Spring Breakers Consider Environmental Impacts of Travel
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — After missing two years of normal spring breaks, many Penn State students are once again planning to travel around the country and world during their week off.
Huge crowds will return to popular spring break destinations, and with them a multitude of environmental impacts. Large-scale tourism affects ecosystems in a variety of ways: airplanes emit almost one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, tourists use months-worth of water in developing countries in a single day, overcrowding reduces biodiversity and more, according to Sustainable Tourism.
While the environmental footprint of tourism is large, students do not always realize the impacts their trips could have.
One Penn State freshman, Isabella Jaen, is traveling to Cancun with 11 friends over break. She said the group chose to go to Cancun because “we are only going to have four spring breaks, so we’re going to have to go all out and go somewhere fun.”
Jaen said that her group had not considered the environmental impacts their trip might have, but she is open to making environmentally conscious choices.
“If you have the money to go to Cancun, you can put that extra mile in for the environment,” she said.
Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences offers students several tips to travel sustainably. Suggestions include calculating the carbon emissions caused by your trip and supporting projects like reforestation to offset it, using public transportation and biodegradable products, adopting local customs and taking shorter showers.
Some Penn State students have even made conservation projects a key part of their travel itineraries. The Environmental Resource Management (ERM) program at Penn State has offered trips to Costa Rica where students participated in service projects prior to and throughout their trip to offset their footprint.
Tammy Shannon, the trip leader and coordinator of academic advising for ERM, explained that the group installed “small-scale biodigesters that captured gas from animal waste to fuel farms that would not otherwise have access to lighting and cooking.”
While environmentally friendly decisions can be made on any scale, not everyone believes that Penn State students will make them over spring break. Megan Handshew, a freshman planning a trip to Miami with seven other friends, said that her group had not thought about the environmental effects of their trip and was skeptical that other groups would make sustainable decisions.
“A lot of people are very cheap and wouldn’t want to spend any extra money [on environmental efforts],” she said.
Kara Ryan, a student studying secondary education, said she hopes otherwise. Ryan holds a chair position in EcoAction, the university’s oldest environmental student organization. She said that caring for the environment and limiting one’s carbon footprint is essential to maintaining Earth’s “beautiful” animals, trees and scenery, as well as clean air and water.
“Realize that you have the privilege to choose whether or not you want to help the environment,” she said. “Don’t think about what’s better for you, think about what’s better for the people around you.”
Though traveling may seem to have too big of an environmental toll to mitigate, Ketja Lingenfelter, the assistant director for student global engagement in the College of Agricultural Sciences, pointed out that learning about sustainable practices abroad could inspire students to implement similar practices in their communities upon return.
“I think rather than just looking at limiting travel, we need to strive to develop ways to travel more sustainably and selectively to make our travel count toward contributing to a better world,” Lingenfelter said.
