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We Americans are a complex bunch—we work hard, we play hard, the beer commercial-esque saying goes. But we actually don't travel much.
We spend around a third of our income on leisure activities, but we don't spend it on flying to the Bahamas. And this is a good thing. Allow me to explain.
In 2006, (different, recession-free times, I know, but bear with me), only 14% of Americans went on vacation over the summer. And this isn't due only to a lack of means?it's due to a lack of will, according to Time Magazine:
| We have to get ahead of our workload in order to leave, and then we have to catch up on our workload upon our return. The longer the vacation we take, the bigger the stumbling blocks appear. Bottom line: it's simply become too stressful to relax. |
We have among the fewest days off of just about any industrialized nation (14 a year on average) and most of us don't even taken advantage of all of them—we leave an average of 4 unused vacation days behind a year. Collectively, that's 574 million days of untaken vacations. And you know what that means—a couple dozen million untaken carbon-spewing plane trips to Hawaii.
So if we're too stressed out to plan vacations, and it spares fossil fuel burning flights anyways, what are we to do?
Simple: localize. Spend more leisure time investigating your local area. Example: I rarely leave New York. I'm too damn busy. But when I get burned out, I hop a subway to the beach at Coney Island. It's like a little afternoon vacation. Or, I can take a train to Long Island for the weekend, or head with some friends upstate a ways to do some camping. All of which are activities that have a considerably lower ecological impact than jetting to a tropical paradise.
Point is, we can't go without vacations of some kind—we'd drive ourselves insane. So let's eke out the stress of planning massive vacations and the environmental harm done by taking car and plane-reliant journeys by staying local. We'll just call them trips. That way, we can find easy ways to relax that fit our hectic schedules. There are undoubtedly some fantastic national parks or pleasant beaches or unexplored towns close to your home right now. And good thing, too—with the recession kicking into high gear, not going on vacation is easier than ever.
We're literally the #1 country in the world when it comes to not taking vacations. Let's keep it that way.
More on Green Travel:
Make 2009 the Year of Green Travel
