Travelin' Light

Travelling light is the only way to go.

As Linda and I continue to downsize from a small apartment to a small truck, we like to listen to motivational music to help carry us through this transition.

So as we go about our business of unburdening ourselves in preparation for travelling light, we like to enjoy a tune by one of our favourite artists, J. J. Cale.

Travelin' Light by J. J. Cale

Travelin' light, is the only way to fly
Travelin' light, just you and I
One-way ticket to ecstasy
Way on down, follow me
Travelin' light, is the only way to fly


Travelin' light, we can go beyond
Travelin' light, we can catch the wind
Travelin' light, let your mind pretend
We can go to paradise
Maybe once, maybe twice
Travelin' light, is the only way to fly

Ah, yes. De-cluttering, dancing, and looking forward to a bit of traveling light ecstasy.

You can enjoy this load-lightening tune here. 

The Future Of Travel

Creative low-carbon, sustainable travel is the way.

When fossil fuel based recreational travel becomes as rare as smoking in a car full of kids with the windows rolled up, those with the urge to venture far from home will have to come up with sustainable alternatives. Undoubtedly bicycles will be part of the solution.

Another home made bike trailer that looks simple enough to build on a utility trailer.

I can't think of a more efficient and enjoyable mode of longer-distance travel than the bicycle. Once you add a funky trailer you have a method for getting places. A person could use such a set-up to get to a port in order to board a sailboat waiting to carry the traveler abroad, or to a train station to further their journey.

There are also businesses ready to get in on the future of travel.

I see this as both a sustainability and obesity mitigation project. The only losers would be the dinosaur-dependent, fossilized old energy order.

Sleep above, storage below.

Pedal power coupled with the energy of the wind will soon be the way for the conscientious recreational traveler. I can't think of a better or more enjoyable way to go.

Libre Como El Viento Lunes

Free like the wind
Photo: Kayli Koep, Mexico

My niece is spending time in Mexico free as a young bohemian can be. I saw her above photo, gleaned from the backstreets of some sleepy town, at the same time I was reading "The Outsider" by Colin Wilson.

A common theme in the book is that the outsider has an inextinguishable desire for freedom. As a matter of fact, bohemians are outsiders. 

So was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who said after witnessing a particularly windy storm from a hilltop vantage:

"Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers without morality. Pure Will, without the confusions of intellect - how happy, how free."

One Flight Vs Everything Else For A Year

Paul Dickinson, executive director of the Carbon Disclosure Project predicts change is inevitable: 

“I’m absolutely, definitely sure that people will be flying a lot less in 5 to 10 years.”

You could be a farmer's market loving, bicycle riding, hemp-wearing, vegetarian that has significantly lowered your carbon footprint, but take even one flight and all that hard work is nullified.

Just one return flight from Vancouver, Canada to Quito, Ecuador creates as much green house gas as the global average production for everything else for a year.

Flying is the least efficient, most damaging method of travel. Aircraft emissions are especially harmful because they spread a toxic cocktail of gasses directly into the upper atmosphere. And it is getting worse.

The aviation industry is growing at about 12% per year, and represents the fastest growing source of greenhouse gasses in the world. Despite its devastating impact, many countries do not include the industry's international aircraft emissions in carbon calculations.

Aviation emissions are also not included in international climate treaties like Kyoto as the industry has been protected from taking responsibility for their impact for decades.

This damaging industry has always been heavily subsidized, making tickets much cheaper than they should be. The 1944 Chicago Convention ruled that no government can levy a tax on aviation fuel. In the U.K. alone, aviation receives the equivalent of a 10 billion pound tax subsidy annually.

If you do fly, there are a few things you can do to mitigate the resulting climate damage. The following are suggestions for balancing the impact of long-haul flights such as from Vancouver to Australia:

1. Plant three trees for every 4000 miles of air travel.
2. Eat vegetarian for a year.
3. Ride your bicycle for a year.
4. Switch to a green energy provider for electricity and heat. 

There is no such thing as sustainable high-speed, long-distance jet travel. The best way to reduce your travel carbon footprint is to not fly.

Choose instead, a slower, more efficient alternative. Slower forms of travel are more relaxing and enjoyable anyway.

Stay Where You Are

Nothing can lower your carbon footprint as much as staying where you are.

I hear a lot of people saying that someone should do something about global warming. I don't hear a lot of people saying that they are voluntarily eliminating non-essential travel.

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to stop participating in the creation of that problem, but that seems to be a novel concept for those who selfishly continue climate-harming behaviours while crossing exotic destinations off their 'bucket list'.

A small minority of voluntary staycationers are starting to speak out. There have been people polled in Europe that go so far as to suggest that taking a flying holiday is immoral and should be stopped altogether. It may sound extreme, but the problem we face is extreme.

Tourism is one of the world's largest and fastest growing industries, and it has a huge, rapidly growing carbon footprint that must be addressed before permanent damage is done to our planet's vital systems.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and environmental groups have singled out air travel as accounting for 60% of tourism greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, tens of thousands of commercial jet planes generate more than 600 million tones of CO2 per year. These numbers are projected to increase in the coming years, raising questions about what we are really doing.

Why are so many people flying more often and farther than ever before to do pretty much the same things they do while at home? Can the travel and tourism sector be considered a beneficial activity? Is the promise of zero impact Eco-tourism even possible, or is it all industry greenwashing to protect profits?

A 2007 paper titled Tourism Feels The Heat Of Global Warming concluded, "If the goal is to effectively decrease greenhouse gas emissions in the travel and tourism sector, there seems to be no way around curbing the growth of the industry." In other words, we will just have to stay home more often.

Today one of the most radical things you can do is be happily content to stay where you are. It may also be one of the most beneficial things you can do for others and the planet.

Waldo Finds Himself

"Wherever I go, there I am."

Waldo, (Willy in the UK, Charlie in France, Ali in Turkey, and Hetti in India) of the Where's Waldo series, was a world traveler for a while. For one year the distinctive book character could be found in a children's magazine featuring illustrations depicting him in crowds in special places all over the world.

Many people are doing the same and 'pulling a Waldo' for a weekend, or a week or two at a time, depending on available holiday time. They are 'getting away' and hiding themselves in crowds the planet over.

Often travel seems more like hiding from the stick, rather than being drawn by the carrot. People attempting to recover from busy lives that are beating them down by taking trips and blending into the background of far away exotic places.

The market for international vacations is growing by about 4% per year. 2012 marked the first time in history that total international trips taken in one year passed the 1 billion milestone globally.

Numb from the endless work of keeping up with the Jones', people fly from one destination to another in a search of respite and some much needed relaxation. Turns out it can be more difficult than trying to find Waldo in a double page spread of an Australian beach scene.

Waldo can hide from you (and his boss), but he can't hide from himself.

Wally's exploits in world travel (and getting lost in crowds) were documented in 52 Wally's World magazine issues in 1997-98. They provided enjoyable geography lessons for kids in 14 countries, none of whom had to leave home to learn about their planet.

Since then Waldo has settled down as his restlessness has dissipated, and his jet setting ways have mellowed to a gentle pace.

As Waldo slowed down he came to the realization that wherever he went, there he was. When the newness and excitement of his trips wore off, as always inevitably happened, he was back to square one.

He stopped, and looked in the mirror in a moment of reckoning.

You might be able to run and hide for a short while, but like Waldo, you will eventually realize you can't escape the fact of who and what you are.

Waldo took the ultimate voyage and traveled within. In the process he found peace and contentment, right where he is at.

The Traveler's Dilemma

I have yet to see significant changes in the amount N. Americans travel

What do you do when you want to see friends, but they live 1500 km away? It is a simple living dilemma. Stay and we don't get to see valued co-conspirators, go and increase our carbon footprint.


The Offer

Recently our beautiful, generous mates in the next province over invited us to come and see them. Problem is, we live 1500 km away from each other.

How generous are they? They offered to pay for our air fare, our room and board for as long as we want to stay, and a car for our own personal use while we are there.

The Dilemma

In seven years we have only left Vancouver Island once, for my brothers wedding. Even then, the event was only two ferry sails from home. Other than that trip, we have kept to within about a 50 km radius of our home since moving here.

Our no-travel living is quite a change from our previous life of near-constant car travel. We enjoyed a life of adventure and discovery out on the open road during our leisure time, and daily commuting was a part of having full time jobs in the city.

But then we asked ourselves what our lives might look like in a post-oil world. We asked, "Where do we want to be when we make the change to a low-carbon lifestyle, and can't travel as easily any more?

Our answer was the west coast of Canada, a place we have long loved for its natural, semi-wild setting.  We moved, and stopped traveling. We didn't really plan it that way, it just kind of happened as we were  slowly entranced by our locality, and felt less of a need to be somewhere else.

Then there is the expense, and the amount of carbon produced while using fossil fuel dependent modes of transportation.

One of the big problems facing humanity right now is climate change caused by the intense use of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution.

A great deal of those emissions were produced in the transportation sector.

"The combustion of fossil fuels. such as gasoline and diesel to transport people and goods is the second largest source of CO2 emissions, accounting for about 31% of total U.S. CO2 emissions and 26% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. This category includes transportation sources such as highway vehicles, air travel, marine transportation, and rail." - source

The Solutions?

As carbon is part of the problem, reducing carbon-intensive activity is part of the solution. So does this mean we can't travel to see friends any more? Visiting friends and family is the number one reason most people give for the purpose of their travel.

We would really like to see people, but they are all far away, and we can't easily walk, bike, or ride horses to traverse the distances between us, as much fun as that might be.

But the current offer on the table is so very generous and enticing.

We have the time, and they have the money. But can the planet handle our recreational, non-critical travel?

Do we miss our friends, or increase our carbon footprint? Should we stay, or should we go?

It's The Traveler's Dilemma. 

Living Simply - Nomads

The Bedouin are stateless nomadic desert dwelling herders.

If modern life is all it's cracked up to be, how come there are still millions of people choosing to live nomadic lifestyles? There are up to 80 million nomads in India alone, and tens of millions more in the rest of the world.

Up until 10,000 years ago, all humans were nomads, roaming the wilderness and living off its abundance. Many people around the world are still living a nomadic existence, whether it is the millions of current traditionalists, or more modern versions of life on the road.

When Linda and I met it was a chance encounter of two wandering souls, and we recognized that fact at first glance. Our first 5 dates all involved traveling and camping, and our wanderlust continues unabated to this day.

Whether it is a voyage around the neighbourhood, or a walk around the world, we are perpetually curious about what is up ahead, and around the corner.

30% of Mongolia's 30 million people are nomadic

10 years ago we went nomadic for a full year. We had sublet our coop unit for the year, so had essentially made ourselves homeless. There is something about not knowing where you are going to sleep at night that adds a whole new urgency and excitement to life.

In the course of the next year we logged some 10,000 km (6,000 miles) driving and commando camping in the back of our small pick up as we travelled from the Pacific to the Atlantic in Canada.

We travelled a further 30,000 km (18,000 miles) by plane, bus, horse drawn cart, train, boat, scooter, foot and ferry as we zigzagged our way to the other side of the planet, then back again.

While overseas we each carried a mid-sized backpack, and over the course of 7 months their meagre contents were all we needed. We washed our clothes in sinks, and bathed out of buckets of steamy hot water. We lived on bread, cheese, cheap wine and whatever the locals were eating. Fortifying stuff for people on the move.

Gokarna, India

We usually spent one or two nights in a location, then moved on. It was all pretty organic - when it felt like time to move, we would go, and when it felt good to stay, we would linger.

The longest we stayed in one place (4 weeks) was in India where we temporarily settled in Gokarna, a small temple town on the Arabian Sea.

While nomadic we were as disconnected as we could get, and the lightness and freedom of movement was exhilarating. It was a constant source of satisfaction that we lived as well as we did with the minimal possessions we carried with us.

I remember thinking, "If I can live for months on end with the things I have in my pack, do I really need all that stuff in storage back home?" We came to realizations during our year on the road that would forever change the way we viewed our lives.

We could see that there is a good reason that so many people spurn modern life and voluntarily choose to live traditionally simple lives on the road. It is a light and unfettered existence, and it is more sustainable than sedentary, high-consumption lifestyles.

40% of ethnic Tibetans are nomadic

You can get a taste of the nomadic lifestyle wherever you are by jettisoning the unnecessary baggage and keeping things light.

It is not so much about being on the move as it is knowing that your life is so unburdened that you could be on the move in a moments notice if the mood struck. To me, that feels like freedom.

Nomadic Rules For Living Simply

• keep possessions to a minimum
• walking is the best way to get around
• relationships are important, things are not
• what your shelter looks like is not as important as whether it is light enough to carry, and keeps you warm and dry
• self-reliance is more secure than dependence
• enjoy the view, and go with the flow
• be creative, use your hands
• be finely tuned to the cycles of nature
• be in charge of your food supply
• use music to bring people together - dance, sing!
• always offer assistance to fellow travelers

Keeping It Light

"No suffering befalls the man who calls nothing his own."
- Dhammapada

Not everyone aspires to be a wandering monk, claiming ownership to nothing but a piece of cloth to wrap one's self in, and a bowl for food. That would be considered extreme for the average participant in Western 'civilization' where we have become weighed down by our possessions.
 
Deep inside, however, we know the sages are on to something. We can relate to them because we harbour a yearning for a slower, simpler life, free from a growing mental and physical clutter.

Most people consider some of their best days to be when possessions were few, and responsibilities minimal. Think about it for your own life, or ask others when they felt the most free, the most alive.

Often people will answer that some of their happiest days were their student days. They remember wandering down the road to knowledge with nothing more than a suitcase and a sense of adventure. People recall macaroni and cheese, tiny dorm rooms, and limited budgets not as examples of extreme hardship, but as the joys of a simpler life.

Some of my best days on this earth have been while living out of a back pack. Wilderness trips of up to two weeks, supported by whatever I could carry on my back, taught me the joys of keeping it light. It was just me, my boots, my back pack, and the grizzly bears. It was liberating and exhilarating, and a wake up call to the lies of economic 'authorities' that promote purchasing our way to happiness and prosperity.

While laying in my sleeping bag on the ground under a dome of stars, I would ponder the Big Question. "If I have everything I need to sustain myself in my back pack, what is all that stuff back at home for? Why am I working so hard to acquire a bunch of things that I don't really want or need?"

This line of questioning eventually caused me to quit my job to experience the freedom of traveling lightly for an extended period of time. I bought a round the world ticket and lived out of a back pack for an entire, glorious year.

While traveling I joyfully washed my six item wardrobe in a sink or bucket, and hung it to dry. I walked everywhere, shunning buses, taxis, and trains unless traveling long distances. I carried a small bundle of art supplies, and even a tiny library that shrunk or grew according to book swaps with other travelers. I had lots of time to use both.

Living with things pared down to the essentials appealed to me, and I have not looked back since. Today my possessions are sparse, and I am constantly acting to streamline them more. I am not down to a piece of cloth and a bowl yet, but I have recovered from the damaging effects of conforming to the regular life script of work - spend - sleep - repeat.

We are repeatedly told that the stuff we own is important for the enjoyment of life, but in the majority of cases this is so wrong. Wandering monks, and even our own experience, teach us that there is no freedom in the accumulation of stuff. Real freedom comes when you get rid of stuff, and stop lusting for more.

The less extraneous stuff we have, the less suffering befalls us.

Keep it light. Be free. Enjoy your life.

Low Carbon Travel: Slower, Not As Far, Less Often

It seems like all the good stuff is somewhere else. It makes a guy want to pack a bag, fire up the tricycle and hit the open road. On the other hand, what is up with this obsession with anywhere other than where we are at? The exotic is always advertised as someplace else, and there are plenty of businesses ready to whisk you there for an extremely low price (plus taxes, fees, and additional levies). Is all this travel to learn about other cultures and make the world a better place, or is it just to help us keep boredom at bay and make ourselves feel 'successful'? Life changing events, or distracting ego strokage?

Regardless of why we do it, there is an environmental cost to all this moving from here to there with near-instant efficiency. In addition to climate change, we are at, or close to, peak oil meaning the end of cheap energy. Remember how you felt filling up at the pumps when crude was at $147/barrel? How attractive was the cross-country voyage in the RV then? We are destined to see those days again.

It will be a huge challenge for the world to adapt to such rapidly declining fuel supplies. So from a probabilistic standpoint, there is no arguing with the actual oil production statistics, they show that it's happening -- it's real and it's happening now. http://energybulletin.net/50578

Low carbon travel is a reality that we currently face. Get ready for the slow road to somewhere close, serviced of course by slow food restaurants.

Given that fuel efficiency decreases markedly with higher speeds, an enforced 60mph speed limit on motorways could save around 1.9 MtC a year. Even enforcement of current limits could achieve significant reductions in emissions. In France, in 2004, strict enforcement on main motorways reduced CO2 emissions by 19% as well as cutting crashes by 30%. http://www.sustrans.org.uk/about-sustrans

We will either find alternative energy sources, dramatically improve the efficiency of our modes of transportation, or do without. Since we are not getting very far finding viable energy alternatives any time soon, and our vehicles are still only about as efficient as Henry Ford's Model T, it's looking more and more like we will be doing without.

For the past five years I have been limiting my travels to local areas that I can access by walking, riding, or paddling my canoe. It gives me great pleasure to execute a local carbon-free adventure. I live in a rural area known for its scenery, but I can honestly say that I have never lived in a place that did not have its own gifts.

When I lived in the city parks provided much-needed breaks from the built environment surrounding me. Even in cities nature finds a way. Office towers in many cities across North America host peregrine falcons. In many cities one could bike downtown to view one of the fastest creatures on earth hunting in the concrete corridors. Empty lots and fields are reclaimed by pioneering species attracting wildlife to seek shelter in them. Many cities have developed areas that are beautiful in their own right. Chances are there are tourists from afar checking your city out. Why not be a tourist in your own town?

Phillip Croft, a west coast naturalist, highlights the joys of his own West Vancouver neighbourhood in his "Nature Diary Of A Quiet Pedestrian". This amazing book chronicles Croft's 25 year ritual of a daily walk from his home, through a wooded park, and to the beach. He takes the reader through the seasons with wit, keen observations, and his own watercolour illustrations. It is a wonderful example of someone recognizing the exotic in his own back yard.

Due to a variety of ailments globalism is crashing, and it is taking speedy global travel with it. Flying aluminium sausages are out, 6 month trips around the Horn of Africa on a creaky sailing ship are in. Road trips in a personal internal combustion vehicle are out, road trips on your bike are in.

Travel to 'exotic' foreign lands, or even the next province or state, is changing, and for good reasons. People are traveling slower, not as far, and less often. Local is the way of the future, and eventually we will discover that what we are looking for can be found wherever we are. Learning about ourselves, our neighbours, and our own locality may be the biggest, most beneficial low carbon trip of them all.