My greatest contradiction
On travel and climate change
What do we do when two of our deepest, most salient values clash with one another?
I grew up in suburban New Jersey. Spent the first 19 years of my life in a tight radius—school, soccer, friends—hardly enough time or drive to leave my circle.
I love my parents and their ability to change and grow. They’ve given me endless opportunities. And I also grew up in a house with Fox News on, hearing lines about how marriage should be between a man and a woman, and how we weren't actually sure the climate was changing—and if it was, it certainly wasn't related to humans burning fossil fuels.
When I turned 20, I spent a semester studying in Spain. What privilege. It's true. I took that classic study-abroad trip. Trains and Ryanair flights on weekends to European cities. People from all over the world at hostels. Playing soccer with kids in the streets in Morocco. My world cracking open—there's so much to see, so much to learn and understand. Most importantly, I started thinking for myself and developing my own values.
I loved it so much that I left the States again for my senior spring. Shanghai this time, with my best friend. 18-hour train rides to rural China. Villages that had hardly seen Americans—we were a novelty. We played some hooky and turned spring break into a three-week adventure in Southeast Asia. More pickup soccer with a beat-up ball. More hot, sticky nights spent on rooftops drinking beers while arguing about politics. More worldview crumbling. The world is so big, yet small. People so different, yet all the same.
After undergrad, I started exploring: Tanzania, Peru, Guatemala. I'm a traveler now. Friends on six continents, tattooed on five. Rode a mountain bike across New Zealand. Stood on the closest point on earth’s surface to the sun. Saved someone from a rip current at 2am under a blood moon in Central America.
I've also seen the injustices of the world firsthand. I haven't just read about them. I've traveled through the Global South, listened to people who live it. Poverty. Violence. Climate injustice. Those conversations helped me refine my values. And I believe everyone should have access to affordable food, water, clean energy, housing, and healthcare. Not simply my politics, but my values.
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I'm not sharing any of this as a flex. There's so much privilege in what I've been able to do. Injustice is the reason I have the time and savings to travel. I realize that. The last thing the world needs is a white dude from the US lecturing about how great travel is, wearing some savior complex.
Even while treading as lightly as possible—the opposite of luxury travel, the least extractive ways I know: slow trips, human-powered as much as possible, connecting with locals, hostels or campsites, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, picking up the language—I still carry shame. Shame that I get to see the world and others don't. Shame that I let it change me and others don't have that opportunity. And these days, most heavily: shame that I burned fossil fuels to get there.
It's impossible to escape the reality that—
I am who I am because of travel.
And I am a climate activist. Those two things sit in real tension with each other, and I'm done pretending otherwise.
Because here's the truth: flying is one of the highest-emissions choices I make. Aviation accounts for roughly 10% of global emissions. I bike everywhere. I eat mostly plant-based. I consume very little. I've built my work around systemic change in the climate space. And then I go buy a plane ticket—and I know exactly what that costs.
That's my contradiction. I own it.
How can something so incredibly beautiful for humanity—flowing through made-up borders, conversations with people on the other side of the world, sharing space with others with entirely different worldviews and languages and cultures—be so bad for the planet?
But I'm not here to beat myself up over it. I'm here to think through it honestly, because I think a lot of people who care about this planet are quietly living the same tension—and the answer isn't as simple as "just stop flying."
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Travel, real travel, does something to you that almost nothing else can.
It pulls you out of your world and drops you into someone else's. It makes you sit with discomfort, with unfamiliarity, with the beautiful strangeness of how other people live. When you stay a little longer, eat where the locals eat, move slowly, listen more than you talk—something shifts. The walls you didn't even know you had start coming down.
I’m not talking about luxury resorts, hop-around itineraries, the most Instagrammed spots—that's not travel, that's consumption. It leaves you largely unchanged and the place a little worse off.
But the other kind—the slow kind, the curious kind, the kind where you carry what you need on your back and come home with either a new understanding of humanity or a fundamentally different relationship with the natural world—that kind builds something. Empathy. Perspective. A sense of how interconnected all of this really is.
The slow kind cracks you open.
And here's what I actually believe: if flying had no climate cost, if it weren't so expensive, I wouldn't be writing an essay about moderation. I'd be telling everyone to go. Go everywhere. Leave your circle. Sit with people who see the world differently than you. Eat their food. Learn ten words of their language. Let it change you.
Because the world becomes a kinder, safer, more understanding place when people do that. We become more tolerant. We stop fearing what's unfamiliar. You can’t meet a family in rural Guatemala or share a rooftop in Southeast Asia and come home thinking anything but the best of people, of humanity. You can’t travel—that slow, intentional way—and be anti-immigration. And man, the US desperately needs more people to travel for that exact reason. Not as tourists. As humans, showing up with curiosity and humility.
That's what's actually at stake here. Not just carbon. Empathy.
* * *
So what do we do?
We fly less. Stay longer. Travel slower, lighter—give more than you take, connect with the people actually living there. That part is on us.
The structural stuff is on the systems. Tax the billionaires—take that money and build rail, fund sustainable aviation fuels, make slow travel the easy choice instead of the inconvenient one. Ban private jets. Ban short-haul flights where rail is already an option. And welcome the people who cross borders seeking something better, because that impulse—to go somewhere, experience something new, build something—is the same one that made travel change me. Nationalists call it a threat. I call it what it is: people trying to feel at home somewhere on this planet.
The problem was never that too many people wanted to see the world. The problem is who gets to, and at what cost.
* * *
There's a line from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty—bit of a silly movie with a beautiful message:
"To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life."
That's the world worth building—where the curious kid from rural India gets the same shot as the kid from suburban New Jersey. Where movement is a right, not a luxury. Where the atmosphere isn't the price of admission.
I travel to remember what's at stake. And I'm not ready to stop.