Holidays - Are they a Right?

I have just had two mini breaks, 4 nights in Italy on Lake Maggiore travelling by plane & 3 nights in The Netherlands (Amsterdam), travelling by Eurostar. I hadn't been abroad since 2019 when I went to Romania. I have travelled a lot to very far flung places in my life. I have also been lucky enough to work for charities in Nepal & Malawi. I do think travelling & experiencing other cultures & environments is important. I have benefited hugely from the experiences I have had. I hope that the countries I have visited have not been harmed by by my footsteps & maybe might have benefited from my presence.

My attitude to holidays as opposed to travel has changed over the years. I no longer think that we have a right to "go on holiday". I think that we have to weigh up the impact tourism has on the world & it's peoples, which is often detrimental in many ways.

 

Relatively wealthy people the world over have come to think that they have a right to go where they want & do what they want. They deserve it, they can afford it. We think that we need a break & in order to achieve that we need to go somewhere else, where the weather, the landscape, the food, the culture is different. I think we need to re-think that attitude in light of the many issues that surround mass travel. 

I live in Oxford. I rarely go into the centre of this lovely city because of the huge numbers of temporary visitors on the streets. We have students in the university. We have language students. We have tourists. The University alone has 26,000 students. We have 18 English language schools with thousands of students. The visitor population is approximately 8 million per year. That is a lot of people who often walk around in big groups & block the pavements. 

I accept that they also generate a lot of income too. But they use infrastructure & services & cost us money. They use up accommodation & make Oxford on a par with London for housing costs. Not only is it difficult to walk around Oxford because of pedestrians & bikes, it is also a horrendous traffic jam whichever way you enter or leave the city. 

Then there are the elephants in the room. The Climate Emergency - Pollution, Population increase, Species & Habitat destruction, Water pollution & scarcity, Extreme weather events, Supply chain issues, Food security....

I simply don't think we can ignore this any longer. We humans cannot continue to think in terms of our rights to do what we want. We have to start accepting that we each need to change the way we live our lives. It simply isn't sustainable. It is an existential threat.