ROLL ON: Travel In The Age of Climate Change

0:00I want you to pause for a moment because I want to tell you about my friend RJ. Now, you might know this guy as the founder and CEO of Rivian. He's certainly that, but he's really so much more. He's one of those rare people who actually walks the walk. I've watched him over many years, and I know him to be this incredibly deeply committed person, committed to preserving wild spaces while also inspiring people to explore responsibly. And that's basically Rivian in a nutshell. Their mission, keep the world adventurous forever, comes from this understanding that adventure and a healthy planet, these are not separate things.

0:38They're the same thing. Here's what gets me. Every generation deserves wild places to roam, to climb higher, to run farther, to be changed by the journey. But obviously, that's only possible if we're not destroying those places in the process of getting there. So yeah, Rivian builds electric vehicles. But really, they're building something bigger. Momentum toward a future where exploration does not come at the expense of nature, but actually inspires us to protect it. It's like, why create the ultimate adventure vehicle if we're not protecting the adventures themselves? And that's why I'm so proud to align forces in partnership with Rivian.

1:19This isn't just about transportation. It's about building a world worth exploring for our kids, for their kids, and for generations to come.

1:39The Rich Roll Podcast.

1:45Santa Monica. Shit. I'm still only in Santa Monica. Every morning I think I'm going to wake up back in Indonesia, or Myanmar, or Mexico. I lived out of two bags for three years. No fixed address. No fixed anything. Nothing. I hid under tarps to sneak across borders. I tiptoed through minefields. Hitched rides on UN peacekeeper choppers. Now, I've been domesticated. My language skills have frayed. My intestinal bacteria is no longer feral. Even my stubborn insomnia has been fading. I eat better. I think clearer. But I can't help but think I'm getting weaker. softer. I am more fragile. There is no doubt that I've lost something essential to who I am.

2:45Everyone gets everything they want. And I wanted a mission. And for my sins, Rich gave me one. Which is how I decided to bring my whole family down to a remote corner of Mexico. To a coastline. Where climate change and natural disaster. Migration and crime. have hammered the landscape, the economy, and the people who live there. What is happening? Adam. What? I appreciate the creative flair. I don't know how the Rich Roll podcast suddenly got commandeered and turned into the Adam Skolnick travel radio hour. You know, the bougie version of, you know, apocalypse now. Yes, yes. Well, thank you for indulging me, but listeners, this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

3:41This is Roll On 2.0, where we dive into a topic from different angles. And this month, that topic is regenerative travel. It's a great show. It's all coming up in a second, but first.

4:00Adam, you love travel. I do. You're the travel guy. I was. travel as your career path, right? It was, it was. I was for better part of nine years, my main income was Lonely Planet Travel Guide. So I was on the road nine months a year, every year all over the place. And it defined me really, that's what I did. I didn't have a normal life. I didn't have a lot of stuff that I have now for sure. My back door was out into the whole world. Right. Yeah. Certainly I'm somebody who loves travel. I look forward to travel. It's always something that, you know, kind of gets me out of bed, excited about what's to come.

4:34And I think most people love travel, but here we are in 2023. And I think collectively and individually, we're all grappling with, you know, how to be better citizens, how to be more environmentally conscious about our choices, how we spend our time, how we allocate our resources. And travel kind of presents a problem. It's sort of an elephant in the room, something we don't exactly want to acknowledge or confront head on because it's uncomfortable knowing that that wanderlust or that vacation that you've been saving up for or that thing on the calendar that you've been so looking forward to has negative consequences for the planet.

5:20So that's what we're gonna do today. We're gonna talk about it and we're gonna do that through the lens of a question. And the question is, is it possible to travel in a completely sustainable way? And if so, how, and if not, what is the best way to move about the globe? 100%. One thing I never ever once considered was my carbon footprint. I never once considered the environmental aspect of it. Not one time, and I'm an environmentalist. It's something I care about a lot. And not one time did I think that this is unsustainable. there is a cost to this that I'm not acknowledging. Which I think really underscores that elephant in the room thing.

6:00Absolutely. Not only do we not wanna look at it, it doesn't even occur to us, but then we have people like Greta who appear, who decide the only way to get to the United States is by sailboat, right? And then we all just sort of descend into guilt and shame over our own choices. And the solution can't be in martyrdom or just isolationism either, right? Like I think that as a collective, we need to find productive solutions that incentivize travel, but do it with systems that are incentivizing and kind of provoking regenerative solutions along the way as part and parcel of that process. And we're very far away from that right now, but I think it's important to talk about it and to kind of explore what those solutions might look like, what currently exists and what might exist with a little bit more imagination, political, civic, and economic will.

6:59I love it. And so I believe we're going to start with the benefits of travel. Like, what's great about travel? You know, I think through escaping our mundane, are we able to expand our awareness and our consciousness? It opens up your brain to new possibilities. I also think that it makes you more accepting of other people and cultures. It's a way to understand and to see that our truth, it's very different depending the perspective that you see. When you go to other countries, you visit other cultures, you discover that what you have believed for all your life, like it has different angles and that's key for progress.

7:45it's really, it's an expansion of the heart and mind, right? That happens when you have these big experiences. For sure. I mean, incredibly broadening experience. I've been to Beirut twice. I've been to Bahrain. I've been to three cities in Saudi Arabia. And those experiences really changed me and broadened my perspective on the world and on humanity and how to interface with humanity. We all have lots of kind of preconceived judgments and ideas about how people live on the other side of the world. And until you travel there and sit in living rooms and convene with people in analog one-on-one format, you can't truly understand the similarities and the differences, the things that separate us and the things that unite us without that.

8:41So it holds a place of great value for me. And I think a great value in general in terms of the education proposition of travel. I became a writer because I wanted to write my way around the world. That was always the goal. And for me, that's because what I found in myself, my own life, but also I see it is that in our daily lives, especially in the modern world that we live in, and I think it's even worse now with the phones, we are basically like wrapped in this like cellophane. Our feelings become dominant because there's no place for it to breathe and you are who you are. You're fixed in this world and you know where you live so well that you kind of can move like a shark through it.

9:30And for me, what I've found with the best trips, I'm not saying all trips are like this, but the ones where you really immerse yourself are like poking a hole in that cellophane and ripping it open so that you are exposed to the world. And so when that happens, you do come back. There is something that happens that expands your awareness of who you are and a connection to everyone and everything. Cause that oneness is real, like what you experienced in the Middle East or in the Arab world or whatever. That to me is what's so powerful about it. and that's why, you know, tourism is a huge market, right?

10:10Let's face it, like as we talk about it, there's impacts, but there's also benefits. I mean, in 2019, before the pandemic, 10.4 % of the global GDP, that's$9.2 trillion was because of travel and tourism. That's tourism market. I mean, that's huge. 10.6 % of all jobs in the whole world, 334 million jobs is related to tourism and travel. Visitor spending here in the United States, 1.7 trillion in 2019. Now the COVID pandemic happened and things really declined like a 50 % decline or more in some places, many millions of jobs were lost. But what happened when COVID was kind of getting toward, where we decided that we were opening up again is we saw this revenge travel element.

10:56So, you know, it started to bounce back. So there are positive aspects of travel. I think we don't want to overlook. Right. So travel generates money. It generates jobs. It generates economic growth. These are all good things, of course. However... And the United Nations has released a key report on climate change. We need a quantum leap in climate action to combat what we've done. Just one round-trip transatlantic flight emits twice as much carbon dioxide emissions as driving the family car for an entire year. This week alone, more than 90 ,000 people came to Hawaii. As visitor numbers continue to increase, so does the amount of garbage found along our shorelines.

11:41These popular stops are sacred. I hope it's a message to us that we need to do more to save this. 100 % sad, yeah. So obviously there are environmental costs baked into every trip that we take, and we got to reckon with them. And one is the carbon footprint, right? That's the most obvious one. One of the ways to address the carbon footprint is through this thing called carbon offsets. But what are carbon offsets? And are they really effective? There's 100 ,000 flights a day. I don't know if you know that stat. But like every single day around the world, there are 100 ,000 flights. This is Paul Feinstein, prolific travel writer and author of Fodor's Travel Guides.

12:26And I think that accounts for maybe the same amount of pollution that all the cars account for. Like, it's an insane amount of environmental degradation. I hate everything about it. I hate this idea of carbon credits. I think it's bullshit because it's like saying, oh, we can be as polluting as we want over here because we're doing all this good stuff over here. You're not really solving any problem. You're still a problem. them. I've checked out a number of these offset options. It's cheap. Yeah. The thing is like, is this greenwashing just to make us feel better about like jumping on flights here and there?

13:07Or is that really making a difference? Like that's something I don't know the answer to. Right. And I think it depends. You know, the ProPublica did a deep dive into this one market and how basically these contributions were supposed to be preserving and then reforesting an area and it wasn't working. Now to offset a six hour flight, it's like 12 bucks if it's coach, it's like 12 bucks. So it's like, you look at that and you think - How can that be right? Well, you're right. If you look at the cost of the carbon, the amount of people on a plane, how long that flight is, that's how they break it down,$12.

13:53I saw it actually priced at just under$4 as well. But if you look at$12 as like that bottom line, that's so easy. Like you think, well, I wish this was 100 % it worked because it's an easy give. Bottom line is we don't know if the offset thing is productive, is working, especially if you're funneling your money to these organizations online that you've never heard about. And there's just nothing there like the organic label that we can trust yet. It's just not happening. So there isn't some kind of clearing house or place to go where we can say, these are the ones that are doing it right. Right, not that I'm aware of.

14:28I mean, there's some that claim to do it right, but I think this ProPublica story - Which will link up in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, it shows that that's, there's an argument there that maybe it's not working out. The problem is that restoration is kind of complicated and not every tree you plant is gonna survive. And like, you know, it's complicated and it's hard to do. And there's politics in every region that you might wanna do it in. So it's like, the question is, is that ever really a solution or is the solution what kind of Killian came up with? Right, so it's one thing to give lip service to how we think about travel and our environmental responsibility.

15:10and it's another thing to actually like walk the walk, right? And somebody who's walking the walk in a really inspirational way is a friend of the podcast and perhaps the greatest living endurance athlete, our friend, Killian Jornet. But then as athletes, of course, it's all about traveling. And then it's all about moving because races are all over the world. like if you went to the Ventures Projects, and we have the opportunity. And I think for me, the biggest difference, it's been like before I was taking it for granted, like, okay, I can go to race in Malaysia, in Japan, in US, in Australia, in South Africa in a single year.

15:58So I was taking this as something that granted because I was an athlete. While today I think it's precious, like to travel, it means that I will have a footprint. So if I do it, it needs to be something very, very special. So I think in the last years, that's what has changed the most for me. It's to change my way of thinking that I'm doing it, I'm traveling because I can, to I travel as something that I know the harm of it, and I take it as something precious. And knowing that more deeply, like, of course, like I have been seeing like glaciers, disappearing all my whole life and see these effects like all the time.

16:43But to connect that to my daily actions, like it took a period of time. So I would say I still like a big footprint, but I try to limit my international travel to once a year and then try to do the other in so I can like use low emission means to go to the races. Yes. So mad respect for Killian for, you know, basically taking such a hard line and being so intentional about how he is thinking about his travel. That's a guy who probably could be traveling all the time and going to amazing places and doing all these races. And he's like, no, I'm not doing that. Like that's fucking bad-ass, right?

17:28It is, it is. To do that. And I think that it's inspiring for the rest of us that leads us all to be a little bit more mindful and conscientious. Like when I'm thinking about like buying that next airplane ticket, I'm gonna be thinking about would Killian do that? Right. And he would probably say no, right? So I'm gonna think twice. You know, I don't know the answer to that question. I like what Killian had to say though. Like if you limit it to one trip, one big trip, if that's the way you look at things, that makes a lot of sense actually. And you're mindful of where you're going, how long you're going for.

18:04Maybe do that trip, make that a longer trip. I mean, that's kind of a guiding post for me. I'm starting to see and think the same way you are, the way Killian is doing it. Because it makes a lot of sense. He's not just like, he's obviously thought it out and it makes a lot of sense. Right. What about hotels? Yeah. Hotels are a mixed bag because if you look at them, when you have a hotel in a remote location, sometimes depending on the level of investment, that will sometimes necessitate and include sewage treatment, alternative energy sources, landscaping, sometimes natural landscaping. So not all hotel developments is created equal, basically.

18:43The word sustainable is a buzzword, and there's no such thing in the hotel world. So there are hotels that try very, very hard in a lot of different ways, and there are hotels that are being performative. Once again, this is Paul Feinstein. So when I say performative, you'll see hotels saying, oh, you know, we use a specific kind of light bulb and we got rid of single-use plastics and so on and so forth. But then, like, maybe you're at a hotel in Norway and they have mangoes on the menu. Well, you know what don't grow in Norway? Mangoes. And so to get a mango in Norway, it's got to go on a tanker and it has to go a very far distance and it's the least sustainable thing you could possibly do.

19:29Like I haven't seen a hotel figure out laundry yet. Laundry is the least sustainable thing in a hotel. It abuses water. It uses chemicals. There's a ton of waste. The energy it takes to run it is prohibitive. So yeah, I'm seeing some hotels that are really fascinating. You know, they have their own farms and they have, you know, they grow their own produce and their own eggs and their own dairy. But, you know, if it's a five-star location, you really have to educate your guests properly because if that guest wants this thing, they're going to go out of their way to get it. And I don't know, it's just really hard.

20:08Like a hotel, you know, inherently is not a sustainable operation. So, you know, it really depends on the ownership group to really focus on things that are not just performative like single-use plastic. Well, there's also two other interesting ripples here. And a lot of kind of tourist destination towns during the pandemic, a lot of higher net worth people bought up real estate or second homes in these locations to flee their kind of urban primary homes. And that has gone a long way towards driving the cost of living and the cost of housing up such that the support staff can't afford to live in the locations that serve all of these people, right?

20:53Great point. So ski towns, et cetera. And that has created a really unsustainable situation economically. And it's almost kind of like a human rights issue, right? Like if you can't have a community where the people that basically allow the infrastructure to exist, they can't live there. What does that say about your priorities and the long-term viability or health of that community at large? And that's a huge issue. And then the second ripple being the impact that the rise of social media has had on driving trends and travel where such a premium is placed on, getting that perfect shot or that selfie or making that real in that exotic location and how that's driving consumer behavior to kind of maybe travel more than one ordinarily should for the purpose of content creation and external validation and like brand building.

21:58Yeah, it's exactly right. And I even talked to Celeste Brash, a fellow writer for Lonely Planet. So a colleague of mine back when I was doing the Lonely Planet books, I should say, she and I spoke for a while about this concept exactly. I have felt that a lot of the shift in travel has been less of, you know, seeing a country of more like what is there to do in a country rather than what can I learn from a country. And I feel like travel has gotten a lot less expensive. So it's got it's become open to a wider range of people. and it's also become sort of a cool thing to do and Instagram especially obviously is you know people showing the photos of them in these places and going to places just for the gram and all of that it it's really changed the type of traveler like now I see people who are who are really there it's a very self-centered activity where I feel like when I started traveling and sort of up until now, you know, my parents' generation, um, in the sixties and seventies and all of that, um, you know, people were really going to sort of find experiences and meet the people and see different things and see different cultures.

23:14And there are certainly people who are still doing that quite a few, but I feel like the bulk of travelers nowadays or are going, it's all about what is there to do. Like that's what all of my writing, um, guidebooks, everything now has shifted to, you know, not a guide of how to find out things on your own. It's a guide of telling you what there is to do, what you can do to have funds. It feels exploitative to me. So Hugh Garvey, who is now the editor in chief of Sunset Magazine, was my editor at Playboy. And Hugh was the first person that kind of brought to me this concept that travel was broken.

23:52This is like in 2015. And his whole thing was everything's the same everywhere. It's all fucking boring. And so I had to, I had to call him, I had to call Hugh and, and talk about this particular issue because, you know, I know he was early on, on the travel is broken, but also because as the editor of Sunset, he is, you know, helping readers find their way to an authentic experience in the American West. Travel has always been broken. You know, basically the, the vacation was, you know, an invention of the, I believe, you know, late 19th century, you know, post-industrial revolution, people with time on their hands, and then people who wanted to make money off of people with time on their hands.

24:40And so, you know, fast forward to today, we all can travel for relatively cheap from a financial perspective, but at extreme cost to the planet. And, you know, we're such novelty seekers now, both virtually and in real life. And it's almost too easy to go anywhere.

25:14Okay, all of that said, Adam, then why did you embark on this Mexico trip? What was it about this location that captured you and what did you learn through the process? You know, it's this notion of regeneration and could that, which we've seen in agriculture and is now kind of migrating to travel in that space, can that address some of these issues that have made travel, I guess, somewhat broken? So when I hear that word regeneration, first, I wanna understand what you mean by that. And also I can't help but think, is this just a marketing catchphrase that's been diluted and thrown around just to lure tourists into traveling to some place under the auspices of doing good for the world when in truth, it's nothing more than just, you know, business as usual.

26:10Okay, well, I can define regeneration for you, but I think it's probably better to get the guy who wrote the book, Regeneration, you know, Paul Hawken, who you interviewed in episode 627. And so I figure we should just listen to him say it. Yeah, the goat. I define regeneration as putting life at the center of every act and decision. I mean, that's what regeneration is. And so looking through that lens, looking through that, you know, seeing the world that way then allows you to reflect, you know, on what it is you're doing or what it is that you're a part of this being done and how it's being done.

26:49And it doesn't mean leaving it or quitting it. It means, can we change that? Can we change that? So regeneration is really not about blaming and, you know, sort of demonizing, you know, those institutions or those economic sectors so much as saying, wait, can we just stop and go the other way? Can we not regenerate the world and have a GDP and an economy and jobs rather than degenerate it? And the fact is we can. So when we think about solving an intractable problem like global warming, oh my, it's impossible. What can we do? and look at all these mega institutions and political stupidity and ignorance and so forth, but if we step back and say, well, what are the conditions that create self-organization or self-abnegation, that is the destroy that, then that's where we want to go.

27:45And that is the source of change. Right. So I get the idea of regeneration in general, but how does regeneration apply to our relationship with travel? You know, that's a great question, Rich, which is why I spoke with Amanda Ho, co-founder of the Regenerative Travel Group, which is a group of hotels on kind of what makes a certain resort a regenerative resort and what regenerative travel is and does. You know, regenerative travel is fairly still new as a term, but many hotels have been practicing regeneration for many years. They're just not having been calling it that, you know, they call it sustainability or being green or eco.

28:29But we really believe that you can't be regenerative if you're not sustainable, because you have to actually go beyond sustainability to be regenerative. You know, being green or eco is doing no harm. Sustainability is reaching that neutral, but actually regenerating and restoring and replenishing a destination or community or ecosystem is going beyond that threshold of just simply sustaining something. You know, extraction is going to a place and, you know, kind of taking what you can get, you know, from your experience or the destination, but really not giving back to the community in any way.