Laurel, thanks for your comment and glad that you like the idea of the online ecological calculator. I agree with you that offsets are certainly not a pass for lots of flights or other carbon emissions heavy activities. There’s lots the travel industry can do to reduce it’s overall environmental footprint, but it needs to better understand and measure the impact of its different activities.

Thanks, Daniel! Yes, the goal of this article is not to disregard the carbon impact of flying, but to emphasize that there are other decisions we make when on the ground that can also greatly impact our full environmental footprint from a trip. TBH, I didn’t realize the impact that food choices had on this until working on a project that measured this.

Completely agree with you that breaking down components and understanding where the biggest problems are will be the best way to address environmental and other damage. Trying to go “Zero Waste” just isn’t a reality for most businesses and so if companies and travelers make adjustments to address the main problem areas that will go a long ways.

Thanks for commenting and sharing your perspective as a travel agent. When travel is something you love and it is also part of one’s work it is easy to not “see” or realize all the potential negative sides and how it can do harm to the environment and local communities. But, there are opportunities through the actions of travel companies and travelers to try and minimize the negative impacts and maximize the positive impacts. Hard to do, but not impossible 🙂

Instead of just jumping on a ‘Zero Waste’ bandwagon (even though the intention is good), breaking everything down and actually analyzing how each aspect of tourism can be optimized will yield much better results. Unfortunately, that process isn’t really standard yet. We can only hope that it will be soon – for everybody’s sake. Keep up the good work!

JoAnna, thanks for your thoughtful comment. Like you, I was glad to see more research and attention being paid to the tourism industry’s entire environmental footprint vs. just focusing on flying. I hope that more measuring and monitoring is done and becomes the norm (and more accessible) so that tourism companies have a starting point to understand their footprint and work on ways to reduce it in a holistic way. Same goes for empowering travelers to make educated decisions and choices about reducing their impact. Thanks to these studies and calculators I noticed that during our recent trip to Asia I was more aware of eating and transportation options than before. This has also carried over into awareness and decisions at home.