Reactions about my trip

When I told people about my trip, I got essentially one of two answers from everyone. The first was, “wow you're so lucky, I wish I could do that.” About half of these people said they couldn't do it because of lack of money, the other half said they didn't have enough vacation time from their jobs. Personally I don't think either of these are very good excuses not to travel. With student deals, couch surfing, and some ingenuity you can travel almost anywhere you want on the earnings from even a summer job at McDonalds. With one years salary you could easily travel in many beautiful parts of the world for several years. Lack of time is a poor excuse too; just when in life do they expect to just have time free? You have to make time free.

The second group of people said “wow, you're going to have the best time of your life.” I hope that's not true because then the rest of my life would be downhill from here. Of course I'll have a good time, and I intend to continue doing enriching things, including traveling.

I only got two really unique responses, and both were from friends involved in environmental activism at RPI. When I told my friend David Jendras about my trip, his first response was, “ How can you justify all those carbon emissions. Are you buying offsets?” I was very happy to hear this from someone, because it's something I had been thinking a lot about. I often do feel very guilty about the enormous environmental impact this trip is having. According to an online eco-footprint calculator, my lifestyle would require about 1.4 planets without this trip, or 5 planets including all the airfare. However, I think lack of travel is something that keeps people ignorant or underwhelmed by both distant and global environmental crisis. To answer David's question, no I'm not buying offsets. Overall I don't think offsets are necessarily a bad thing when done transparently and properly. However, I think direct, thoughtful personal actions are far more important, and people tend to ignore these potential actions when they could just write a check to Terra Pass instead. Personally I'd rather save my money and eventfully buy a micro wind turbine or PV panels for my roof because I strongly believe that decentralized renewable energy is far better than grid scale projects that offsets might finance. Instead of paying someone to plant trees for me, I'd rather do it myself. So yes, I am very conscious of the impact this trip is having and no I am not buying offsets.

The second surprising response came from Sarah Parks, an STS grad student. She thought I was smart to take a trip like this “while you still can.” Unlike the first group of people who meant “while you aren't yet tied to traditional office jobs and careers”, Sarah meant “while the price of fossil fuels is still low enough.” In her opinion, and I agree with her, trips like this will not be possible in the future, especially not at this speed. I'm glad I bought tickets when I did, because gas prices, and consequently air line tickets, have been rocketing up ever since. We're now at about $140 a barrel, and the airline industry is squirming. Newspapers are full of articles about how some airlines are starting to charge extra for baggage by the pound and charging even for water on flights to reduce airplane weight and cut costs. I'm glad I decided to bring just one carry-on backpack and a water bottle! A few airlines have been researching the use of biofuels to replace fossil fuel jet fuel. However, the trials so far have been fairly wimpy, and we're still a long way off from biofueled international jet travel, let alone a better alternative. Virgin Airlines recently made headlines for running 1 of the 4 engines of a Boeing 747 on 20% biofuel. Whoop dee doo. Right now the airline industry is enthralled with planes like the new Dreamliner that are ~20% lighter to conserve fuel, but they are doing almost nothing to radically change their fossil fueled enterprises. Frankly I think it's scary that so few people are thinking the way Sarah is about this trip. The information is out there, and these issues are finally becoming mainstream and frequent in the media but people refuse to take serious steps to even consider a future beyond fossil fuel dependency, let alone take serious actions for their future and the future of their communities. It's one thing to not understand the problem and not do anything, but it's terrifying when people educate themselves about real problems that affect them and still do nothing.