I have attacked the anti-travel, anti-human environmental lobby on this blog before, but it has to be said that while their motives maybe sinister and their means illiberal, the environmentalists do at least have convictions, which they firmly believe in: human beings are evil and the planet must come first. Right or wrong, that's their opinion and few would deny their right to it (even though climate-change deniers such as myself would be the first up against the wall in a world led by them...)
Last week however the budget airlines that attract so much wrath from the environmentalists were attacked from another angle: the travel industry. Mark Ellingham, the founder of the Rough Guides series, called for an end to 'binge flying' and for 'green levies to be placed on overseas plane trips.'
Ellingham wants no less than a £100 green tax on all European flights, and a £200 tax on long-haul flights. He said "If there was just one thing I could change it would be to stop this new British obsession with binge flying. We now live in a society where, if people have nothing to do on a Saturday night, they fly to Budapest for 48 hours."
The devil is in the last sentence. Ellingham's worries may on the surface be about saving the environment, but they also betray a disdain for the kind of people who fly to Budapest for 48 hours. This middle-class student, backpacker travel snobbism, which turns its nose up at people who go abroad and - shock horror - stay in nice chain hotels, drink imported beer, eat in McDonalds and generally neglect the culture of the places they visit, is fashionable in travel writer circles.
Well, not at In Your Pocket. We think that any society that is egalitarian enough to facilitate almost anybody access to cheap air travel is a successful one. That people can quite literally go to Budapest if they have nothing to do is wonderful. Quite how stopping people doing so would make the world a better place is difficult to comprehend.
It seems doubly ironic that the people of Central and Eastern Europe - discovering cheap travel after decades locked behind the Iron Curtain - are now taking part in an activity that some very comfortable people in Western Europe consider beyond contempt.
Keep flying.
Keep offsetting the offsets.
Monday, May 14
That's Rough
Posted by Pocket Blogger on Monday, May 14, 2007
Etichete: Travel Guides
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1 comments:
What? You're not on the environmentalist bandwagon? Oh, come on, darling... it's really rather 'now' and, you know, sooo cool... get with it like everyone else does. You can offset the not-flying thing by enjoying lovely Fair Trade coffee and shoes and handbags and thingies imported all the way from places like Botzwabie where they treat their slaves properly. And you can drink bottled water, also imported, because it's like so, well, you know... not what the common people drink. And you can listen to your iBlob... you know, the original one, which came in a cubic metre of packaging and had an irreplacable battery. And eat cumquatchacallits (imported, probably) or something exciting and exotic while you decide which of last week's clothes you will throw away in order to buy something new and absaloutely fabulously forgettable. Oh - what a wonderful throw-away environmentalist world we live in... and all without flying.
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