Sustainable Journey — Let’s Talk About Sustainable Travel

Let’s Talk About Sustainable Journey — Let’s Talk About Sustainable Travel

Sustainable travel is a journey of ‘authentic travel experiences’ that respect a destination’s environment, people, and culture, and that help us realize how small the world we thought we knew really is. Through videos about an endangered langur monkey, a trip into space, and ocean cleanup efforts, let’s think together about practical ways to travel more sustainably.

Words Hur Taewoo

The Langur Monkey With 100 Million Views

BBC Earth’s videos deserve to be listed as cultural heritage of the digital age. The channel’s 11.1 million subscribers would surely agree. The BBC Earth channel archives countless documentaries the BBC has made over the years, and even the thumbnails seem ready to burst with the wonders of our planet and the life on it. Try playing the clip that captures the (supposed) accidental fall of a monkey mannequin that had infiltrated a troop of langur monkeys. Posted five years ago, the video has already passed 100 million views. The story is simple. The mannequin monkey falls by mistake, and the monkeys around it mourn. It is deeply moving. It feels as though they are saying, ‘Our mistake killed the baby. Oh, what do we do? We’re so sad.’

Where Does All That Plastic Waste Go?

About 460 million metric tons of plastic products are produced every year, and only about 6 percent of them are recycled. The rest is, quite literally, garbage. It is buried in landfills, left lying around, or drifts into rivers and the sea. The scale of ocean waste is beyond belief. In the Pacific, an island of plastic waste 16 times the size of South Korea is floating. Many people recognize how serious the problem is, but it is not one that can be solved easily.
The Ocean Cleanup, founded a few years ago by a young Dutchman, Boyan Slat, burst onto the scene like a comet as a nonprofit startup aiming to tackle marine plastic pollution. It developed devices that collect plastic waste from the sea and rivers, and it recycles that plastic into products such as sunglasses. The world responded to the challenge with cheers and investment.
As The Ocean Cleanup drew attention, other opinions erupted. Some environmental activists and researchers argue that the real solution is not cleaning up plastic but not throwing it away in the first place. Some scientists argue that living creatures have begun to inhabit the garbage patches and are building new ecosystems there, so we should protect and study them before clearing anything. None of these claims is wrong. We should not throw things away, we should protect, and we should clean up what is already there.
Not long ago, The Ocean Cleanup’s YouTube channel featured its latest Interceptor, a boat that collects waste from rivers. Built in collaboration with the world-famous band Coldplay, it is called Neo Moon 1. Powered by solar energy, Moon 1 is floating down Malaysia’s Klang River, gathering plastic waste harder and more efficiently than earlier models.

Space Travel

It is more mesmerizing than gazing at a campfire, a stream, or a meadow: gazing at Earth. The footage beamed from the International Space Station (ISS), floating about 350 kilometers above us, only gets more absorbing the longer you watch. The views of Earth captured from a station slowly circling the silent sea of space remain mysterious no matter how long you look. In the slow-motion flow of the footage, you can see the shapes of land and ocean, the movement of clouds and atmosphere, and lights, cities, grasslands, and mountain ranges. Somewhere down there I must be, but seeing an Earth far greater than my own existence, I can only marvel. And just as I write this, an aurora has appeared.

So What Is Sustainable Travel, Anyway?

What is sustainability? Whenever I bring up sustainable travel, the question I hear most is, ‘What is sustainable travel?’ So before discussing sustainable travel, it makes sense to start with sustainability itself. I recommend setting aside a few minutes to watch a three-minute, six-second video produced by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It sums things up in a single sentence right from the start: “Sustainability is meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” YouTube’s translated subtitles are enough to follow the whole video. Sustainability is usually described through three pillars: Environment, Economy, and Social. Note that this video replaces Social with Equity in its explanation.