TRAVEL CONNECTIONS
A second way for me of connecting to what Merlin Sheldrake and the film “Fantastical Fungi” refer to as the “wide wood web” is the way I am connect to different cultures around the world through the web of the Internet which for me is connected with the ability, nowadays, to travel.
Just as language opens us up in a magic mushroom sort of way to the entirety of the world around us, travel can open us up to all kinds of new experiences.
I know, as my brother Richard reminds me, that the ability to travel almost effortlessly, magically, which is a result of technology that connects the world comes at a heavy carbon global warming cost. I read an article yesterday detailing a Greenpeace study of travel in Europe where I am about to go in a month and a half (after a month in Montevideo) that claims that the cost of train travel in Europe is up to 30 times the cost of air travel while the carbon price of air travel is five times as high as the carbon cost of rail travel. So the magic of each kind of travel, particularly air travel, comes at a high cost of sending carbon into the air and contributes to global warming with world wide travel somehow being out of kilter.
As with the green revolution in agriculture based on production through fossil fuels, the ability through the Industrial Revolution based on the burning of fossil fuels to manufacture anywhere and instantly transport everywhere also through the burning of fossil fuels, the ability to keep warm in winter and cool in summer through the use of fossil fuels, travel, both locally through automobiles and globally by air also contributes to global warming. Our ingenuity which is greatly increasing the standard of living and quality of life all over the world is now creating this terrible problem of global warming.
That is the negative side. But there is a positive side to travel and this is what I want to delight in. Through the connections of the Internet, information about airbnb’s everywhere and ways to find cheap flights everywhere and the ability to get all of the information you need for travel easily and the ease of travel for people of any age, this is a golden age of travel. Travel is almost impossible to resist once you are aware of the possibilities. Luckily, most people are rooted to where they are and travel either seems too dislocating or uncertain or scary or unthinkable to do so most people stay home. True, only the comparatively rich, not Indian or African villagers, can travel for pleasure, so travel is also unfair.
But all of that said, there is a network of travel possibilities that I can’t resist. Montevideo in two weeks, Sicily in a month and a half, Greece for a month after that, Virginia Beach at Christmas, India and Sri Lanka after Christmas. A hundred years ago this would have been time consuming, enormously expensive and almost impossible with half the time on a ship being tossed in the waves.
But suddenly we can connect anywhere and explore anywhere and be open to the stimulation of different cultures of the world which dislocate us and renew us and make us wonder. Some of this we can do simply by sitting at home and following Rick Steves as he travels. The Internet connects us world wide with images and instant communication. You can do it with me if you like as I report next month on what Montevideo feels like to an old man strolling around. And soon with Apple Vision Pro goggles we will be able to settle in anywhere in the world in 3D, right in our living rooms. The whole world is getting closer and closer. And one of these days we will be able to travel without releasing carbon and contributing to global warming and just as certainly this will create some new problem that will seem insurmountable.
But right now, at 86, before time runs out, I will take what I can get and delight in it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 