When (So-Called) Eco-Travelers Sin

When I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man a few years ago, I was struck by an exchange between the nature-embracing mountain man Eustace Conway and an acolyte whose idea of life-changing sustainability was to turn off the water when she was brushing her teeth.

I wonder if some so-called “eco-travelers” operate the same way. Maybe they book a “life-changing” holiday at an eco-resort in Costa Rica and declare themselves sustainable travelers. But what if they take their unsustainable bad habits with them?

I was reminded of this question when I saw a recent tweet about the Top Ten Eco-Travel Mistakes by Traveling the Green Way, summarizing a survey by the eco-tourism agent Responsible Travel. It turns out that travel providers working with Responsible Travel noticed a lot of mindless behavior by their tourists, including littering (especially plastic bags and cigarette butts), disrupting wildlife, wasting water and energy, buying illegal products and even standing on coral reefs (thereby killing a marine organism that takes, oh, 100 years to grow one inch.)

Maybe we travel because we want to check out of our own reality, but why check out altogether and treat our vacation fantasyland as a place with unending resources and a magical ability to absorb our discarded cigarette butts? Many non-eco-travelers have been doing that for years, and they deserve to be derided. Those of us who want to be eco should use our brains, or, at least, National Geographic Traveler’s nifty guide to sustainable tourism.

So, I’m curious: Do you have any tales of bad eco-behavior by proclaimed eco-travelers? I’m still cringing over a former friend (and self-proclaimed environmentalist) with whom I traveled to the mountains of northwestern Greece in 2004. He had a majorly acidic meltdown when I accidentally stepped on a wildflower (“It’s a native species!”) to avoid falling off a cliff—but not five minutes later threw a candy wrapper into the tangle of purple flowers and tall grass. Nice!

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