Backyard Wanderlust

Traveling close to home can reduce the carbon footprint of tourism while still providing rewarding experiences

STORY BY YVONNE WORDEN | PHOTO BY KJELL REDAL

(Above) Ellie Moeller, 22, stands outside the Hidden Lake fire lookout off of Highway 20 at sunrise on Oct. 4, 2015. Only an hour-and-a-half drive and four-hour hike away, locations like these provide a more immediate getaway from everyday life than distant locales.

Adventure has taken many forms in Jasmine Goodnow’s life. As a young girl, she was spellbound by television programs about wilderness areas and anthropological sites like Machu Picchu. She has explored the plains of Kenya and the jungles of Costa Rica. Now, she’s discovering that adventure can be found much closer to home.

Goodnow, an assistant tourism and recreation professor at Western, is part of an effort to redefine tourism. The challenge is helping people find the time, money and motivation to travel, in a way that’s less destructive to the planet. The solution is simple — travel closer to home.

The planet cannot sustain mass tourism, as it exists today. Over a billion tourists traveled abroad in 2014, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. A passenger emits more carbon flying round-trip from the West Coast to the East Coast of the U.S. than they would driving a car for an entire year, and more than someone in a developing country would emit in a lifetime, according to a report published in Tourism Recreation Research. Dean of Huxley College of the Environment, Steve Hollenhorst, co-authored the report. While he enjoys visiting remote places, his interest in climate change made him question tourism’s global impact.

The airline industry is far from switching to alternative sources from fossil fuels. While ground transportation is shifting toward electric vehicles, commercial and military airplanes won’t fly any time soon on electricity, he says. “Liquid fuels are amazing things, they are compact, portable and they have just the right level of flammability so that you can burn them in an engine but not explode an airplane,” Hollenhorst says.

Hollenhorst is studying how to make jet fuel out of wood residuals and material from the municipal waste stream. But this adoption by the fuel industry is a long way off. “We’re all dependent on petroleum to fly these airplanes,” Hollenhorst says. “That means we all need to fly less until we can come up with these kinds of alternatives.”

So, how do we reduce air travel but still go on adventures?

Goodnow’s research is rooted in what makes travel meaningful. She looks at whether people can get as much value from a trip closer to home than they would abroad.

Meaningful travel depends on liminality. In her research, Goodnow defines “liminality” as a threshold or space between one place and the next. Travelers must experience separation from social structure with relaxed limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior.

About 40 percent of Americans who earn paid vacation don’t use all of it. The main obstacles to travel are responsibilities at home and work, lack of money and limited time, Goodnow says.

Goodnow’s lifestyle has enabled her to travel more regularly and for longer periods of time. “I’m an outlier in the U.S. I’m a 40-year old single woman, with no children, no spouse, no pets,” Goodnow says. “I don’t even have a plant right now because it died on my last trip — but I have a great job and I have time.”

Goodnow wants to know how more people can go on meaningful adventures.

Goodnow has adopted a term called “microadventures,” coined by British adventurist and author Alastair Humphrey. According to Humphrey, microadventures are cheap and simple trips taken close to home. People can use the time between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. to go on an adventure, such as sleeping on a hill, flying a kite, jumping in a river or going for a long bike ride.

One way to do a microadventure is to mode-shift, traveling by car rather than airplane or by bike rather than car, Hollenhorst says. “You’re not just cruising by at 70 miles an hour on a highway,” Hollenhorst says. “The landscape passes by at a slower pace, and all of a sudden, places that seemed rather mundane, you feel better connected to.”

While on vacation for her 40th birthday in August 2015, Goodnow surveyed fellow travelers in the Pacific Northwest, Iceland, Norway and Croatia on the impressions of microadventures. In her study, Goodnow defined microadventures as trips four days or less, within 750 miles from home. This means, microadventures from Bellingham must be to destinations closer than Salt Lake City or San Francisco.

“What we found is that self discovery and insight can be experienced on a microadventure on the same rate as traveling long distance,” Goodnow says. “If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t need to spend $3,000 — you can do it right at home.”

Goodnow challenged herself to do one microadventure a month. She’s been called crazy for doing one-night stays in Whistler, B.C. and Leavenworth, Washington, but for Goodnow, it’s all part of the experience. “When people are inspired to travel in their own backyard, we start romanticizing where we live and we fall in love with where we live,” she says.

Goodnow enjoys the flexibility of microadventures. She can take them spontaneously and more often. She hopes to travel to local destinations and inspire others to do the same.

Adventure isn’t just a destination — it’s a mindset.