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Like headless chickens

2020-06-01T13:11:54.556Z


I long for another way to travel. Hopefully the new trips (and the new world) will be slower, more deliberate, truer


While doing gymnastics at home in these months of confinement, I have seen the contest Now I fall! , with Arturo Valls, a perfect program to distract you while still moving (if I put on a good movie I often stay engrossed and still). Well, every day there are 11 contestants and they ask everyone what they would like to do with the money if they win. And the vast majority say they would use it to travel. Furthermore, many of them maintain that they would take Route 66, a highway that goes from Chicago to Los Angeles and that apparently has become fashionable.

Traveling has always been part of the essence of the human being. The eternal curiosity to know what lies beyond the last bend in the road spurs us. Just remember that we come from Africa and that we have managed to populate every corner of the planet, a true demonstration of our desire to walk. And now we are preparing to leave Earth: Elon Musk assures that by 2050 he will have taken a million colonists to Mars, and there are several companies designing tourist trips to the Moon within the next two decades.

I have also felt that urgency; One of the reasons I became a journalist was because I thought it would help me travel, and so it was. The journey is not only a spatial transit, but also a mental one; knowing another place you can imagine yourself in another life. Touring the world allows us to get out of the confinement of our little existence. What extraordinary proof this pandemic has been, which has confined vermin as mobile and errant as us. And that has shown us, perhaps forever, that you cannot continue to keep up with the frenetic pace of recent decades.

Because the fast-paced life we ​​led turned travel, that vital life experience, into a disposable product for rapid consumption, in that fashion of fast trip that is equivalent to fast food and in which we have all fallen (me too, of course) . Suffice it to know that in 2014 the average of 100,000 daily flights in the world was reached for the first time; and just four years later, in 2018, the average was already 120,000. Furthermore, on July 25, 2019, the historical record of 230,000 flights was reached in one day. We were packed, I mean. There was almost no sky left for so much apparatus.

And then the pandemic broke out. At the end of last March, world air traffic had decreased 55% (in Spain, 90%). And what has happened? That air pollution has been greatly reduced. The general slowdown in activity has also influenced, of course, but airplanes, as Greta explained to us, are very harmful. According to IATA (International Air Transport Association), they produce 2% of the world's carbon emissions, and they also release nitrogen oxide and other greenhouse gases thousands of meters above the ground, which makes them stay there for a long time. more time. Thanks to the coronavirus, the concentration of nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere is now well below WHO recommendations, an unusual achievement.

And I wonder: are we going to launch ourselves into this madness again, to resume traveling with a compulsive avidity, to surrender to the fashion of Route 66 and flights to the tropics? In the first place, at the moment I do not think they are sanitary very safe; but in addition it is that the planet cannot allow it. Yes, I know that fast trips are very tempting, as is fast food , which is full of addictive ingredients. But we know that it is harmful enough not to eat it every day. I'm not saying we give up travel, quite the contrary. This year, for now, let's travel through Spain: let's help reactivate our society. And what I long for is another way of traveling, which is the same as saying another way of living: with more awareness; with more construction of the own desire, instead of letting ourselves eat the coconut for the fashions; with more control over our actions. The break in confinement has allowed me to see that we had been running madly here and there for years like headless chickens. Hopefully the new trips (and the new world) will be slower, more deliberate, truer.

Source: elparis

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