Slow & local travel

Holidays are a break from the normal routine, yet you can break your routine at home or in your local area, it just requires a new perspective.

Ask your friends for their favourite local attractions, hidden pleasures, fabulous festivals and cosmic adventures. Map a slow journey along roads, rivers and coasts that you’ve never travelled and see sights you’ve never seen. If you throw in the cash you save not flying to the other side of the planet, you can even indulge yourself, guilt free. It’s for the environment after all.

Here are some suggestions as to how we can approach holidays from a new and more environmentally friendly direction:Plug into your network. Blast an email to all your contacts asking for their best local holiday tips and you’ll be surprised at the results.

Check out your local parks and nature. See our Immerse Yourself in Nature action.
Take your kids back to your favourite childhood holidays. Returning with your kids to your childhood holiday spots can help you realise that memories are about relationships and emotions not places and things.
Have a holiday at home. Simply relax in your castle and enjoy your family friends and hobbies without having to work.
Ride, walk, boat. Try a cycling holiday, a houseboat cruise or a walk in a national park.
Spend your airfare on yourself. Start to apply the cost of flying overseas to your favourite pastime. So a return flight to Europe equals many hours of music, 40 hours of massages, or a windsurfer, or sponsoring 10 children’s education for a year in a developing country.

Why is this action important?

Long distance air travel and holidays in exotic countries has become a common practice for many. As a result, the contribution of carbon emissions from aircraft to global warming is rising. Reducing the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses entering the atmosphere is critical if we are to address climate change and the environmental havoc it is causing.

Environmental benefit

By reducing the energy and emissions required for us to holiday we directly reduce our contribution to climate change and start to shift our thinking towards “how we can support nature” rather than blithely assuming nature will continue to provide all.

Wellbeing benefit

Air travel emissions are responsible for an increasing proportion of our air pollution and the respiratory ailments it causes (asthma, fatigue, chest infections, etc.). It also causes noise pollution and warps our perspective; we end up placing a higher value on those places furthest from us while the places near us are overlooked.