. But we’ll figure it out. In the meantime, we are trying to use this car less. That’s why we walk to the village together
so much.”

“Oh,” replied Sabrina. “Oh, yeah.”

I grinned to myself. Duncan was hopelessly obsessed with fuel injectors and transmissions, but his older sister had just made the right connections in her head. She’s a smart cookie, this girl of mine. I was proud of her, and proud of myself for explaining that our present vehicle wasn’t so great but that answers were out there. I’d slipped in an age-appropriate explanation of climate change, without coloring in the whole grim picture.

Then Sabrina chimed in again with a pearl of wisdom that put all my eco-angst into perspective the way only a precocious five-year-old can.

“You know what, Dad?”

“Hmmm?”

“I have a vagina.”

“Yes . . . ?”

“But Duncan has a Prius!”

* * *

This is a book about the construction of a sustainably designed 280-square-foot writing studio—the building I have come to call my Eco-Shed. But it is also about the making of
an evolution. It is about my own ecological awakening and my personal struggle to reconcile an increasing awareness of a sick planet with a sprawling economic and political framework
more or less engineered to preserve the status quo. It is about the end of the world as we know it and the promise of a better one to replace it just in time. It is about the small trade-offs we
make in our heads every day between convenience and cost, entitlement and personal responsibility. It is about our natural instinct to flatten the protruding nail of personal sacrifice
with the always-handy hammers of convenience and denial. It is about genuinely wanting to leave a lighter footprint on the planet but running smack up against a series of obstacles—some practical and objective, others less so—and muddling through with as much humor and grace as possible.

This book is also about the transformation that has unexpectedly unspooled between my own two ears. Like me, you probably already know that global warming presents the single greatest threat to humanity in all of history and the most profound challenge we face as a civilization.

You probably also understand that the Big Melt is not just another “environmental problem” we need to worry about. Instead, it has emerged as the defining moral, ethical, and economic issue of our time.

But like me, you also live in the real world. A world in which you still have to get to work by 8:30. One in which the kids need to be at soccer practice and swimming lessons on Saturday.
One in which your benevolent father-in-law gives you an late-model import SUV for Christmas, then builds you a seventeen-thousand-dollar timber-framed double carport to park it in.

Transformational change is a messy, sometimes awkward business. As in Sabrina’s ultra-mega-blockbuster crayon collection, there are multiple shades of green. There’s what I
like to call “baseline” green, the color of normalized everyday activities and behaviors—curbside recycling, backyard composting, and USDA Certified Organic whatever. But travel a
little further along the continuum—move beyond these everyday norms and dabble with a slightly darker shade of green—and things start to get complicated. For example, it’s all well
and good to say “Enough, already, with all the air travel” but not so easy if your wife’s family and friends are scattered widely across the continent. It doesn’t take long to figure out why those who work the hardest to make the world a better place can easily find themselves not fitting into it very well. In this carbon-counting age, a thin line separates the leaders from the pariahs.

How does one embrace a greener life and keep everybody in it happy along the way? How do we gently redirect our dear Duncan, who equates petroleum with power and control and
liberty and adventure—feelings he is hardwired to covet—without turning him into a playground weirdo? How do I inspire my friends, family, and neighbors without making them
feel either inadequate or defensive? And more to the point, how do we get rid of our damn suv without throwing a metaphorical family piston rod, casting shards of broken steel through the
engine compartment of our reasonably well-running marriage? And speaking of marriage, how do I convince my wife to turn off the damn energy-sucking halogen lights that she insists on
leaving on over the kitchen stove? How, in other words, do we transform our lives without unraveling them?

We live in a tortured age—rife with elaborate guilt trips, look-the-other-way hypocrisy, newfangled codes of ecological conduct, and everyday paradoxes. I am at times my own worst
enemy. In summertime, I buy or pick organic, locally grown berries, then gleefully slather them with Cool Whip—likely one of the most processed foods available, if you could even call it a food. Every other week, I load boxes of tin cans, newspapers, and carefully rinsed plastic milk jugs into my SUV and drive them to the recycling depot, an exercise in ecological self-cancellation. Some of my behavior runs roughshod over my intentions, and I muddle forward, doing the best I can.

it was easier in the good old days. For years, I flipped past news stories and magazine articles about the latest atmospheric red flag: hurricanes, fires, cracking ice shelves, gaunt polar bears, and so on. With so much out there already fighting for my attention—work, family, and those precious few diversions from work and family—I knew just enough about global warm-
ing to know that everything about it was hopeless and bleak and insurmountable.

Part of the problem was that I resented the solution. It meant I needed to either inconvenience myself or descend further into consumer debt. Either drive less, the greener-thans said, or buy a more efficient car I couldn’t afford. But with a mortgage and two babies, I was already living close to the edge of both my pay stub and my strategic reserves of life force. Yet the advice was the same: Turn down the thermostat another degree or two and wear a thicker sweater, or retire that old wheezing furnace altogether and invest in a new one. Choose local and organic food, which is tastier and burns less petroleum on its journey to my plate but is twice the price of the bulk packs stacked up at the Big Box store. It’s human nature to take the path of least resistance, and in many cases, that’s precisely what this bleary-eyed, working-stiff dad did.

Meanwhile, the greener-thans tried seducing me with baby steps. Some even packaged the changes up as eco-hedonism, underscoring the simple pleasures of a greener life. As a com-
pulsive recycler, enthusiastic composter, and frequent cyclist, I was already—to crib the language of social marketers—“predisposed.” But somewhere along the path to enlightenment,
I hit a wall. I’d already swapped out my light bulbs with more expensive models that promised to slash my monthly utility bill by 18.4 cents. But that was as far as I could go. I wasn’t pre-
pared to tack a $386 Toyota Prius payment onto my strained monthly budget. I’d rather pump that money into the bottom-less tank of my SUV the one with more room for the stroller
and the groceries.

Why? To answer that, we need to rewind a little further. As a journalist, I am by trade something of a professional skeptic. My career has always been about hunches and the inner voice of curiosity, and I have always tempered the “next big thing” with the cold water of reality. At some point in late 2005, that curiosity led me to do some digging into the sustainability movement, which, by that point, had largely edged classic save-the-owls environmentalism off the radar. Having spent years out on the margins, the greens had crept back onto the pop
culture agenda by refashioning themselves as champions of eco-chic. Suddenly, environmentalism wasn’t about camping out in a tree and eating carob bars or buzzing Japanese whalers in Zodiacs. The new eco-movement was sexy and stylish, all gorgeous bamboo paneling and sleek, wafer-thin photovoltaic panels. It wasn’t about grave problems anymore; it was about easy solutions. Every other new municipal building going up was certified “green,” while Hollywood starlets were giving once-dorky hybrids much-needed va-va-vroom. Hey, Cameron Diaz drives one, and she’s pretty hot, right?

I wanted to peel back eco-chic’s veneer and get at the meaty stuff I suspected lay underneath. I wanted to reverse-engineer the trend. To be honest, a part of me secretly wanted to take it
down a notch or two.

Why? To this jaded skeptic, eco-chic wasn’t about changing the world; it was about changing your furniture. You, too, can be green just like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts,
the new movement promised. Just shun all that nasty plastic—except, that is, the kind in your wallet. Stick a polyurethane-free, latex-stuffed sofa bed over here ($4,500), add some recycled-
glass mosaic tile accents there ($55 a square foot), park a designer Dutch city bicycle ($1,500) in the front hall, and on and on. Though in principle these things were of course all far
kinder to Mother Gaia—polyurethane sofa cushions are damn nasty, and not even Padre would dare dis a bicycle—none of them really required any serious reconsideration of our cycle of
endless production and consumption. If eco-chic had a subtle motto it was this: “Shop different, feel better.” I knew, somewhere deep down, we needed to do more. Much more.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Toyota dealership: in the name of due diligence, I drank the Kool-Aid.

The more I educated myself about what was going on in the blue skies overhead, the more I realized that revisiting my own habits, both at the checkout counter and at home, wasn’t
just the right thing to do—it was a moral imperative. I gradually came to realize that climate change wasn’t some abstract, bummer, out-there issue fighting for my attention like, say, my
neglected retirement savings or a long-planned videotaped home inventory. No, it was about my two preschool-age children and the children they might have someday. Not to get all
terribly earnest, but it stirred inside me the same sort of compulsion to do something that I imagine my British grandparents must have felt as they watched Hitler and his thugs march
across Western Europe.

I resolved to change the things I could and try not to worry too much about the things I couldn’t. Although I was hopelessly jealous of the swish Ford Escape Hybrid that a physician
friend had bought for his family, my wife and I had already sold one of our two carbon-spewing SUVs, so we tried to feel good about that. Problem is, I soon ended up where I am today,
at the start of a year of green renewal, in a kind of eco-neurotic feedback loop. I am by nature a chronic worrywart. It’s my mother’s fault, really (sorry, Mum). From her, I inherited a
nasty nail-biting habit and low-level-anxiety gene, which I have incidentally passed along to my girl Sabrina, the poor thing. It’s more a background anxiousness than a clinical anxiety, nothing that would warrant a regimen of pharmaceuticals—at least not yet. But thanks to my mild personality quirk, I can no longer hide from what I now understand. My newfound eco-
logical literacy suffuses even the mundane routines of my daily life. Some days inside my head, the end of the world just won’t go away.

So, welcome to my one-man recyclables-sorting sideshow set against a backdrop of creeping collective dread. Pour yourself a drink, throw in some ice—hey, the grid is still up; the
freezer’s full of it, right?—and enjoy the ride.