Sustainable travel

Any trip that involves squatting next to a body of water for an extended period of time is a good trip in my book. 😂 No, I wasn’t digging a cat hole next to a river (you know that’s not Leave no Trace)! I was scooping up water to press through a teeny tiny filter next to a creek in Mondim de Basto, Portugal. Why? Uh, for science, that’s why! Because I was on a trip with Exodus Travels that led a small group of journalists from Porto to the Douro Valley to Mondim de Basto to hike, stay in ancient estates transformed into hotels, eat at locally owned restaurants, explore picturesque wineries built into steep, terraced hillsides, and do science. Namely, collecting water in a bag, forcing it through a super fine filter, and shipping that filter off to a lab somewhere, all in the name of studying biodiversity. Yep, at the risk of sounding like a complete nerd, I was geeking out about participating in a different aspect of sustainable travel: using my exploratory endeavors for scientific and ecological good. And you could be, too! Here’s how (and why citizen science matters when it comes to sustainable travel).

We get the question frequently: “What is sustainable travel?” Usually it is uttered after we introduce ourselves as sustainable travel bloggers. At first, the question was surprising. What do you mean “what is sustainable travel?!” You know what “sustainable” means, right? Apply that to travel! But when people kept asking, we thought maybe the concept wasn’t as straightforward as we thought. Or it’s still such a new one to most people that it did, in fact, warrant an explanation. So allow us to explain! We’ll dive into what sustainable travel is, what it isn’t, and how we can all travel more sustainably.