this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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I mean, people should get to experience the wonders of the world around them.
"Sorry, due to the circumstances of your birth beyond your control you only get to experience corn fields and the local grainary. If your parents had more opportunities maybe you would have been born where there's cultural artifacts to experience, diversity and education, but you don't and never will" is a pretty bleak standard.
What if instead of focusing on the people who want to see the world we focus on the people who made it so you can't do so by train or boat?
Being able to go spend a week 5000km away from home at a moment's notice wasn't a thing 100 years ago, it's a privilege, not a right and it's an extremely wasteful privilege that can be afforded by a small minority of the world's population. What you're saying to ridicule what I said is exactly how the vast majority of the world will live their lives.
Exposure to other cultures is extremely important for building a just society. We have other options to make it more sustainable.
Edit: We've always been a mobile species. Sedentary lifestyles are extremely new to us, we are meant to travel and meet others. It's healthy. Otherwise populations get isolated and weird.
Bingo, we don't need everyone to go see with their own eyes the famine happening in a country for it to become something people care about.
You're intentionally missing the point entirely.
We've always been mobile but we've never been that mobile. Traveling thousands of km was a commitment that would take people's months if not years and, again, only an extremely small minority would travel that much in their lifetime, most people never traveled more than tens of km away from home.
Most people lost several children in infancy as well. Appealing to how things were to justify how they should be falls flat.
Why should we return to a world where the people you know as a child are the only ones you ever meet? Why is that better?
We were once less mobile. We also decided that was awful and have consistently found ways to be more mobile. If we're looking to history, we'd be forgiven for taking the lesson as "always find a way to go further, faster". Hell, we invented water vessels so we could travel more than a few hours from drinking water. It used to be that people didn't rip apart the earth to get metal and lay pipes, they just never went more than a few hours from a water source.
The concept of moving water to the people was then an unimaginable luxury and privilege available only to a small minority.
The difference is that tourism is not an essential need, healthcare is. Tourism via air travel is extremely wasteful, in a week of vacation people have the environmental impact equivalent to months of their regular lives.
But hey, guess visiting the world is more important than saving the world!
You're clearly not even interested in reading what's being said.
I'm not interested in people who can't admit that they're defending the destruction of the environment.
"We can do it with more environmentally friendly alternatives!"
Alright, so in the meantime it's still not environmentally friendly so we should stop until it is instead of increasing the demand for air travel (which is what is currently happening).
It sucks that people aren't able to travel wherever they want without crazy emissions, it doesn't mean they get to dodge their responsibilities, they need to make a choice, either they assume the fact that they're part of the environmental problem and stop blaming others or they stop taking airplanes and spend their time closer to home... You know... Just like the vast majority of the world's population!
When did I defend the destruction of the environment?
You're reading a lot of "pro-airplane" sentiment in "we should have more trains" and "I'm more upset with the destruction of American passenger rail than I am with people who want to enjoy our world".
Do you maybe see the difference between "travel at all costs" and "differently directed anger"?
You're defending people's mobility and saying we need more alternative means to do it, no problem with that, the alternatives don't exist at the moment so unless you're against mobility as it's done now until we find better solutions then you're in favor of the destruction of the environment in order to not disrupt the status quo.
People don't get to "enjoy the world" without a thought about the environmental impact that comes with it at the moment. For there to be a world to enjoy, people need to stop taking planes and as long as they take planes then alternatives won't be developed.
I mean, trains exist, they're just not the best in the US.
You also seemed to be okay with driving, which startled me but is definitively a viable alternative in almost all cases.
Given some of your other comments, I think I'm gonna take it as a "no" on the "telling the difference between travel at any cost and being more mad at systems and those who control them than individuals" question.
When you look at fuel economy per passenger a small car with two passengers and a huge truck with four passengers both beat air travel in a plane full of passengers (about 4L/100km/passenger for the plane, which is easy to beat in a car). Add to that the fact that planes don't have the equivalent of a catalytic converter and that emissions at altitude are about twice as damaging... Well, traveling by car is the environmental decision when the alternative is taking a plane, especially for shorter trips as planes waste a ton of fuel for takeoff and landing.
Some people want to travel at any cost, I'm saying they should learn to travel close to home because traveling around the world has a huge environmental impact.
That is not accurate.
Oh really? So back then you could leave your house in France and be in China less than 24h later?
Lmao. Go ahead and sidestep my points entirely, I am not going to waste time on hyperbolic comparisons.
Your disagreed with me saying that people didn't have the mobility we have today, I don't see how I'm sidestepping.
People moved extreme distances in the past and often, there is a lot of evidence for groups and individuals travelling 100s to 1000s of kms. We followed long distance game. We evolved to travel. It was slower but we did it. We can do it now with more sustainable options as I said. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing it faster now. Instead of attacking individuals who want to see the world and experience something different, please for the love of god just attack the oil barrons who we know are holding us all back. They buy up patents for green tech and shelve them. Attacking people like you are doing with hyperbolic false dilemmas does not harm the people who are causing the issue. You are only empowering them, seperating yourself from potential allies and perpetuating ignorance which favours the capitalists. The less you move, the more borders they create.
You don't see a difference between moving long distances because of a nomadic lifestyle and visiting a beach 5000km away from where you live and coming back a week later?
My allies here are the people intelligent enough to realize that tourism as we do it now will never be sustainable, not people trying to justify it any way they can.
The day you make it have zero environmental impact then go ahead, in the meantime you have no leg to stand on because that's not what's happening.
So what if it's new? Medicine that we now consider a basic necessity is newer than airplanes, and a significant portion of the world lives without it.
Something beneficial not being available to everyone isn't an argument to ensure no one has it.
I wasn't ridiculing your position, I was accurately stating how bleak it is. That you acknowledged that it was accurate but thought it was "ridicule" maybe says something about the position.
Very few things are a "right", and being a privilege doesn't make something bad, it just means that it's good and others don't have it.
Society advanced as we work to extend privileges to everyone, and it advanced faster when we take stock of the privileges we've developed and find ways to provide them better.
Air and car travel are resource intensive and dirty ways to travel. Instead of denying people the wonders of the world, we should find ways to provide better solutions to the problem of travel, and leave the intensive solution to cases where it's speed is needed.
Instead of being mad at the family taking a plane to a beach vacation, be mad at the system that made taking the train more expensive.
We should work to enrich the quality of people's lives, not just leave huge deaths of people behind because it's expensive or inconvenient to do otherwise.
Want to enrich the quality of life of people? Stop wasting resources to travel the world, reduce your environmental impact so the people you plan on visiting can keep on living where their currently live.
Are you going to give your phone away and live without?
So I should drive a huge diesel truck without a catalytic converter because if I don't do everything possible I might as well do nothing? Traveling the world is a luxury, get over it.
So, people should stop emigrating? Flying to Puerto Rico to see their families?
If people were responsible enough to take the environmental impact of air travel into consideration when making life choices they might reconsider their decision to move thousands of km away from their family.
Hell, if we just charged them based on the environmental cost they would realize they can't afford it.
No, you should sell your phone, computer and car because if you're that angry about people partaking in luxuries with an environmental impactcand you don't think "less impactful alternatives" are better than entirely forgoing the luxury, then it's hypocritical of you to do anything but walk or bike and eschew optional things with environmental impact.
It's quite specifically that you've been saying that other people should do without rather than doing better, so... You first. You have legs. You can bike. Our ancestors got along with less, so you can sell your car. You don't need a phone. It's a luxury you can live without, so sell yours and get over it.
Doing better is taking vacations close to home, it's not never going on vacation. People have visited 20 countries but have never visited their own country or they make themselves believe that they need to go to Punta Cana once a year to feel good about their life.
The cellphone comparison is keeping the same phone for years (receiving shorter distances in more energy efficient means of transportation) vs changing phone every year (taking a plane to visit another country). Well guess what, I've been using the same phone for years so guess I'm good here.
But you were arguing people shouldn't travel at all, citing our ancestors who lived their whole lives within a few kilometers. Now you're saying people should travel responsibly and live with moderation, which is pretty different from your previous point.
No, I'm saying people shouldn't take planes to travel, it's not normal to expect to travel 5000km as a one week vacation.
Right, which is a big shift from what you were saying before. Your previous position is what caused pushback, not a dislike for the environment.
In any case, I'm glad you've come around.
Why? Our ancestors never worried about environmental impact, and it's clear that the only thing that matters is what we used to do.
Our ancestors used to find themselves in an environment that wasn't good and they'd walk to somewhere that was. Or starve.
Or we could, instead of shitting on people who want to see the world and and enjoy the abilities we've developed to do so, shit on the people who made the "not terrible" ways of doing that impossible.
Ok, so you'll agree that in the meantime people need to stop traveling then? Right? RIGHT?
How far is traveling? What means do you find acceptable? And until when do you mean?
Do I need to wait until I have access to a totally renewable train to go to the nice beach that's a 90 minute drive away? What about the 25 minute drive to the flooded salt quarry that gives everyone a rash due to the stunning population of migratory waterfowl? The 15 minute drive to the park on the river with a vaguely unsettling murk to the water?
Hey, you just mentioned a bunch of destinations that you don't need to use a plane to go to, good job, enjoy them!
Air travel is the issue, not traveling.
You'll have to forgive my confusion and understand why I might have thought you had an issue with travel in general. Writing off trains and boats didn't help either, nor saying that people who wanted to focus on alternatives to air travel were in favor of destroying the environment.