For the better part of my life, tourism has defined how I move through the world. It has shown me more beauty than I can recount, created far-flung homes, seeded many loves, and has made me question, well, pretty much everything.

With that, I have been back into the whirlwind of (re)thinking. I treasure the experiences, I treasure the memories, I treasure the fact that in the infinitude of a universe impartial to our individual successes, I EXIST in a form that can even understand what treasure is.

For the past couple of years, my relationship with tourism (and travel at large) has been less defined by what I can get from it, but on what this complex interweaving system means for the web of communities, ecosystems, infrastructure, and everything in between that support it. At the risk of being reductionist, I set out to more fully understand the impacts within this space, and the most prominent measure that seemed a good starting place was in greenhouse gas emissions.

It can be easy to speak sweepingly, but only generalities will emerge. I have studied (read also: obsessed over) our travel systems, and though illuminating, wowee, do we have some work to do to overhaul how we visit.

My life has been built around flying from one place to the next for nearly a decade. Coincidentally, this is by far the largest contributor to greenhouse gases in travel (more than food, lodging, local transport and goods, combined, by roughly a factor of four). So what to do when an opportunity to fly halfway around the world on a whim to go skiing, hot on the tails of spending two years writing a paper that boiled down to how flying is environmentally irresponsible, arises? Commence inner turmoil. When all was said and done, we went to Japan. It was incredible, inspiring, and just plain ol’ fun. I feel richer for the time spent, savoring what I could with other souls that I love.

Alas, I have affirmed this to be true: the things that we feel we can’t live without, do indeed have impact. I am embarking on a shift of my own; how can we advocate for and demonstrate a push for responsibility within our societies, through traveling to and from, learning, and applying lessons elsewhere? There is so much wisdom regarding how to live fully, collectively, and with ingenuity to the benefit of the many. Tourism is at the intersection of food, transit, buildings, green space, and social systems—what better way to explore for a better world?

This is not a call to action to never fly again, nor to let go of dreams of a destination that spans the globe. Hell, I think human psychology has demonstrated that a change of a behavior needs to be intrinsically motivated, and words from elsewhere, however well intentioned, can only go so far. If you have wrestled with some of these ideas and thoughts, you’re not alone. The scales of being are multi-dimensional and can be exhausting to contend with.

All we can do, is all we can do (thanks, Watsky), and I can only hope that my all moves the needle in the right direction. Stay tuned for more in the way of nature, bikes, trains, sustainable systems, and two-cent musings.