Patrick Friel

ENVS02

Essay #3

The Effects of Human Travel on the Environment

The act of traveling is a very relative term. The distance traveled and the speed at which one travels are ways of putting the act of traveling in a context that makes it useful. The how and why of travel is the essence of travel itself. Throughout human history, the limitations of existing human travel technology has been absolutely critical to explaining the context of what was going on. This travel technology is also critical to explaining the environmental impact that human travel has had throughout history and to offer information as to what the future of human travel will be on the environment.

Human travel in American culture is commonly thought of as a device by which people can experience and see different environments, peoples, and places. Exploring the world for oneself is certainly one apparition of travel. However, historically and numerically, travel and the development of travel technology has taken place as an extension of some type of commercial activity. This could be discovering new natural resources, trading, or protecting existing assets.

Interestingly, a major form of travel has been on the seas, a human ability only made possible by technology. In the ancient days of Greece the city-states that were able to control sea travel most effectively were the most prosperous, sea travel being the most effective during the time. The Mediterranean area was a hotbed for economic and information trading. When the Chinese Empire ruled, large scale travel on ships existed for the purpose of economic trading, moving information, and some military action as well. Skipping ahead to the days of Christopher Columbus, travel was motivated by the search for gold. In this scenario things didn’t work out as planned, but massive natural resources were found by a portion of the world that did not know the North and South American continents even existed.

Each of these ages of travel has had different effects on the environment. In the earlier days of the Greeks and the Chinese, there simply wasn’t enough travel to have a major impact on the Earth’s environment. With the North and South American explorers and the travel that they brought, the effects directly from traveling were minimal. The sails of ships used the sustainable wind sources of the Earth to move, having no impact at all on the environment. However, the indirect effects of travel during this period resulted in massive deforesting and what some would consider the eventual raping of the land in a very environmentally unfriendly fashion. In fact, the city of New York was built into the landscape simply because it was a hub of sea travel and needed to capacitate larger amounts of people and trade resulting from increases in travel to and from the area.

Today, we are still expanding our international trading which can be substituted for travel because the majority of today’s traveling is done for business and trading. Looking at our current traveling technology most people would talk about how much better it is. However, I think it is proper to question whether or not our means of travel are indeed better. Today, the merchant marine traffic takes place on large steel ships powered by mixtures of diesel fuels, coal, and a few nuclear powered ships. It is clear that more can be moved faster and with much higher probabilities of actually completing the journey. However, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill and what some perceive as an upcoming fuel crisis may show that our travel technology, while faster and larger capacity, may not be the optimal sustainable solution, especially when taking the environment into account. Clearly, the usage of fossil fuels in airplanes as well as ships has hazardous effects on the environment in many different forms. The progress made in travel technology may not be sustainable in the long run. Also we continue to transform our landscape to accommodate more travel. Looking at the last century, the United States has quickly been transformed into a network of paved roadways for car travel resulting in multiple environmental concerns. In the near future this trend is going to continue. Many alternate power sources have been looked at and some real solutions to gasoline powered automobiles are on the horizon.

Historically, our nation and most of the world has been rather unconcerned with environmental effects claiming “progress” was simply more important and needed to be uninhibited. After several decades of this policy I think our nation “woke-up” to the natural disasters of the past and has become much more environmentally aware. While it is still easy to spot nature conservation or environment friendly bumper stickers on SUVs I tend to believe that people just don’t see viable alternatives yet. The fact that there has been substantial development of alternate power sources despite major resistance from oil companies, especially in a capitalist society like ours, shows that there is a large demand for other methods of travel.

Through history, human travel has had an increasing effect on the environment and has continuously moved to different methods of travel to include sea, air, and space. Hopefully, the people of the Earth have become more aware of the damage that their travel has on the effect of the environment. Most importantly the signs we see today with rising demand for safer and more environmentally friendly travel methods could mean that we are returning to the sustainability of the early wind powered sailors. It will be very interesting to see how human travel methods, reasons for traveling, and travels effect on the environment change over time. When and if space travel becomes a major form of travel, it will be interesting to see if humans continue a policy of conservation or revert back to the old North and South American explorer’s policy where there seems to be limitless resources and results in wasting of many resources in an unsafe manner.