34. Holiday at Home
In this week's #52climatesolutions, we look at lots of planet-friendly ways to enjoy your time off.
Good Mabon morning! One of our very first substack posts was about how we celebrate Mabon, which means we’ve been writing here for a whole year! Big thanks for supporting us in this space. It’s been lovely to stretch out beyond word limits, advertising and algorithms and share with you. Today is a home day for half of us, so we’ll be harvesting corn, writing, making music, preserving tomatoes, mending jumpers, making an apple pie and pondering how we’ll manage kilos of quinces and more pears than we know what to do with. We love these days where we have no other plans. Holiday-at-home days, where we catch-up and go slow all at once.
The following climate solution was first shared on Instagram, around this time of year, three years ago - just as we headed into lockdown. We had planned to share it anyway, but it ended up being a way to make the most of a bad situation. We’ve had the opportunity to re-share it here with some edits that bring it closer to our original (pre-pandemic) inspiration. It’s still a valid solution in these times where we all need to be doing everything we can to be mindful of consumption. Especially in light of the most recent IPCC report - our ‘final warning’. It’s bleak. Yes, governments, mining companies and corporations can have the biggest impact here. They have the power to turn things around quickly. But our small positive actions compound and send a loud message of our intentions. Taking personal responsibility reduces our negative impact and sends a clear message to our communities. It also helps us share and gain skills we need to know for an unknown future.
Holiday at home
People go on holidays to learn, explore, connect, play and relax. The pros and cons for society can vary. Sometimes tourism can support local communities, but this might be at the expense of a local people’s identity, customs and traditions. Tourism contributes approximately 8% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, presenting a serious problem. Pre-pandemic, cheap domestic and global aviation enabled millions of people to travel almost anywhere in the world (see solution ‘fly less’). But harmful impacts occur from cruise ships, and other transport, as well as from the consumptive behaviour of many tourists, such as from excessive use of fossil-fuel derived single-use plastic!
We are heading into the Easter period soon, when many people might go away on holiday. Of course, it’s a privilege to be able to go on holidays at all, and we understand that many people don’t ever get to travel. But for those who do, this might be time for some self-reflection. What kind of impact does your travel have? Can you choose lower impact forms of transport? Choose to stay at places that operate with an environmental ethos? Look for near-by places to shop package-free, or compost your scraps? Or maybe re-think traveling far away, altogether?
For this week’s #52climatesolutions, we suggest you try to have a holiday at home. Home-holidays can be a budget-saving measure as well as a climate-solution. You can bet that your ecological footprint will be much lower. Home-holidays might sound like a peculiar concept (especially post-pandemic where many of us spent much more time at home than usual), and that’s okay. Climate action will require us to think and act in ways that we never thought possible. Try to create fewer reasons to want to escape your day-to-day life. This might involve a bigger shift in thinking about what you need and what brings you contentment.
Some great ways to enjoy your holiday at home
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