Over lunch, a director of a PR company representing travel firms told me she is discouraging them from using the word “green” in copy unless they are really doing something creditable.
About time. Every second email pinging into my in-box is from someone in the travel trade pretending to greenness. An endless number of firms is offering to help air passengers salve their consciences by giving them the opportunity to pay to plant trees. One is even promising to plant a tree “free” in return for every booking. It will do so in Wales — though at least one study suggests that planting outside the tropics could actually contribute to global warming.
Then there’s this kind of thing: “If you want to keep your social conscience clean and your carbon footprint to a minimum, then the Capital Region USA has some great options for keeping your environmental impact to a minimum whilst ensuring maximum fun!” There follows a list of ways in which you can have a “green” holiday, with no mention, of course, of the return flight across the Atlantic that the holiday entails.
The most outrageous nonsense of all, however, comes from the company BCP, which is “urging holidaymakers to go green by taking advantage of the newly opened, environmentally-friendly, multi-storey Q-Park car park at Heathrow”.
This opportunism is a response, at least in part, to public concern. More and more of us are becoming worried about the potentially negative effects of travel, and anxious to do what we can to minimise them. The trouble is that much of the debate is conducted in generalities – global warming, climate change, demographic shifts, globalisation – that are difficult to relate directly to our own fortnight in the sun.
In The Final Call, Leo Hickman, a Guardian writer, does a great job of turning the generalities into specifics. The book’s subtitle is In Search of the True Cost of Our Holidays. To establish that cost, Hickman doesn’t simply rehash UN and World Tourism Organisation research; he gets out — with a certain amount of agonising over whether he should be flying — and does a thorough reporting job. In Dubai, having stayed in the tourist hotels, he sneaks into the rather less comfortable camps that house the migrant workers who built those hotels. In the Caribbean, he boards the world’s biggest cruise ship, and sees just who benefits when its passengers are disgorged in tiny ports. In Tallinn, Estonia, he discovers what happens when a Unesco World Heritage site, opened up by no-frills flights from Britain, becomes better known for cheap beer and easy access to prostitutes.
It’s a book that no one in the travel trade, and no one who reports on it, should be able to read without a few twinges of guilt, but Hickman has suggestions about what we might do to feel a little less guilty in future. Read an interview with him on the excellent World Hum site, and then read the book.