We had friends over for lunch yesterday. Like us, they too are addicted to traveling the world, exploring new places, meeting new people and being inspired by new cultural experiences. Unsurprisingly, most of lunch was spent on travel talk; favourite destinations, future travel plans and how we’d all love to be able to afford business class tickets on our long-haul flights. I’d guess that between our two families, we’ve been to just shy of half the countries in the world. That’s a lot of places…and sadly, a lot of jet fuel.

While sat there munching and chatting excitedly about trips to Namibia, Georgian and Transylvania, I wondered when there would be an appropriate opportunity to shoehorn in the environmental perspective of our addiction. I’m pretty sure all of us thought about it, but cause it’s such a downer, no one wanted to spoil the fun and bring it up. And I think that probably sums up how must people think.

The fact that so much of our guilty pleasures are bad for the planet is so numbing, that we mostly only allow them to loom in the background. If Earth is really heading towards a cataclysmic climate catastrophe and the only way of braking the impact is to more or less give up 90% of the lifestyle we take for granted today, including, but obviously not limited to pollution-generating activities like intercontinental air travel, how and more importantly, by whom will that movement get started by? And who is going to explain to all the good folks in South America, Africa, India and China, many now slowly startings to ascend from poverty, that they have to forfeit all the material goodies we have enjoyed for decades in favor of saving the planet? Just sayin’…