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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
you’ll agree that in the meantime people need to stop traveling then?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.