Traveling has been one of the most fulfilling, important, and inspiring experiences of my life.
It’s through traveling that I’ve learned several languages, built fulfilling lifelong relationships, had pivotal, unforgettable experiences and so much more. To live without traveling is not a life I want to life.
However, I’ve also come to see that all of us travel addicts need to talk more about climate change and sustainability. Because traveling has a big impact on the planet.
Here Are My Tips (Philosophical, Practical, or Otherwise) to Travel More Sustainably
This will course through my personal journey and hopefully arm you with ideas and frameworks. My goal is to help you achieve two things at once: enjoy your traveling while beginning a ripple effect that will help combat climate change, especially in the transportation and tourism sectors.
Broadening Out: What to Consider Before Changing Your Travel Behavior
Before getting into the practical tips, we have to start by broadening out.
After all, is aiming to travel sustainably worth anything at all while oil and gas companies look for new article drilling opportunities and cash in on record profits while continuing to receive billions in tax subsides?
This is a fair question.
The short answer is no but the longer answer is yes if it leads to broader systemic change. At least, that’s where I stand on it. So if you’re just going to take fewer flights and pat yourself on the back, that’s not really going to change much in the world.
Any “Sustainable Travel Tips” Are Total BS If You Don’t Look At These Steps FIRST
You can’t let doing a few small things that make you feel good distract you from what really matters.
1) Acknowledge The Impact of Your Travels
With that said, to fight climate change, I’ve found it helpful to first see how my personal actions are complicit in it. Not because I’ll fix things on my own, but because it has helped me grasped just how varied and challenging it is to live sustainably, especially while traveling.
As Someone Who Travels, I’ve Had to Acknowledge That I’m One of The Worst Offenders
Here’s a brutal stat from the European Union: “Someone flying from Lisbon to New York and back generates roughly the same level of emissions as the average person in the EU does by heating their home for a whole year.” And that’s somebody in the developed world. In many global regions, my round trip Europe flight is responsible for more emissions than the average person in many countries emits in an entire year.
The “rich,” which from a global lens includes me and anybody else capable of flying regularly, are disproportionately responsible for emissions.
Between 2022-2024, I’ve taken over 40 flights. YIKES. I’ve emitted while thinking I was living a relatively sustainable life.
I say I care about the planet, yet at the same time, I’m jutting around the world and emitting huge amounts of jet fuel going into the atmosphere, to the point that all the composting I’m doing hardly matters at all.
Remember, Carbon Offsets Are Mostly a Sham
And no, the little “Pay $1.86 to offset the carbon of this flight” isn’t actually offsetting your carbon most of the time. I’ll leave this explanation to Jon Oliver, our British-American treasure.
2) Acknowledge That Your Impact Is a Drop in The Ocean
With all of that said, remember that while you spend time, money, and energy trying to limit your plane miles (while I will give tips and which I personally do) some multi-millionaire gas executive is lobbying to expand oil drilling in the once-pristine arctic circle.
Living Within Your Values Can Help Change The World
Yet, I still believe changing our personal actions and living in our values can change the world.
That’s because it can inspire broader communal and societal changes.
For example, fighting to expand train service to eliminate short flights, which would eliminate hundreds or thousands of flights over the coming years, does make a huge difference.
Even if you personally flying less won’t change the world, for me small changes in my actions have been a gateway to fighting for bigger changes.
It’s easier for me to fight for more public transit because I personally use it everywhere, live without a car, and help others live without a car too.
This, I believe, helps me then lead the charge in getting other people to make changes too, which then can impact not the drops, but the buckets.
3) Remember That What You Do Outside of Travel Matters More Than How You Travel
Combining the first two, we can recognize our personal impact and recognize the bigger forces at play that make change. We can live within our values and make sacrifices.
To bring this together, fighting for sustainable travel means pulling a few big levers in your life that go beyond how you travel.
The 80/20 of Sustainability: The Three Things That Matter Most
Before I give the list, let me paint this with a negative example.
A New York City finance bro lives in a high-rise apartment with the latest and greatest building efficiency. The building is plastered with a big A grading from the city for its efficiency.
He takes the subway to midtown (hooray for solar-powered mass transit!), and gets to the offices of Chase, or Bank of America, or some other giant bank. This building too is “certified efficient” and the bank’s website proudly states this as part of their sustainability measures.
Then, he goes and works on negotiating a seven-figure loan to Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, or BP so they can expand drilling in the arctic.
In this example, who cares how he got to work or the efficiency of his building because there’s no doubt that what he’s doing is a huge net-negative.
There are a few things that matter way more than how sustainable your travel is.
- How you MAKE your money
- How you INVEST your money
- How you spend the REST OF YOUR TIME
I’ll also admit that I still haven’t figured out how to do the first two in a way that feels good. After all, so much of our economy is built on extracting resources.
Yet I spend more time thinking about how to I can get these right, rather than worrying about the exact CO2 emissions of my flight to see my friends in Barcelona.
That’s because if I can do these right, then my life won’t just be about limiting my emissions, but also about moving communities and society towards a cleaner, healthier life.
Another way of looking at this is, there’s only so much damage you can limit with your personal actions, but no limit to your positive good in how you spend your time.
For more on these, with personal examples, struggles, and changes I’m making, you can check out this article on The 80/20 of Climate Change:
The 80/20 of Personal Action for Climate Change
4) Acknowledge The Intersections Between Systemic Inequality and Climate Change
Climate change is not just about CO2 numbers.
It’s also about clean air and water, safe spaces to live with nature, affordable housing, robust infrastructure, and more.
As Peter Gelderloos writes in his book The Solutions are Already Here, “Because the exploitation of the planet is interrelated with exploitation in human societies, the ecological crisis is very much a question of justice, reparation or revolution.”
The same societal systems that brought us polluted highways, plastic in the oceans, and dangerously high levels of CO2 approaching tipping points is the same one that brought us slavery, patriarchy, and the atomic bomb.
Fighting climate change is fundamentally a movement towards giving everybody on the planet equal opportunity.
Those who face the worst consequences of climate change, like higher asthma rates from polluted air, less access to clear water, destruction of their soil and land, and increased risk of extreme weather events are disproportionately the poor, black, and brown.
This happens on both a global and local lens.
As another example of these intersections, women are more likely to support big action on climate change, so if you’re working to helping raise women voices, then you’re also helping to fight climate change.
This means as a traveler, you shouldn’t just think about your CO2 emissions. You should also think about how your actions as a travel impact those who live there. For example in In the context of living as a digital nomad in Medellín, I thought about how where I chose to stay affects prices and housing availability to locals.
I consider these tips “the big four” for thinking about sustainable travel. They are a guiding framework and will keep the rest of these tips in their proper context.
Transportation Tips
The hallmark difference between traveling and everyday life is the fact that you’re, well, traveling more. You’re likely traversing more miles — exponentially more — than the average person. That means, when it comes to your personal lifestyle, we have to start with transportation.
5) Avoid SHORT Flights
Per passenger mile, short flights are the worst. Worse than the long flight. This is for a few reasons.
First, the most emission-intensive part of flying happens at takeoff and landing. So whether it’s a 40-minute flight, for a 9-hour flight, there’s still one takeoff and one landing.
Second, longer flights benefit from economies of scale. There are usually more people on the flights, often a lot more, so per person the emissions are lower per mile, all else equal. These long flights also typically use more modern jets with better fuel efficiency.
Short flights are also much easier to cut from your life. Although the United States tries its best to give you no other option, the shorter the flight, the more likely you’ll be able to find a train or a bus.
I’ve made it a personal rule to avoid short flights.
This is even when it’s pushed to the limit, like when I took a 7-hour Greyhound bus ride from Chicago to Louisville, KY instead of flying. So if this is you, check out my article on tips to thrive on the Greyhound bus.
For any flight under two hours, find another way.
The airlines are not going green anytime soon, despite their best marketing efforts to convince us they are.
6) Set Yourself a Personal Flying Quota
Admittedly, this is new for me, something I’ve thought about more as I’ve stewed in my guilt over how much I’ve flown the last few years.
I decided to give myself a number of fights for the calendar year, and the number I personally landed on is six. (Note, this includes connections. Remember that takeoff and landing is the worst part.)
This has helped me think more deeply about which trips matter most to me and actually lead to more happiness and fulfillment, and which ones just felt like obligations.
The rule has been so powerful, I wrote a full article on it.
Why I Gave Myself a Personal Flying Limit And Why I’ll Keep it Forever
This is still a lot for the average person, but for someone like me who constantly travels, it has provided the right amount of restriction.
7) Don’t Fly Business or First
But I personally don’t fly business or first. That’s not because I hate nice things (I love the first-class private room experience on Amtrak.) It’s because if you’re in a business class seat, your emissions per passenger mile go way up.
Personally, I’ll save my dollars for the long-haul Amtrak rides!
8) Walk, Bike, and Take Transit
Need a mass transit angel? I’m your guy.
I have lots of tips on this, from learning the bike shares, to taking the buses. Check out my article on how I live in the U.S. without a car.
9) Choose Fewer Places Over a Longer Period of Time
The best way to limit your transportation footprint is to, well, not travel as often. I’ve come to prefer to slow down, to settle in a place for a least a month rather than hustle from place to place.
I also believe in depth over breadth. I lived in New York for three years, and more I discovered about the city, the more I realized how little I know. I could spend lifetime after lifetime just trying to get to the soul of one city.
I think there’s a fear of missing out by not seeing everything, but that fulfillment of getting to know a place, even a small sliver, for outweighs that for me.
Housing
Where you choose to stay has both environmental and ethical considerations.
As an outsider, understand the impact of gentrification. I covered this in my article on digital nomading in Medellín and will be covering it again in an upcoming article on Barcelona.
When lots of outsiders with more money come to spend on housing and food, the cost of living for everybody goes up. Then the locals can no longer afford rents and are forced to move.
The local culture often gets replaced with expensive, sterile shops and food chains.
This is why in so many cities throughout the world, there has been a call for more “sustainable tourism.” It doesn’t mean that tourism is bad. Often, the locals recognize the importance of tourism. Yet, it’s the difference between drinking from a water fountain and a fire house. Too much tourism without the right plan to protect locals can have disastrous effects.
10) Choose a Place With Sustainable TOurism INfrastructure
This is not so black and white, but it begins by doing your homework on the interplay between locals and tourists before you go. For example, if you want to go to the Canary Islands, it won’t take much research to learn that locals are protesting against their government over unsustainable tourism, and telling tourists not to come.
So maybe… hold off on the Canary Islands for now. Even if you are the perfect guest, you may still be taking scarce resources, including housing, from locals.
Research the current situation before you go.
11) Stay in an Airbnb Space Where The Host Lives
Airbnb’s impacts of local housing costs has gotten to the point where major cities have banned Airbnb.
Why this happens is simple.
Landlords realized they can make more money by renting apartments on Airbnb for short-term stays instead of to locals. This led to big real estate companies buying up local housing for Airbnb, taking it off the market and leading to a housing crunch.
The good news is that the original idea for Airbnb, where you stay in someone’s home like their extra bedroom that they still live in, usually doesn’t do this.
This way, you’re not taking a home away from a local, and instead putting the money into the pocket of a local, one who you’ll get to meet and talk with and get local recommendations from. I’ve done this in nearly a dozen cities, and it has lead to some of my absolute favorite travel experiences.
From Peru to Italy, some of my favorite travel trips have been made better thanks to an incredible local Airbnb host. This is not the only housing option, but it’s my favorite for sure.
On the flip side AVOID staying in fancy Airbnb’s where it’s obvious that no human actually lives there, and it’s just to make some real estate company money.
Food
Traveling and trying new food go hand in hand. A huge point of traveling, one might say
Here are a few ways to both have a better food experience and make more ethical and sustainable options.
12) Find The Farmers’ Markets
What makes food local what it is, at its core, is what grows there.
Eating locally not only supports farmers, but also reduces the “food miles” drastically. The food you’re eating, when you choose local, won’t have to be shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to get to your plate.
You’ll also get healthier food this way. I’ve made it a habit when getting somewhere to look up when and where the farmers bring out their fresh produce for sale.
13) Choose The Local Businesses, Avoid Chains
Of course, eating out at restaurants is a fundamental part of trying the local food and seeing how its prepared too. My advice here is to always choose the local restaurants. That hole-in-the-wall that has been there for a hundred years? You know it’s going to be so fire. It’s also likely they’ll use local ingredients. For example, a great paella on the costa brava of Spain or a ceviche in Lima Peru is almost definitely from the nearby sea. Go there.
This helps small businesses benefit from the tourism dollars you’re bringing, instead of driving them out. The opposite is what happens when tourists come and look for the nearest Starbucks or McDonald’s.
14) Eat In, Not Out
Finally, enjoy your meals and eat in! Take-out requires plastic containers put into a plastic bag eaten with plastic forks, all of which will end up in the landfill or worse.
Here’s a nice quote from a fun book, No Impact Man on this. “Plastic take-out-tubs trash is part of a huge societal garlic-sauce-covered slop of molded hydrocarbons and other petrochemicals that, after perhaps twenty minutes of use, will end up in landfills and incinerators, to leach chemicals into the water we drink or vaporize into the air we breathe.”
Wouldn’t you rather sit and enjoy your meal anyway?
Packing Tips
Next, here are a few tips on how to pack fro traveling.
15) Don’t Check a Bag
With all this travel over all of these years I’ve never checked a bag. I’ve traveled for months at a time with a backpack. If you’re just going on a vacation for a week or two, there are very few good reasons to check a bag.
There are several reasons for this. First, it saves money. Why waste money paying the airlines to carry things I don’t need? It also saves money because then you won’t need to haul cabs from the airport, because it’s easier to walk or take transit with just a backpack.
However, I think the psychological reason is more important. When I stopped checking bags, I realized how little I needed to live and by happy.
I actually realized that having more things weighed me down (literally.) This carried over into the rest of my life.
Living with one bag helped solidify for me that I don’t want a big house, a nice car, or lots of things. It would be a big pain in the ass to get those things, and wouldn’t make me happier at all. Society tells us this is what should make us happy, but really it just gets us to buy more things.
Live with just a backpack, realize how little you need, and you’ll never go back again.
I write more about this in my article on How I Became Rich (With Less).
16) Bring Reusable Items
Next, because you have such a small amount of space, you have to choose items wisely.
Obviously, bring a reusable water bottle. That’s a no brainer.
I’ve also moved on to buying super-concentrated travel soap. When you’ve traveled as much as me, travel soap becomes a natural topic of interest. I’ve landed on a brand I really like called Everlist. It’s highly concentrated soap (most soap is just water) so it’s really easy to store. They also use metal instead of plastic.
I also bring a wooden fork with me. I rarely use it, but on occasion where it seems I’ll need to use plastic silverware, I can whip it out.
17) Above All, Be a Kind Guest
When you’re traveling, you are a guest. This means you should enter the mindset you’d have if somebody invited you over for dinner.
You’d take your shoes off, be respectable, offer to help clean the dishes.
Here’s what this means in practice.
Don’t Support Extractive Tourism
Extractive tourism, as the term implies, are types of tourism that take away from the place you’re visiting. Here are some examples:
- Sexual tourism. Don’t go somewhere because the prostitutes are cheap. For the problems with this, look up the sexual tourism problems in Medellin. It has ruined entire parts of the city and make it seriously less safe for the average tourist and local alike.
- Wildlife Tourism. This includes big game hunting safaris. Don’t kill endangered animals, please.
- Tours that support destruction industries. Don’t do mining or logging tours.
You should research the specific activity in the specific place you’re going and understand its impacts on the locals and the land before just assuming it’s okay.
Leave The Place Better Than You Found It
Use kind manners. Show your appreciation. Leave a smile on the faces of those who are allowing you to be a guest in their country, city, or place. Leave the place better than when you found it. Live by the golden rule, and you’ll be well on your way to more sustainable travel.
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