Is travelling regeneratively just being bourgeois elsewhere?

When I recently polled my Instagram followers about the meaning of “regenerative travel” for a story assignment, one response stood out: being bourgeois elsewhere.

My story was to appear in The Good Traveler, a manifesto of 10 principles on how to be, you guessed it, a good traveller. The brief was to share how my experience on a South African permaculture farm last winter embodied regenerative travel—a term my Instagram survey had revealed to be largely unknown or misunderstood among my predominantly proletariat followers.        

Meanwhile, in the summer of 2020, the New York Times had done its part in popularizing this seemingly new travel concept among the jet set class. The article announced a “new frontier” of “leaving a place better than you found it.” True to form for the NYT travel pages, the new frontier was exemplified by a bevy of options to help rich people feel mindful while abroad.    

Indeed, wealthy travellers were eager to emerge from their lockdowns with a wanderlust they could feel good about. Namely, by spending thousands of dollars a night to stay at the intersection of elegance and eco-consciousness—a vacation that met their values, new-fangled as they were. “We will only travel this way now,” one commenter boasted. “And pay for the carbon on the airline.”

Illustration: Khylin Woodrow

Other commenters were rather unamused. “I looked at the linked places,” one remarked, “$1,900/night in Cambodia where the per capita GDP is $1,250/year. Just stay at the Marriott and give the other $1,500/night to random people you meet on the street, it will actually improve people's lives.”

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For my story, I had come across another Cambodian property, a stunning retreat in the Cardamom mountains. It consists of 15 luxury tents on a plot of foothill about the size of a regional airport, with the profits helping to protect the surrounding forest from poaching and logging. Each booking comes with an Adventure Butler (a local human being) tasked with “finding unforgettable activities to suit your tastes and fitness … not to mention the traditional butler role: unpacking and packing your luggage and fulfilling your ad-hoc requests.” Everything is included, claims the website, “except your helicopter.” A tent starts at $2,682 USD a night.

On some level, I’m sure the jungle campers view their eco-holiday as a way to offset the environmental harm inherent to their general existence (the richest 10% produce about half of all greenhouse gas emissions). On that point, a reader responding to the Times story made a holistic recommendation: “Don't add another (or more) first-world consumer to the planet. That helps an awful lot.” Tough to refute. But we’re here now so what can we do? 

For one, I’d recommend a less cynical outlook than mine. It’s encouraging that our top polluters are aiming to reduce their footprint in a major pollutant activity. It would be better if they’d bike to Cambodia, but still. As for those of us who can’t afford to employ a locally sourced butler, we don’t need to delegate our goodwill exclusively to the purveyors of luxury eco-travel. 

Numbi Valley permaculture farm, Klein Karoo, South Africa

What articles like those in the Times often omit is that genuine regenerative travel is largely unglamorous and available to everyone. It involves things that are foreign to traditional notions of leisure, like learning how one’s presence can actually enrich a place beyond merely throwing money at it. Much of our potential to make a tangible, positive impact on the ground can’t be realized through the booking portals of foreign property developers but by connecting with locals on platforms like Workaway. 

That’s how my trip to the farm in South Africa came about. The owners needed someone to steward their homestead while on holiday and I was looking for a hands-on immersion into permaculture. Once there, I saw how two people were able to completely regenerate a formerly barren plot of land into a source of abundance, and how travellers can play a supportive role, however small and brief, in nurturing local ecosystems.

I don’t mean to claim that I had a flawless regenerative travel experience, nor to preach my virtues. I’d simply like to present a more modest alternative to the many ritzy options occupying the mainstream. I think it’s important to promote financially inclusive ways to travel regeneratively and I’m grateful to the publisher of my story, Design Hotels, an upscale hotel collective, for inviting me to share my decidedly downscale perspective. You can read it here.