UKC

Responsible / Eco Friendly Tourism

New Topic
This topic has been archived, and won't accept reply postings.
 PK 23 Aug 2005
Is there a UK public exhibition covering this?

If not, do people generally think it would work?

 tony 23 Aug 2005
In reply to PK:

Most tourism masquerading as eco-tourism is bollocks, as most eco-tourist destinations involve long plane journeys, with all the environmental damage that that entails. It's only really sound if you only walk or cycle - anything else is just window-dressing.
OP PK 23 Aug 2005
In reply to tony:
> (In reply to PK)
>
It's only really sound if you only walk or cycle

. . .or sail, or ride a horse. . .

And is it (more) sound if you pay a voluntary "green tax" on your flight?

 CJD 23 Aug 2005
In reply to tony:

my brother was arguing with me about this - he said that doing (for instance) a coast to coast route by bicycle was more environmentally sound than walking it, as it would be quicker by bike and thus you wouldn't use up energy during overnight stops.

I think he was just being pedantic though.
 tony 23 Aug 2005
In reply to PK:
> (In reply to tony)
> [...]
> It's only really sound if you only walk or cycle
>
> . . .or sail, or ride a horse. . .
>
Fair point.

> And is it (more) sound if you pay a voluntary "green tax" on your flight?

Mere tokenism. The green tax you pay isn't going to reduce the overall ecological footprint of your activity. In the same way as the waste hierarchy is headed with 'reduce' before 'reuse' and 'recycle', it's better to reduce ecological footprints than try to offset through some arbitrary taxation.

 Liam M 23 Aug 2005
In reply to CJD: How does that work - surely you stop somewhere during that time, be it at home before/after the trip, or on route. His argument could only come into play if your home was sufficiently more efficient than the other locations at which you stopped.

Unless your brother is some sort of mechanoid who shuts himself down when not on these excursions!
 tony 23 Aug 2005
In reply to CJD:
> (In reply to tony)
> I think he was just being pedantic though.

Quite possibly. However, if the overnight stops on your walking trip incur less energy usage than the overnight energy use of the cyclists who get home earlier, then the walkers are imposing less of an overall energy burden than the cyclists.
Justin 23 Aug 2005
In reply to tony:

> Mere tokenism. The green tax you pay isn't going to reduce the overall ecological footprint of your activity.

I think that if the tax were compulsory, and included all the externalities, it may place a true price on things. By placing certain activities in a more expensive, and hence less attainable bracket, reduction may follow.
JJJJ 23 Aug 2005
In reply to CJD:

i think you should harangue him about the energy required for the production of the bicycle in the first place.
ceri 23 Aug 2005
In reply to tony: i agree. if i cycled for 2 days, i'd come home and watch tv, with lights on etc. if walking for 6 days, id be camping or youth hostelling, and not watching TV, so using less energy than if i was at home.
 tony 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Justin:

Proper pricing of externalities would be one thing, but when the activity in itself is supposed to be an environmentally friendly activity, the need to impose an externality-driven tax in order to reduce the uptake of the activity just seems to be missing the point entirely.
 CJD 23 Aug 2005
In reply to JJJJ:

I couldn't quite follow his reasoning. he can be a bit random at times.

still, he's the one who keeps popping off on exotic minibreaks so I think his commitment to ethical tourism has worn off.
Justin 23 Aug 2005
In reply to tony: I think we're coming from different angles but likely agree with each other. It would be best if we just didn't screw this planet up in the first place. Barring that, emissions markets, environmental tax and the inclusion of externalities or at least a tax on aviation fuel will go some way in helping the situation.
 JDDD 23 Aug 2005
In reply to tony:
> (In reply to PK)
>
> Most tourism masquerading as eco-tourism is bollocks, as most eco-tourist destinations involve long plane journeys

Ah yes, but there are now companies which can offset that damage by planting trees for you
 tony 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Jon Dittman:
> (In reply to tony)
> [...]
>
> Ah yes, but there are now companies which can offset that damage by planting trees for you

See my point about reducing ecological footprints. If you really care, you don't impose the burden in the first place.
Anonymous 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Jon Dittman:

> Ah yes, but there are now companies which can offset that damage by planting trees for you


But do they guarentee that the forest they plant will never be felled (well at least not for a few millenia)? because if they don't then it's a pretty worthless gesture.

Mark
OP PK 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Jon Dittman: Don't suppose you know who those companies are?

Cheers

PK
 Tom Briggs 23 Aug 2005
In reply to PK:
> Is there a UK public exhibition covering this?
>
> If not, do people generally think it would work?

It makes me cringe, for the reasons tony points out.

I was having a similar conversation with a surfing friend recently. Surfers seem to be big into 'environmentalism' and yet they fly all over the world, looking for the perfect waves!

 JDDD 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Anonymous:

> But do they guarentee that the forest they plant will never be felled (well at least not for a few millenia)? because if they don't then it's a pretty worthless gesture.

It doesn't matter. As long as it isn't burned. When a tree grows it traps the CO2. As long as it remains in timber form that CO2 has been removed from the atmosphere. If we only burned wood in this world and grew it as a fuel, the earth would be CO2 neutral.
OP PK 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Jon Dittman: So a wood burning aircraft would be OK??

<gets mad scientist hat from cupboard>
 Liam M 23 Aug 2005
In reply to PK: Isn't part of the problem with aircraft though that most airliners spurt out their omissions where the effect is most pronounced i.e. high up in the atmosphere. So it gets to the situation where it is doing damage a lot quicker than ground based pollutants, and there is less opportunity to recover it through trees etc.

So wood powered aircraft might not quite work!
Anonymous 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Jon Dittman:

What I meant was that the land would have to remain as forest in the long term. Obviously it doesn't matter if individual trees are cut down, as long as new ones are allowed to grow. Do the companies offering this service guarentee that they are not going to sell the land to farmers 100years down the line?

Another thing: Do the calculations that of how many trees are needed to make a trip carbon neutral subtract whatever the carbon value of the land was that was cleared to plant the forest? After all, scrubland can be pretty productive, and I doubt that you'd gain a huge amount by forresting it.

Mark
OP PK 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Liam M: I had already calculated that it would take more wood to get it off the ground than the aircraft could carry!

<puts hat away>
 Liam M 23 Aug 2005
In reply to PK: I'm sure you could engineer super high calorific wood. Or failing that just make the aircraft from wood and have them burning themselves to pieces as a source of propulsion. May have a limited range though.
 JDDD 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Anonymous: I am no expert in this, but forest captures very much more CO2 than scrub land. By productive, do you mean in terms of food or CO2? We are dealing in C02 so to reduce CO2, converting farm / scrub land into forest is better than the other way round. If anything, if the forest is cut down, and replanted with new trees, that is even better than just leaving it - so long as you don't burn the wood.
OP PK 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Liam M: On a more serious note - I never really worked out why big sailing ships are not taken more seriously. I know they would be slower, and their passage could not be timetabled, but surely they would offer economies over fossil fuelled ships.

Would n't they??
 JDDD 23 Aug 2005
In reply to PK:
> (In reply to Jon Dittman) So a wood burning aircraft would be OK??


Yes - wood / trees are classed as a renewable source of energy and are carbon neutral as long as you replant every tree you burn.
OP PK 23 Aug 2005
 Liam M 23 Aug 2005
In reply to PK: It would probably take quite a commitment to get ports up to dealing with the large amounts of goods were used to coming in and out.

Even the largest sail powered vessels are likely to be dwarfed by fairly small container ships. I don't know how practical it is to make huge sailing ships.

And with the increased pace of demand, and the potentially less predictable performance of sailing ships, possibly very few companies would commit to them.

I do think it would be quite cool to see ports filled with sailing vessels though.
 Michael Ryan 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Tom, UKC News Editor:
> (In reply to PK)
> [...]
>
> It makes me cringe, for the reasons tony points out.
>
> I was having a similar conversation with a surfing friend recently. Surfers seem to be big into 'environmentalism' and yet they fly all over the world, looking for the perfect waves!

Surfer, climber, fly fisher man, founder of Patagonia and environmentalist Yvon Chouinard has some intresting quotes on that subject

What are you most guilty of consuming?

Well, we're probably all going to hell for our consumptive lifestyles. My own little hot spot in hell will be because of all the jet fuel I've burned. And surfboards. But my son makes them, so...

http://www.tpl.org/tier3_cd.cfm?content_item_id=5307&folder_id=1545

Anonymous 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Jon Dittman:
> I am no expert in this, but forest captures very much more CO2 than scrub land. By productive, do you mean in terms of food or CO2?

Well they're kind of the same. 'Production', when you refer to ecosystems refers to the rate of photosynnthesis (i.e. the rate at which carbon is fixed). It was slightly sloppy language however, what I really meant was the amount of carbon stored (i.e. the biomass). You are right that forests will store more carbon than other habitats. However, if you base your calculations purely on the amount of carbon stored (rather than the difference between the forest and the previous land use) then you will be consistently underestimating the gain; potentially by quite a large amount.

Mark
Anonymous 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Liam M:

> Even the largest sail powered vessels are likely to be dwarfed by fairly small container ships. I don't know how practical it is to make huge sailing ships.

Some people think that it's both practical and, more importantly, ecenomical.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18524881.600
Mark



 Liam M 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Anonymous: Now they look very cool - it would be great to see what essentially look like kite surfers writ huge powering their way across the seas.
Anonymous 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Jon Dittman:

Actually, looking at the website that was linked to earlier, I was pretty much spot on with my wild guess; they only guarentee the forest for 99years. At best this scheme is passing the problem to the next generation or two. Maybe that's not such a bad thing though; perhaps by then the problem will be easily solvable. However, I still say it's a bit misleading to offer this as 'carbon neutral travel' (I notice that they too put the neutral bit in inverted comas).

Mark
 tony 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Anonymous:
> (In reply to Jon Dittman)
>
> Actually, looking at the website that was linked to earlier, I was pretty much spot on with my wild guess; they only guarentee the forest for 99years.

This is fair. If things aren't sorted by then, it will take more than forests to put anything right.
Anonymous 23 Aug 2005
In reply to tony:

> This is fair. If things aren't sorted by then, it will take more than forests to put anything right.

Of course, as I said, offsetting the problem is not a bad thing. But, by the end of those 100yrs we'll still have to/ had to deal with the carbon produced by their 'carbon neutral flight'.

They're probabally right to call it carbon neutral; the more people who sign up to it the better (and, I'm sure, fewer people would sign up to 'carbon offset travel'), but I still think it allows people to feel less guilty about air travel than they should.

Mark

 tony 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Anonymous:
> but I still think it allows people to feel less guilty about air travel than they should.
>
Quite agree. There seems to be this idea that planting trees makes it 'alright'. It might salve some consciences, but it doesn't come close to addressing the real issues. It's a bit of a head-in-the-sand idea.

 Tom Briggs 23 Aug 2005
In reply to Mick Ryan:

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in their Marketing Dept. "So, we've got this new design for a jacket, but we've got to make sure we only sell it to people who haven't already got a jacket". It's very clever. The customer pays a premium for their (albeit excellent) product. And then Patagonia donates 1% of sales. You feel good, Yvon gets to surf...the guy's a genius. Can't wait to read his book.

New Topic
This topic has been archived, and won't accept reply postings.
Loading Notifications...