2019: The year of sustainable thinking

Here we are again, at the end of another 365-day trip around the sun together, another year-long stay on the rooftop of our planetary hotel. It's an artificial, human-centric end, of course, but the eve of a "new" year is as good a time as any to stop, sit under a tree and check our internal compasses again.

A new dawn, in Turkey

Are we still on track? How far back was the last trail-marker? Sometimes it can feel as if we're adrift in an oceanic universe, without signposts to guide us. Most importantly, have we left the places we've been better than we found them?

It's been a big year, globally and personally, and I feel equal parts anxious and hopeful on this last day of 2019.

Anxious about the state of the world, including Australia, much of which is still in deep drought and on fire as I write this. Hopeful because good things are happening too, people power is growing - and Greta Thunberg was just named TIME magazine's Person of the Year. (Watching her "How dare you" speech to the UN was one of the most heart-wrenching moments of 2019.)

Greta the great, keeping it real

We still have a long way to go to turn this earth-ship around, but it's heartening that more of us are now talking about the climate crisis and finding new ways to live more sustainably.

Sustainable writing
One of the things I'm grateful for this year is that demand for sustainable travel stories has been at an all-time high, allowing my love of travel and my desire for a simpler, more sustainable life to make friends with each other.

2040, most inspiring book of 2019

I wrote about overtourism and 10 unsung destinations such as Jordan and Turkey and how to be an "untourist" in Venice. About "green lands", countries like Costa Rica and Bhutan that are doing good things for the planet; and 5 ways to avoid buying plastic bottles when you can't drink the tap water.

There were stories about sustainable moves airlines are making and what sustainable travel in 2020 and beyond looks like. I even interviewed 10 environmental advocates about where they go on holiday (and found out what they really think about flight-shame).

The power of seven
I also got to write more about tiny houses, which brings me to my last list for the year: seven low-impact highlights of 2019...

Tiny house #3 (pic by Unyoked)

1. My first tiny-house stay. After obsessing about tiny houses for the past couple of years, I finally got to sleep in four of them on a Goldilocks-esque tiny house tour of regional NSW and Victoria in February.

Officially, I was on assignment for Traveller to report on the new "tiny house stay" phenomenon - and to review all four tiny houses for this blog (starting with Edmond in the NSW Southern Highlands). But it was really a personal quest to experience tiny life first-hand, if only for a few days. The good news: climbing ladders to loft beds only fuelled my desire to live in a tiny house one day soon.

Beached in the Mergui islands

2. Low-impact trips. Changes in the travel industry have meant it's now easier than ever to build sustainable elements into my trips. So in addition to hiking Japan's little-known Tokaido trail in March and kayaking Myanmar's remote Mergui islands last month, I stayed in minimalist hotel rooms in Tokyo and Bangkok and did Intrepid's deliciously new vegan tour of northern Italy.

3. People power. At home, I got involved in more eco-events than usual, from tree-planting days in Lennox to Sustainable House Day, the Brisbane Eco Expo and, most inspiring of all, the Global Climate Strike in September.

I would have loved to have been one of the 80,000 people striking in Sydney or the 100,000 in Melbourne, but even at the relatively small Lismore strike it felt amazing to be part of the largest climate mobilisation in history. A record 7.6 million people protested for climate action across the world. Power to the people!

Butcher bird with a message

4. Finding peace. One of my favourite trips this year was an opportunity to review Eden Health Retreat in south-east Queensland. It came at just the right time; I'd been feeling burned-out (even travel writers get the blues) and Eden pressed "reset" on my life. It was the most nourishing week I've had in a long time.

Silk rug soft as butterfly wings

5. I won, I won! In October, while I was walking barefoot on Turkish rugs in Istanbul, I won the ASTW's Travel Writer of the Year award for the fifth time - which felt especially good after struggling with anxiety-depression a bit this year. And more goodness came when I got to celebrate with my travel mates at an ASTW lunch in Sydney earlier this month.

6. Singing therapy. Here's something you might not know about me: I like singing. Just for myself, or with a friend or two. But in July this year I stepped out of my introverted comfort zone and sang three songs with Mr No Impact Girl at a local open-mic night called Tintenbar Upfront. After a shaky start and cotton-wool-mouth nerves, it was a new kind of fun, but the biggest high came afterwards, just from taking the leap ("daring greatly" as Brene Brown would say; yes, I love her).

7. A month of simple Sundays. One of the things that brought me joy this year was creating and self-publishing this little book of mostly prose pieces I wrote on idle Sunday afternoons in the outdoors over the past couple of years.

Since launching it last month I've been bowled over by how well it has been received. From my local book store and art gallery both wanting to sell it, to friends ordering multiple copies to give to their friends, people have been genuinely touched by it, which warms my heart.

Barefoot, outside and ready to write

Part of that, I think, is because it's about the simple, grounding, peace-giving experience of being in nature - something we can all relate to. Something that's increasingly important in this anxious age we live in.

So my 2020 wish for you is that you get the chance to gather ordinary moments in nature this coming year, as many as your senses can carry, share them with others and hold them close. Because the more connected we feel to the planet, our living life-support system, the more motivated we are to act in its best interests.

Here's to a peaceful, plastic-free, low-carbon year for you all, wherever you happen to be. And, as always, thanks for reading and for doing all you do to live and travel more simply. Meet you back here in the new year, ok?

Barefoot writing: "A month of simple Sundays", my new book

I'm excited to announce the quiet launch of a little project I've been working on: a new book, in fact, unlike any other I've written. It isn't about travel. It's not a guide. It's still non-fiction, sort of.

A month of simple Sundays is an accidental collection of 30 prose pieces (and a few poems) written on idle Sunday afternoons with a pen on paper outdoors, mostly while looking at the sea, for no one but me - until now.

It's illustrated by Melbourne-based artist Kia Maddock, who was living in northern NSW at the time and did many of the drawings in the places where I wrote the words. (I did a few of the drawings too.)

It might be a new book, but writing short pieces, by hand, is something I've been doing for a long time - at least since I was 12 when an uncle gave me my first diary and set me on the journal-writing path. I still believe there's something powerful about writing by hand. Part creative expression, part therapy, it grounds me and help me know how I am inside.

Sunset pandanus, one Sunday

It also helps me reconnect with where I am. Writing helps me get my bearings, recalibrate my internal compass, find my feet - which, when I'm writing like this, are usually shoeless and buried in the grass.

Here's a bit about the book:

"It started a few years ago. Whenever I was free on a Sunday afternoon, which was deliberately often, I'd set off with a small bag containing a notebook, a pen and maybe a thermos of tea, in search of a quiet natural spot to write. My intention was simple: to find my way back to what's real, by which I mean whatever is going on right now, in and around us, wherever we find ourselves. 

"One night on a whim, I read a few of these short pieces to someone I love and he loved them so much I thought I'd put them together into a little book for him. Then the idea grew and before I knew it I had this collection, a month of Sunday writings, lightly edited and presented in no particular order, all written during solitary sessions on windswept headlands in Sydney and on [Australia's] NSW north coast, where I now live."

Bare feet are happy feet

And a sample piece of Sunday writing:

"Bare feet listening to the drought-dry grass tell its survival story. Living things want to live, without having to know it. What wants to be written today, seen and listened to? The curled-up feeling not sure of its own name. The animal impatience wanting to not live corralled by schedules and deadlines. The angel-winged serenity letting go, letting go, wanting only peace, everywhere. The wind blows again and leaves only this fluttering on the page, a streamer of letters tossed into the air to mark the occasion, celebrate the fact that Look! I was witness to this window of time left ajar and everything I saw made me want to keep looking and to pick up the streamers and show them to you. Here, see what I saw?"

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Paper daisy, wild and free

A month of simple Sundays is available here on the Blurb bookstore, where you can read a 15-page preview. More information on my Books page.

Inside us all is a creative light that wants to shine and be seen. Thanks so much for supporting mine by reading my writing here and elsewhere.

Travel Writer of the Year - again!

For the past three days I've been jumping up and down inside like Olive in Little Miss Sunshine, because on Saturday night I won the Australian Society of Travel Writers' most prestigious award: Travel Writer of the Year.

Aloft in Turkey - instead
 of attending awards night 

It's a big honour and feels so good to be recognised by my peers. Freelance travel writing can be a lonely art sometimes - most of the time we travel solo and there's all that solitary writing time - but moments like this remind me that I'm part of a wonderful community of writers and travel media people which has been my surrogate family for more than 20 years.

The awards are open only to members of the ASTW, i.e. only to professional travel writers, so there's some stiff competition. The other two finalists for this award were actually two of my friends; one of them, Catherine Marshall, won the award last year AND the year before.

I've won this award four times before myself, but the last time was in 2013 so I was pleasantly surprised just to be a finalist this year. I certainly didn't expect to win. I still can't really believe it.

It's judged on a portfolio of each writer's three best published stories for the year, so I thought I'd share the links to mine here, all published in Traveller, in The Sydney Morning Herald:

Tamang kids, Nepal

High hopes in the Himalayas: my Nepal cover story about a new 15-day trek run by Intrepid Travel to help people in the Langtang Valley recover from the devastating 2015 earthquakes.

The call of the high: an essay about why we climb mountains, seek out rooftop bars and choose window seats when we travel.

Kyushu's sacred mountain hike: a story about a 10-day walk I did late last year on the remote Kunisaki Peninsula in Kyushu with Walk Japan.

As fate - and an assignment from Traveller - would have it, I was in Turkey until yesterday and couldn't attend the ASTW awards night in Cairns last weekend. So the ASTW Committee asked me to send my acceptance speech by video. Here's the result (I'm better in print!), shot in a little antique shop and cafe in Istanbul where I'd stopped for a tiny cup of Turkish coffee:

Big thanks again to the ASTW and the judges and award sponsor Visit USA, and to everyone who sent lovely messages via Facebook, which made my brief layover in Singapore's Changi airport the best ever. And now that I'm home I can jump up and down on the outside too.

Tiny house review: Unyoked's Micah "hideout"

Tiny houses are the future. There, I said it. And not just for living in. Ever since tiny houses started colonising travel a few years ago, tiny low-impact weekenders have been sprouting up everywhere - and by "everywhere" I mean places so off-grid all your phone is good for is as a paperweight while trying to read a book outdoors.

Bed by Unyoked (and pic)

This post is about one of the "tiny house stay" pioneers - Micah, by Unyoked - and it's the final episode in my Goldilocks series reviewing four "tiny house stays" I experienced earlier this year.

(If you missed the others, they were: Edmond, just south of Sydney, Tallarook Tiny Home on the NSW south coast and Fred's Tiny House in Castlemaine, Victoria. And for more on the whole "tiny house stay" thing, see my tiny house travel story in Traveller.)

Unyoked origins
Tiny house stays officially arrived in Australia when twin brothers Cam and Chris Grant quit their corporate jobs in Sydney and set up Unyoked in 2016.

Cam & Chris in Unyoked country

Inspired by the sense of freedom and adventure they felt as kids when camping and hiking, they built the first architect-designed tiny houses for rent and put them on privately owned wilderness blocks a couple of hours from Sydney and Melbourne. But these weren't just escape hatches from modern life.

"It's not just about renting tiny houses," says Cam. "We want people, through our experience, to realise that sitting at a desk for eight to 10 hours a day, answering emails in bed and feeling guilty for taking that one trip at the end of the year isn't the way we have to live.

"I think collectively we're starting to realise that and more and more of us are looking to get back to simpler times, to reconnect with nature and get off-grid once in a while."

Country Victoria roads...

Meet Micah
Just getting to Micah, one of Unyoked's six tiny houses, felt like a small adventure, despite it being only an hour from Melbourne. Mr No Impact Girl and I drove along dirt roads under Simpsons-blue skies dotted with fluffy clouds, through five farm gates, past sheep and windmills.

Parking inside the last gate, we loaded our bags and an esky into a little black wagon, and trundled down the hill to where Micah sat - in a paddock ringed by gnarled old eucalypts beside the bone-dry Campaspe River. A few lonesome crows provided the outback soundtrack.

There she is! (Because like ships,
tinys are always girls)

One of the best things about the Unyoked experience is that there's no one to meet you when you arrive.

You probably won't see another human being during your stay, in fact (except the one you brought with you) or anything man-made.

This is why Unyoked calls its tiny houses "cabins" or "hideouts". As Cam Grant explains: "What we're trying to do is emulate the experience of hiking through a forest and finding your own cabin in the woods."

Micah's minimialist facade

Bed + moon
First impressions: Micah is the epitome of simple, basically an off-grid wooden box, on wheels cleverly concealed by stacked campfire-wood. It also has a flat roof instead of the storybook gable roof seen on most tiny houses.

Most different of all, there's no loft bed. Instead the queen bed is at waist-height, a signature Unyoked feature. Much as I love the cubbyhouse feeling of climbing a ladder to bed, I also loved this bed-couch-daybed. Plus it was flanked by two enormous picture windows that brought the outdoors in.

Happiness is a sunny bed

So you can curl up with a cup of tea or your favourite person, or both, and watch the wind dancing in the trees, the sheep grazing, those crows flying by.

In other words, you can be inside and still keep abreast of what's going on in the real world, i.e. outside.

Even after dark. That night, after an early dinner, we lounged in bed and watched the best show in town: the full moon rising from behind the nearest hill. The next morning we saw the sequel, also from bed: a spectacular sunrise.

(Since our stay, Unyoked has made their beds even more comfy with mattresses by Koala, which donates part of its profits to koala conservation, and In Bed natural bed linen.)

A cabin of wood + light

A Scandi-Japanese cabin
Beyond the bed, Micah's plywood interior gives it a cosy, cabin-y feeling, a nod to Unyoked's Scandi-Japan design ethos. There's plenty of natural light - from the sliding door, those two picture windows and another window over the sink.

I loved the minimalist kitchen with its camping-esque gas cooktop and white enamel plates, bowls and cups.

Wine supplied (for a price)

Micah had possibly the best reading matter of all the tinys I stayed in: a stack of Penguin paperbacks including Call of the Wild and Picnic at Hanging Rock (because Hanging Rock is just down the road), two cabin-themed photo books and a "Field Guide" full of need-to-know guest info.

Other thoughtful touches included: hot water bottles for cold nights, a couple of yoga mats, loose leaf tea and coffee beans - plus a grinder, a plunger and an aeropress coffee maker. And there were "provisions" (with price tags) such as wine and pancake kits.

The only bit I wasn't crazy about was Micah's bathroom. Everything necessary was there - composting toilet, hot shower, handbasin. It just looked like an afterthought, a sort of in-house outhouse.

Barefoot on prickly grass

The verdict
Micah's location and non-loft bed are its winning features and I love that Cam and Chris are thinking outside the hotel room box, curating experiences with a sense of fun and creativity.

Most importantly, they really deliver on the "unyoked" promise: helping you step away from the striving-working-busy vehicle and surrender to a slower way of being in the world, if only for a night or two.

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Micah's sunset view

How to do it: Unyoked's six tiny houses - three near Sydney and three near Melbourne - are about to get 15 new siblings. Within the next 12 months there'll be three more each outside Sydney and Melbourne, the rest near Brisbane and Canberra, in northern NSW and in Tasmania. See unyoked.co

While you're there: Kyneton is cute as a button that's fallen off your favourite shirt. Only an hour's drive northwest of Melbourne, and situated in the beautiful Macedon Ranges, it's country and creative in equal measure. Loved The Town Roaster, a retro-style cafe with crazy-good coffee and sugar-free treats and The Hamster, for vegetarian fare. At Mineral Springs Park you can fill your bottles with mineral water, for free. Hanging Rock (of Peter Weir's "Picnic at" fame) is 10 minutes away. And on hot summer days you can cool off with a swim at two nearby waterfalls: Trentham and Turpin's.

Gratitude: Thanks to Unyoked for hosting us for a night at Micah. I can recommend their free weekly "Dispatches" too, creative emails bearing tiny-related news items like "why silence is good for your brain".

2040: The most inspiring book you will read this year (or ever)

This time last week, before the delegates at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York sat down to talk about solutions to the climate crisis, before they even heard Greta Thunberg's powerful "How dare you" speech, they watched a few clips from an Australian movie.

Seen the doco?
Now read the book

2040, a documentary released earlier this year and directed by Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau, was projected onto the walls of the stately UN General Assembly Hall and introduced by lead Paris Agreement negotiator Christiana Figueres. (It was screened in full at the UN Youth Climate Summit later in the week.)

If you haven't seen it, this eco-doco is a fascinating fast-forward glimpse at a best-case-scenario future Earth.

Inspired by the birth of his daughter Velvet, Damon (best known for That Sugar Film) spent three years visiting 14 countries and interviewing hundreds of scientists and other experts about innovative ideas and technologies that currently exist (no pie-in-sky stuff allowed) to present an intelligent guess about how life on Earth could be 20 years from now.

Damon and Intrepid marketing
guru Gillian Monaghan

He offset all his travel emissions, by the way, with carbon credits and by planting a small forest in northern NSW near where he lives with Velvet and his partner Zoe. And because one of 2040's partners was Intrepid Travel, a carbon-neutral BCorp I often work with, I was invited to help plant some of those trees - which will hopefully sequester 90 tonnes of CO2 by 2040.

Here's something Damon said that chilly winter's morning when we were all taking a break, which neatly sums up the film's ethos:

Velvet, Zoe + Damon

"If you go beyond that dominant discourse in the media, there's hope everywhere. It's everywhere. The spotlight is on this tiny little part of the stage, but if you look in the shadows and the wings, there's magic happening. So we need to get that spotlight THERE and get people to be inspired by what is actually going on."

Now 2040 is a book too, a beautiful 300-page "Handbook for the Regeneration" and it's hands-down one of the most inspiring reads I've had in a long time.

I borrowed it from my local library and was so tempted to dog-ear pages and write in the margins and underline poignant quotes and interesting stats and handy tips that I'm thinking of buying a copy to keep and keep referring back to.

What to eat for soil health

The book opens with a tear-out (I resisted the temptation) Household Checklist, 13 simple things we can all do to reduce our impact right now, such as: grow your own food (growing a kilo of veggies sequesters 2kg of emissions) and change your search engine to Ecosia (done! Ecosia uses ad revenue to plant trees for online searches).

After a foreword by Paul Hawken, founder of Project Drawdown, 2040 is divided into sections about Energy, Transport, Drawdown & (carbon) Sequestration and Consumption.

Each section ends with "More reasons for hope" about sustainable things happening all over the world, and suggested things we can do now to help in our homes, offices and communities.

There's info on carbon-sequestering foods, environmentally friendly fabrics (hemp and linen are top of the clothes heap), "environmental dashboards" being installed in communities to give live feedback on energy consumption, and how to envision the Earth as a doughnut (to understand how climate solutions benefit everybody).

Some of the best quotes come from Paul Hawken, particularly in relation to Project Drawdown, which has been developing a map of the top 100 solutions to reverse global warming - such as empowering girls and women, reforestation, reducing food waste, regenerative agriculture, solar farms and plant-rich diets.

A page of youthful wisdom

It's all so easy to read and gorgeously put together with plenty of colour images and illustrations and quotes from some of the 80 children Damon interviewed in various cities around the world, all aged between six and 11.

There are interesting stories about everything from the origins of Monopoly to Earth Overshoot Day in various countries (Australia uses its share of the world's resources by March 31 every year, apparently), as well as insights into how things went awry in the first place.

My favourite bits were about the rise of regenerative agriculture (eight of the top 20 solutions to the reverse global warming are food-related, apparently) and the "seaweed solution" - which Damon calls "the simplest, cleanest, least political and most inspiring" he'd seen on his whole 2040 journey.

Here's his educated rave about it:

"Seaqueen" is the future

"If I told you that this one solution could potentially draw down staggering amounts of carbon, restore marine ecosystems, provide enough seafood (brimming with healthy omega-3 fatty acids) for 10 billion people... cool the waters over coral reefs to help prevent bleaching, plus provide a material to make plastics and clothing, feed cattle to dramatically reduce methane emissions and provide a biofuel for energy, you'd probably say, 'This sounds like some Silicon Valley, Elon Musk-funded, Richard Branson award-winning miracle.'

"And I'd say: 'Nah, it's just seaweed.'" (Or "seaqueen" as he now refers to it.)

Lentil stew, mmm

The book ends with 50 delicious recipes, and cooking tips, based around ingredients that sequester carbon and replenish the soil - how many cookbooks do that?

Like I said, inspiring. 2040 is a book everyone should read, really. Pass it on. Tell your friends about it, buy a copy and share it around, ask your local library to order a few copies so more people can read it.

It's all about the collective consciousness: the more of us thinking this way, the sooner this Earthship of ours will set a new course for a brighter, healthier future for us all.

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Big thanks to Intrepid Travel for the movie ticket for 2040; Intrepid also gave free tickets to school students all over Australia on 2040's opening weekend earlier this year. 2040 is now available for community and school screenings and the What's Your 2040? website has clips from the film as well as plenty of sustainable living tips.

What Bob Brown said (at the TravelDAZE sustainable travel event)

One of the highlights of attending Travel Weekly's TravelDAZE sustainable travel event a couple of weeks ago was seeing Bob Brown, former Greens senator and long-time environmental campaigner, in person, and listening to his inspiring keynote speech. In his trademark regional Australian drawl he didn't pull any punches about the predicament we earthlings are facing right now, but he was also full of informed hope and fired-up to do something about it. 

How great is Greta?

I'm thinking about Bob this week because there's a Global Climate Strike happening next week, on Friday 20 September 2019. Unlike other climate action strikes inspired by Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who kicked things off in August last year by skipping school every Friday to stage a one-girl protest outside Sweden's Parliament, this one isn't just for students. 

It's for everyone, of all ages, all over the world. And if earlier climate strikes are anything to go by, it's going to be huge. I'm going to the Global Climate Strike in Lismore, my nearest city (there'll be strikes Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane; find other cities worldwide here). I thought I'd share Bob's talk here, to get us all in the climate-action mood. 

Here's a lightly edited transcript of what Bob Brown said at TravelDAZE on 28 August with some of his own pictures of natural places he loves. (Who knew one of Australia's best-known conservationists was also an accomplished photographer?)

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Bob Brown - pic by New Matilda

"I’m Bob. I was first hit by conscious awareness at Trunkey Creek on the old Coachy Road between Bathurst and Goulburn. My dad was the local policeman, my mum had come off a dairy farm and she said, 'Whatever you do, look after nature' and it’s been with me ever since.

The word ‘sustainability’ of course comes from Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Norwegian Prime Minister, who was commissioned by the United Nations in the 1980s to look at the fact that humanity seemed to be overshooting its ability to live within the bounds of the planet. She talked about the need for us to have a sustainable relationship with this little earth of ours. Since then, we’ve had 2 billion more mouths to feed.

Some time after Gro Harlem Brundtland’s time, we reached 100 per cent use of the living resources of the planet. We’re now at 170 per cent. That's why every morning we wake to fewer forests, fewer fisheries, less arable land, more mouths to feed, to a million species facing extinction and the extinction rate now over 10,000 times the background extinction rate from natural attrition – due to the fact that the planet cannot deal with nearly 8 billion of us.

There were just two and a half billion of us when I was at Trunkey Creek and we're headed for 12 billion this century, with everybody wanting to consume more on a finite planet that simply doesn’t have more to give.

Bob & Stop Adani activists

So we’re in the greatest crisis of human time. It’s not coming. We’re in it. And yet today we have Australia’s minister for resources saying that coal is a great product and the more we can sell of it the better. 

While up at the Adani mine site in central Queensland, which has now been given the go-ahead by the environment ministers in Canberra and in Queensland, the Wangan and Jagalingou people, headed by elder Adrian Burragubba, are calling for people to go and camp with them on that site - I'll be going up there - to protect their sacred lands, which have songlines going right down the Darling River and through to the ocean, which the Adani mining operation will destroy if it goes ahead. 

And if the rest of the Galilee Basin is opened up, this will more than double the Australian greenhouse gas output into our atmosphere, when Australia is already the worst polluter per capita on the planet as we’re also the richest people per capita ever to have existed on this planet. 

I’m just stating the reality of the crisis that we are in because it is time for action.

But I want to come to the matter before us, which is tourism.

Tarkine forest, Tasmania
Pic by Bob Brown

Last year, a friend of mine took a busload of 17- and 18-year-olds from Shanghai out to the great forests of Tasmania and had trouble getting them out of the bus because they had never been in a natural environment in their lives and they were frightened of what might happen to them. 

We’re now in a world where there may be 50 cities of between 20 and 50 million people, most of them not able to get an experience in a true natural environment in the next couple of decades. What to do about this?

The spread of human beings across the planet is of course disastrous for natural environments, and if there’s one thing I do today it’s make a plea for our national parks. 

After decades of people putting themselves in front of bulldozers – Margaret Thorsborne, who was 91 when she died last year, there’s a famous picture of her, this woman with her handbag over her arm standing against the bulldozers at Hinchinbrook Island where a developer was coming in to clear the mangroves 20 or 30 years ago – today we’re not only needing to protect what is left of nature, and there’s quite a lot, but we need to consolidate the protection of the areas that are protected because they’re being invaded. 

Nature-based tourism is such a fabulous part of the human endeavour because it does bring us back to what's important. There are the great cultural icons of the world of course, the human-based manifestations of creativity, although Gaudi, the great Barcelonian architect who designed the Familia Sagrada, that great cathedral which after 120 or 130 years is nearing completion now, said that all human creativity comes from the great book of nature. It’s nature, of which we are part, on this finite planet, that we have to protect.

Bob Brown's tourism action plan

I've put together a list of things we might do (see pic, right). I’ll pick a couple out.

One is: Pay proper respect to the indigenous people left in their indigenous lands and that includes the Wangan and Jagalingou people who are calling on people around the world to sit with them, to protect their sacred lands [against the Adani coal mine] because it is part of the sacred planet for which we have no substitute.

Another is: Reward ourselves with starlit nights in the wild. It is extraordinarily important if we’re going to look after this planet, that we re-engage with it. I know as a campaigning conservationist, since I left my medical practice to get into the job of 'preventative medicine', that is protecting our environment, which is so important to the human soul and therefore human wellbeing, that it is imperative to spend time out under the stars at night – by the way Scorpio is right overhead at the moment, it’s magnificent. 

Bob & a bluegum, Tasmania
Pic by Paul Thomas

And of course that means days immersed in nature too, walking to where we camp, living close to nature, as our 100 BILLION forebears have done until this little blip in history where we’re technologically not only transforming the planet but transforming our own appreciation, or lack of appreciation, for the fact that we cannot do without this earth, which gives us everything. 

But it can do without us. As it’s done without the dinosaurs. The only difference is that the dinosaurs didn’t see that asteroid coming, 65 million years ago. We know what we’re doing and we can turn it around. We have the technological wherewithal. We have the ethical background, if we only take it on. We have the ability for restraint. We’ve shown in two World Wars that within three months of an emergency we can use 15 per cent of our gross domestic product to protect ourselves and yet 2 per cent of world domestic product put to it now would stop the climate emergency in its tracks. 

[At this point in his talk, Bob took us on a little trip by showing some of his own photographs of some of his favourite natural places, most in Tasmania, all threatened by tourism developments from resorts to roads. For brevity, I've omitted this section but included some of his pics.]

Bushfire haze near Huon River

Every second of every day, whether we’re in Sydney or Hobart or Timbuktu, is one degree Centigrade hotter than when I was a boy, due to burning coal, oil, gas and forests. And the prescription for our society at the moment doesn't seem to be 'let’s move to the technologically available alternatives of renewable energy' or 'instead of destroying trees, let's plant more' but to put the foot on the accelerator. 

There’s an enormous disjunct in thinking here and the tourism industry has a great potential role to play in getting us out of this wrong mindset into the constructive and sustainable mindset of the future. 

Another point on my credo for nature-tourism: Insisting that the people who destroy and injure nature are properly arraigned. That means, charged and penalised. We, for example, should not be a planet in which more whales are being harpooned. We should not be a planet in which more great forests are being felled. 

Not a black-throated finch,
but a fantailed cuckoo

We should not be a planet in which coal mines, as well as having the impact on climate change, are directly threatening species. 

This little bird on my lapel pin is the black-throated finch. At the Adani mine site there are 400 left, it’s the most important population as it heads towards extinction. They’re about to clear the woodland on which this bird depends, to open it up for coal extraction, to burn for profit – that’s all there is to it. It’s completely unnecessary. 

In India, as in Australia, renewable energy is now cheaper than coal-fired energy. But if you’re friends with the prime minister and when you build your power station to burn your Queensland coal next to the Bangladeshi border to sell across the border and your prime minister clears hundreds of people off that land and gives you tax breaks for putting the power station there, well, you’re sitting pretty. And when you are opening a coal mine in Queensland in which you intend to put $3 million into family or company trusts in the Cayman Islands, then you’re onto a good thing. But I don’t think the minister is going to take that on.

Bob & Paul's old house in Tasmania's
Liffey Valley, which they donated to
Bush Heritage Australia

What I do think we can take on, as people who respect and want to present nature to our fellow human beings, is to create a travel industry that is going to be ethical and able to survive into the future with pride in its chest and to back those environmentalists on the front line trying to protect national parks and threatened natural areas, knowing that it’s taking part in the protection of the planet upon which we all depend. 

Ladies and gentlemen, it's a beautiful planet, we’re a beautiful species, we need to bring out the best in ourselves and each other and turn around this ship of state so that our children, our grandchildren and everybody who is on this planet after us will thank us for having been here. Thank you all."

Bob Brown, low-carbon travel & more from TravelDAZE 2019

Last week I did something that wasn't very no-impact: I flew to Sydney for the day. After weighing up the pros and (carbon) cons, I decided it was worth it. And it totally was, because it was one incredible, inspiring day.

Called TravelDAZE, this annual TEDx-style event is run by Travel Weekly and this year the theme was Sustainable Travel. So of course I had to go.

Oh, and one of the 21 speakers was Bob Brown. (If you're not Australian or don't know about this environmentalist and former senator and Greens leader, introduce yourself at bobbrown.org.au. I'll wait here.)

Walking the talk
It was great to see TravelDAZE walking the sustainability talk. For instance: it was held at the NSW Teachers Federation conference centre near Sydney's Central Station so there was easy access by public transport. Pre-event emails asked everyone to bring their own reusable water bottles (there was filtered water on tap) and coffee cups.

Frank Green's sustainable cups

There were also free Frank Green coffee cups, which are beautifully designed, recyclable, leak-proof (great for travelling) and made in Australia. (Too bad they're plastic, but I'd brought my own cup anyway; Frank Green also makes ceramic-steel cups).

The only printed materials were our name tags. Registration was done electronically. There were no promotional gifts (refreshingly unusual at travel events). And lunch, prepared by local caterer Relish Foods, was amazing: healthy, vegetarian (with two options for meat-eaters) and served in compostable bowls with corn-starch cutlery.

Why isn't every conference as creatively sustainable as this?

The stage was set for an epic day of short talks averaging 10-15 minutes each with a couple of longer keynotes. Here are a few snippets that inspired or resonated with me.

Good things are happening
The main takeaway from the day was that travel companies are increasingly committed to doing good - reducing their environmental impact, protecting human rights, reducing animal cruelty, promoting gender equality, giving back - in a multitude of ways.

A few standout examples, that go way beyond banning plastic straws and asking guests to reuse hotel towels, from a day that was positively bursting with them:

• Intrepid Travel has been carbon neutral since 2010 and is planning to go "carbon positive" next year; that is, not just offsetting their carbon emissions but actually removing carbon from the atmosphere by working with The Climate Foundation and the University of Tasmania to develop Australia's first seaweed platform off Tasmania's east coast. 
• IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) announced in July it's removing tiny toiletries from more than 840,000 rooms in 5600 hotels worldwide, replacing them with refillable bulk dispensers by 2021 to reduce plastic waste.
• Virgin Holidays, United Airlines and British Airways have stopped selling tickets to captive dolphin "attractions" (unlike Qantas, which backflipped on its commitment this week), just one of the ways World Animal Protection, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, is actively working with travel companies to end animal cruelty in tourism and promote animal-friendly tourism. 
• World Resorts of Distinction created a Conscious Travel Checklist in July - which includes "offsets guests' carbon footprints" and "no single-use plastic" - and encourages guests to use it when planning their holidays. You can download it here. 
• Abercrombie & Kent Philanthropy, set up in 1982, now supports 42 conservation, education, health care and social enterprise projects - in 22 countries, including a bike mechanic program that employs and empowers women in Tanzania (love this).
• New Zealand is on a mission to lead the world in sustainable tourism AND become the first carbon-neutral country in the world and in November launched the Tiaki Promise, a Maori-based pledge to help travellers "care for people and place" when visiting NZ. 

Low-carbon travel
Darrell Wade, co-founder of Intrepid Travel, kept it real when he was asked about the future of sustainable travel. It's bright, he said - and bleak. In terms of travellers wanting to minimise their impact and travel companies stepping up to be more sustainable (see above), he's hopeful.

Darrell Wade, keeping it real

"The tourism industry, as much as we've got a big question mark over our heads for carbon emissions, in terms of the benefit to the world in the money we spend and the cultural bridge we make and the peace dividends, what our industry delivers is huge," he said, before talking up the value of "undertourism" (visiting countries that don't get many visitors).

About those carbon emissions... When it comes to aviation, the future is "pretty bleak". Although flying gets about one per cent more efficient every year per passenger-mile, aviation is growing at about 4.5 per cent a year "so the impact of aviation is getting worse every year... and biofuels may never be economically viable." It's travel's inconvenient truth, Wade said.

What can be done? Travel companies need to address the carbon emissions of flying when designing tourism products. "In our case, Intrepid has a legal presence in about 40 countries and traditionally we've always thought of each country as either an outbound market [such as Australia, the US or England] or an inbound market like Vietnam or Peru or Kenya. As time goes on, I think we'll have to flip that on its head," he said, by offering lower-carbon products in domestic markets. "We'll increasingly have to have a lower carbon structure built into tourism product at a global level."

Clean Travel founder Macartan
Gaughan with the UN goals

Small is beautiful
There was much talk about big goals, specifically the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which include "Climate action" and "No poverty" by 2030. We also learned about small, grass-roots projects and partnerships making a difference.

The Myanmar Stove Project, supported by the Soneva Foundation, plans to distribute 200,000 fuel-efficient cooking stoves to reduce deforestation, carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution. Courier Luggage, a family-owned business in South Australia, recently launched a new range of wheeled suitcases made entirely from recycled plastic drink bottles for National Geographic.

A PNG child receiving
a new Solar Buddy

Solar Buddy, which has partnered with Flight Centre, provides portable solar-powered lights to beat "energy poverty" in developing countries.

Then there's Planeterra, a not-for-profit launched in 2015 by G Adventures to help communities around the world benefit from tourism. After reaching its target of "50 [projects] in 5 [years]" 18 months early, it now has a new target, Project 100: to support 100 local enterprises by 2020. Now that's big.

Bob rules, ok?
My personal highlight of the day was seeing Bob Brown, who gave the keynote address. He might have retired from politics in 2012 but he's still as passionate as ever, his words a stirring call to action about the urgency of protecting the planet and Australia's wild natural places.

The inspirational Bob Brown

He credits his mum with instilling in him a respect for nature: "I was first hit by conscious awareness at Trunkey Creek, between Bathurst and Goulburn [in central NSW]. My dad was the local policeman, my mum had come off a dairy farm and she said, 'Whatever you do, look after nature' and it's been with me ever since."

He talked about his credo for nature-based tourism, the disastrous Adani coal mine in central Queensland, the climate emergency - "We're in the greatest crisis of human time. It's not coming. We're in it." And his ethos: "Don't get depressed, get active."

Rules to travel by

To illustrate the importance of protecting national parks and World Heritage Areas, he showed us pics of some of his favourite places - Flinders Chase National Park on Kangaroo Island (South Australia) and Federation Peak, Frenchman's Cap and the South Coast Track in Tasmania - all at risk from private tourism developments, which should be built on private land, he said.

"National parks should be for the public, the infrastructure should be publicly paid for and amenable to everyone equally," he said.

His last words: "It's a beautiful planet, we're a beautiful species, [but] we need to turn around this ship of state so that our children, our grandchildren and everybody who is on this planet after us will thank us for being here."

A calmer Costa

Costa is a force of nature
Gardening Australia host and TV personality Costa Georgiadis livened up the post-lunch time-slot with his show-and-tell (instead of a "what do you call it, Powerpoint!" presentation).

Wearing a black T-shirt that read, when his beard wasn't in the way, "Giving is better than taking, Producing is better than consuming, Collaborating is better than competing", he wandered all over the auditorium and tossed us rolls of Who Gives A Crap recycled toilet paper (which helps build toilets for communities in developing countries).

He also showed off his reusables (apparently he hasn't used anything disposable for 28 years): a stainless steel water bottle, a reusable coffee cup, wooden cutlery, even a Boomerang Bag! "Free the leaf!" he said, holding up a glass jar of tea leaves he uses instead of tea bags. "Say no to convenience!" See Travel Weekly's story for more on what Costa said.

Not just lions

The Lion's Share
The day ended on an upbeat note: filmmaker Christopher Nelius talked about The Lion's Share, a Sydney-based initiative launched in September last year to "change the world through advertising."

For 150 years we've been using animals to help sell products, Nelius said, to convey messages of cuteness, security, innocence, belonging. "But there's a disconnect. We can put a tiger on a cereal box, but real tigers in the wild are in trouble." And not just tigers but rhinos, koalas, orangutans, snow leopards...

Pic by The Lion's Share Fund

The Lion's Share helps advertisers "give back" by voluntarily donating 0.5 per cent of what they spend on advertising every time they use animals (even cartoon animals!) in their ads. Last year, $US591 billion was spent on media globally; 20 per cent of those ads used animals. Backed by the UN Development Program and Mars Inc, The Lion's Share funds wildlife conservation, habitat restoration and animal welfare projects. They're aiming to raise $US100 million a year within three years.

Sir David Attenborough is even behind it, as a Special Ambassador, and has called it "a profoundly game-changing initiative".

What better way to end a thought-tornado of a day of inspiration and positive action?

*

Big thanks to Daisy Melwani at Travel Weekly - and event sponsor G Adventures - for the media ticket to TravelDAZE this year and to all the speakers for sharing their hard-won experience. So inspiring, invigorating and empowering. I learned a lot. Now to plant more trees to carbon-offset those flights...