30 November

I’m in a very small minority. I don’t like travel. Which is interesting in a culture obsessed with it. To me it’s a dislocation, a very clear indication of how disconnected we are from the landscapes we live within, that they create such weak and fragile ties. Being separated from your land and constantly not grounded in your surroundings should be a profoundly difficult thing - but the culture loves it, relishes it. It huddles the coast, spending far more time OS than having any real connection to its own continent. And when it does travel domestically, it’s glaringly obvious we’re tourists in our own land, no matter how much we have Crocodile Dundee fantasies about getting back to nature. Camping doesn’t bring you any closer to the reality of the place. Every trip to me feels like a violation, to me and also to those whose lands we turn into tourist attractions. Those lands are people’s homes. They create tourist districts to shelter from visitors, wanting the income but secretly (or increasingly not secretly) hating being overrun. The occasional trip, sure, but let’s not pretend travel is an occasional treat for modern people. It’s a lifelong obsession. Many defend it with analogies about nomadism. Nomads didn’t travel. They moved around to find food. We refuse to see that this passion is a remnant of our colonial/imperial history, the accumulation of places that is the passion of all empires. Today disguised under terms like ‘bucket list’. The entire culture needs to come ‘down to Earth’, as Bruno Latour said, meaning learning how to inhabit space again, rather than just pass through it. We also can’t do basic maths. About 4% of the world does regular international travel. That 4% alone is destroying and overwhelming popular destinations, while burning and emitting tonnes of jet or ship fuel per person, per trip. It’s not an activity that is globally sustainable, for anything except the tiniest elite. We are that elite, the children of empire. And above all else, it doesn’t bring you any closer to the reality of the places you visit. You will literally get closer to that reality reading a book about the place, by somebody who lives there. Being there is just a point on a map, not participation in the landscape and its culture. Even ‘authentic’ tourism is bollocks, the pretense that by staying a while you’re doing anything except invading other people’s space. You are always just a visitor, you being there changes what you went to see.