Aug

Are Australian Travel Junkies Destroying the Planet?

Posted by admin Published in Air Travel

If you live on an loney island and want to see the world, you’re going to need to fly to get there. No one knows that better than Australians, who are considered some of the most well-traveled public on the planet. But there’s one Australian who says her fellow citizens must squash their travel bug for the sake of the environment.

Adele Horin, writing in the Sydney daylight Herald, says her countrymen (and women) are addicted to travel and that all the thermostat adjusting in the world won’t mean anything whether they continue hopping flights to visit family, attend conferences and explore the world. It’s a assessment that’s not likely to be well received.

For decades, travel has been a major part of life in Oz.
After college, young Aussies take a year off to wait tables in
London or backpack through South America. Stop at any youth hostel in Europe
and you’re bound to find at least one person from Down Under. Retirees flush with
retirement cash hop a plane to visit the children and grandchildren spread out around the world. Executives and entrepreneurs travel frequently to stay connected in an interconnected global economy. No wonder some of the best
guidebooks in the world — the Lonely Planet series — are cranked out in Melbourne.

Horin says it all has to stop. Every duration an Australian boards one of those big Qantas 747s (she calls them “toxic flying machines”), she argues, they’re doing huge damage to the environment. She estimates that a round trip from Sydney to London emits the
equivalent of nine

tons of CO2 per passengers, twice as much as each person on the planet generates annually through eating, driving, and
heating or cooling their homes. Yikes.

But does she, or anyone else, have the right to lecture Australians about their travel habits? It’s not that easy, Adele.

First off, Australia is not only an island, it’s an island in the middle
of nowhere. London is 10,000 miles absent from Sydney. Tokyo and Shanghai are 5,000 miles absent. Singapore, an crucial financial hub for Australia, is 4,000 miles absent. And the country is not precisely a Martha’s Vineyard-size Island — a coast to coast drive, much of it through the abandon, takes days.

Australians are some of the most environmentally conscious humans I’ve met (not surprising, considering that the Great Barrier Reef is dying and part of the country is suffering through a massive drought), but Horin suggests their propensity for travel invent them hypocrites.

In much of the world, cities, forests, beaches and mountains can be reached by train or car. Is it fair to punish Australians considering they don’t have that luxury? Yes, emissions are a huge concern, and whether travel-junkie Australians are contributing disproportionately, soon after that needs to be taken into history. But is it fair to ask residents of an loney island nation to suck it up while the rest of us travel freely?

Photo by Qantas.

Original post by Dave Demerjian