Opinion: Once the pandemic is over, I hope we travel less

Kate Black is a freelance writer based in Vancouver.

On March 9, I was sitting in a loud, crowded terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. I remember thinking, naively, “I hope I never board an airplane again,” as if I would have a choice in the months to come.

I was in a bad mood. The reality of the COVID-19 crisis was starting to feel real. What’s more: I was on my way home from a conference in San Antonio, Tex., that felt like a waste of time. Amid rising virus panic, most of the sessions that I planned on attending were cancelled at the last minute. The trade fair felt like a ghost town. In the days before I flew out, I had considered cancelling, but didn’t. It was a privilege, I thought, to travel on my employer’s dime. I was bored at home, it was a free trip, end of story.

What compounded my postconference ennui was knowing what a colossal impact my travelling would have on the worsening climate crisis. Air travel is bad – like, really bad – for our planet: A chunk of Arctic sea ice the size of a queen bed vanishes for each person on a return flight between Vancouver and Toronto. I know that giant corporations and political inertia are responsible for the vast majority of our world’s emissions. But I also know that enough individual actions influence the priorities of companies and politicians.

World travel, for now at least, has been put on hold. And it will hardly be the same once the pandemic is under control, though it’s hard to say what these changes will be and for how long they will last. In my ideal new normal, whenever that comes, I hope we’ll curb the infinite appetite for novelty that threatens our finite planet.

Typing this, I feel like I’m probably insulting all of my peers, if not deeply entrenching myself as a joyless social pariah. I’m a 26-year-old millennial. I know that my generation not only values travel more than those before us, but that being a Person Who Travels is a personality trait, maybe something deeper than that. It even makes us more attractive – dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge report that you’re more likely to get a match if you use travel photos in your profile. Travel seems to be a virtue in itself, synonymous with “interesting,” cooler than child-rearing and home-owning.

I get why people drool over travel photos. A reminder: I went on a trip to a half-cancelled conference on the cusp of a global health crisis because it meant I got to somewhere I had never been before. The way I see it, I will probably never own a house and I don’t know whether I’ll have children or from what career I will retire; travelling is a thing I can do to introduce immediate novelty, purpose and identity into my life.

But as I luxuriate over the pros and cons of travel, the planet is warming. The world must dramatically reduce its emissions to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change. The appeal of travel feels flimsy in comparison.

Making this argument, though, topples dangerously close to a slippery slope. I’ve seen cases made against post-COVID travel that are thinly veiled anti-migrant dog whistles, or that perpetuate racist myths about the virus. Perhaps you’ve seen a meme claiming that humans, in fact, are the virus. The idea that humans as a species are flawed and somehow deserving of this pandemic closely echoes ecofascism, the inaccurate blaming of climate catastrophe on overpopulation and the actions of marginalized people. To be clear, the wealthy have a much higher carbon footprint than anyone else, although the poor already bear the worst of climate destruction.

People travel in planes more than ever before, and that number was poised to double within the next two decades. Some of those people, I imagine, are rightfully visiting their homelands. But this is far from my situation, and far from what I assume is the situation of my peers, jet-setting to tropical locations or travelling across the continent for a conference.

Although I lambaste my ill-fated trip to San Antonio as useless, I can’t stop thinking about the last time I went to a bar. My co-workers and I met another group of marooned conference attendees at a karaoke joint. It was warm and I could see the moon as I sang the Dixie Chicks, holding the mic to my lips, not thinking about whether it had touched somebody else’s moments before. It felt special, even before hindsight. I don’t know whether I could recreate that feeling at home. Maybe I could – maybe I should try.

If anything, the pandemic has showed us how our planet can put business-as-usual on hold when our safety is at stake. The optimist in me hopes we could do the same for climate change. For the time being, we are forced to reckon with an anxious question: Who are we when we can’t leave home? The answer, I think, requires soul-searching deeper than jumping on a plane.

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