Systems have always backboned travel. Thomas Cook organized a charter for his temperance travelers in 1841 by rail. He then packaged together transportation, lodgings, and food service for tours worldwide. AAA in the States has transitioned road trip planning from analog Triptychs to digital.
Marriott leads among chain hotels that rely on multiple brand systems to keep travelers of all sorts loyal. All-inclusive resorts like Sandals at exclusive and often remote beachfronts around the Caribbean rely on digital systems across island nations to supply labor and food for their cloistered clientele. Hurtigruten depends on a network of shoreside agents to keep its Norwegian cruise-ferry itineraries seamless.
The Deep Nearby introduces a new and different system to leisure travel that serves as climate action. Motivated travelers find easy access to places that have transitioned to climate action or are significantly on their way. Governmentally authorized hotel bed taxes are available to fund the pairing that matching grants can satisfy — the golden bullet for marketing travel in our time.
The Deep Nearby has moving parts, but their sequence is as organic as maturation. Consider how a nonprofit or a group working together would make this work.
The playing field
First, let’s note that many nonprofits have already staked positions in this field. The Center for Responsible Tourism (CREST) is respected and well connected in destination tourism strategies, including certification that it conducts with the Global Destination Stewardship Council (GSTC), that different from CREST, hides much of its work behind a membership paywall. CREST also has led formation of the Future of Tourism Coalition to chart a way for tourism to become sustainable in the paradigm shift from Covid-19 to Climate Change. Hundreds of NGOs, companies and consultants have signed on, though a work plan, funding and staff have yet to be worked out. GSTC is the Coalition’s default adviser. In any case, both NGOs are destination focused, and that leaves a circle unclosed.
Of more interest are two nonprofits that have next to no stake in tourism. The Rocky Mountain Institute conducts innovative research into alternative energy that some years ago included a collaborative stab with a UN agency into a green hydrogen ferry service in the Eastern Caribbean. .
Project Drawdown is the global initiative that works to curb the rise of greenhouse gas emissions and actively turn the numbers downward. It measures five categories of initiative. These are electricity, buildings and materials, food and agriculture, land sinks, and transportation.
Why does neither engage tourism?
Although universities offer advanced degrees in travel and tourism led by scholars of endowed chairs, and despite tourism’s top contributions to the GNP of many states, tourism lacks intellectual mettle. It’s itself a patchwork of Drawdown’s fields of priority inclusion.
It also gets overlooked in serious discussions of drawdown because it’s driven by passions: by wanderlust, by appetites both licit and illicit, and always by sexual images. It’s escape, isn’t it, but economics isn’t dubbed ”the dismal science” for its playfulness.
How it works
In the first instance, The Deep Nearby is meant to be a North American and not a global network. It’s not “pay to play.” It’s in no way sinister.
It starts by recognizing that almost no place that travelers come from — urban and affluent — don’t also welcome visitors for the economic and job benefits. They know the downsides of how tourism drives unwise land use in rural and transitional areas that still cry for conservation, crowds restaurants, turns housing into short-term rentals that upset neighborhoods. Gen X and Zoomers bear the burden that climate action has to be all-inclusive and socially fair.
So The Deep Nearby helps connect people committed to climate action ready to spend money in places where public policy defines at least aspects of hospitality even if not certified. The test is more simply whether the place is greenwashing or acting honestly. If it’s everybody’s job to meet global climate goals, why wouldn’t a new climate-assertive system of hospitality make sure it’s known about?
It’s the magic of leisure travel that it’s one of those purchases that FedEx doesn’t deliver. We ship ourselves. Economists call travelers “exports”. But as climate actors, we show up in the least troubling way. Of course, we can do this by cycling or by hiking networks of trails that proliferate everywhere and keep us outdoors all the way.
But private sector innovation opens up new systems of rail, like Brightline up from Miami across Florida to Orlando and soon to Tampa; new hydrogen-powered technology that will power cruise ferries of Explora Journeys starting in 2028, and new designs for comfort of electric wide-windowed buses like Jet that operates between New York City and Washington, D.C. that “open” windows across where we travel.
E-cars and vans can carry us for shorter distances to places revealed by altogether new experiences — by displays of cultural intimacy derived from “where the locals hang out” that locals find themselves willing to share with travelers of mutual global values. And always at lodgings scaled to their vicinities, to locally sustainable systems.
Mindset is everything.
It’s where the swift transition over landscapes that air travelers experience instead become entire shores, islets, estuaries, peninsulas, field and forts of legend — of greenhouse nations, we are reminded, like Brazil under extractive violence that fight for political direction at the brink of doom, and our own.
And the other piece
It’s simple enough for an identified network of qualified places to make itself known. Surely the marketing wizardry exists.
An RMI, a Project Drawdown, the League of Cities, an association of counties, a humanities council or some mix would become lead advocates by two steps. None has a stake in mass tourism. The three necessary steps?
1. Appoint a panel of experts to adopt criteria that qualify places/destinations as significant achievers in climate policy. Panelists would include architects and artists, ethicists, ethnographers, geographers, estimable travel journalists planners, representatives of nonprofits that advance social justice, housing, and safe streets — the advocacy body will know best. Travel industry and marketing interests would be included but should not lead. Chosen places might include neighborhoods, towns, regions, events and more that otherwise measure up. Awards can be given.
2. Measuring up would also include criteria for how such places hold themselves out, e.g., by direct messaging at their governmental home pages or at least by prominent reference to destination subsites, or by the latter alone with the right message-making about neighborhoods, districts, and qualifying events. Places that show promise at random include New Zealand, the Rupununi of Guyana, Gothenburg, Sweden; Denmark, the Balkans, New Mexico, Gainesville/Alachua County, Wakulla County, Florida as well as Florida Parks, the two Portlands, the National Park System, National Wildlife Refuge system, the system of National Heritage Corridors.
3. Establish an interactive forum that keeps travelers and destinations in touch.
The point is to communicate information by thoughtful media use. The right advocacy leader will have no problem gaining attention to the new site. Integrity will attract myriad collaborators. People want to continue to travel. Places nearby want to shape deep experiences for them. Climate action is where the world comes back together.
We’ll look at how the connections are working in a next posting.
Notes
https://www.responsibletravel.org/what-we-do/responding-climate-change/
https://robbreport.com/motors/marine/explora-journeys-hydrogen-cruise-ships-1234697332/
https://davidsuzuki.org/living-green/air-travel-climate-change/
https://www.hotel-online.com/press_releases/release/connecting-people-places-planet-with-the-future-of-tourism/ Expedia travel research ciited or 2023 fully supports my analysis but is not an alternative system to what I propose because its business model relies on booking hotel rooms in bulk for resale.
https://www.newzealand.com/us/
https://guyanachronicle.com/2022/04/17/rupununi-can-be-among-worlds-most-powerful-tourism-products/ . . . https://tourismguyana.gy/conservation-and-sustainable-tourism-in-the-rupununi/
https://thesustainableagency.com/blog/most-sustainable-city-in-the-world-gothenburg-sweden/
https://www.thebalkansandbeyond.com/eco-friendly-travel-through-the-balkans/
https://www.visitportland.com/
