When you are a true traveler, planet Earth becomes your most passionate and lasting love affair.
And suddenly, it becomes clear that we must protect her.
Along the way, you meet people who are passionate about making green choices, and some who travel with green intentions at the forefront. At first, it can seem strange, foreign. But then you realize, to travel is to witness how fragile our planet really is.
In Alaska, I watched a glacier melt.
In Peru, I watched trash wash up upon the beaches.
In Vietnam, I could see the effects of our dependence on plastics. It was floating in the Red River in Hanoi. People were swimming in it at Sentosa, in Singapore, piles of floating trash.
In Cambodia, enterprising children from the poorest of villages put empty plastic bottles in a net to fashion a flotation device.
In Halong Bay, Vietnam, when we were fishing for squid by night, the trash glowed back at us. Our guides say a boat with a giant net goes out into the bay to collect the trash periodically. This, my people, is an UNESCO World Heritage Site. And we have no one to blame for this pollution but humankind. It is heartbreaking.
This week I had the opportunity to contribute to a blog owned by a friend of mine, CS Sherin, who authored the amazing green living resource, Recipe For a Green Life. It was important to me to write about the recent IPCC Climate Report, developed by a team of scientists appointed by the United Nations. These scientists determined it’s likely we will see catastrophic effects of climate change within our lifetimes. Sherin’s blog seemed like the perfect place to share the post, but the more I think about it, preservation of the planet is a cause all travelers can get behind, because we love this place and want to keep exploring it while encouraging others to do the same. As travelers, we have a vested interest in protecting Mother Earth.
It’s been so easy for far too long to think of climate change as something we, or someone else, can deal with later. This report tells us changes are long past due.
But not all hope is lost. Dear Earth lovers, we still have time to mitigate the effects of climate change. And best of all, there are a few easy changes you can make immediately that will have a positive and lasting impact on our beautiful, precious planet.
Like you, I still want to see many places in the world, places gravely at risk from our current way of life. I hope you’ll take a few moments to read the post about five things you can do to protect our planet, share it, and take some baby steps toward sustainability, so we can continue to explore and appreciate a healthier planet Earth for generations to come.
Charish Badzinski is an explorer and award-winning features, food and travel writer. When she isn’t working to build her blog: Rollerbag Goddess Rolls the World, she applies her worldview to her small business, Rollerbag Goddess Global Communications, providing powerful storytelling to her clients.
Posts on the Rollerbag Goddess Rolls the World travel blog are never sponsored and have no affiliate links, so you know you will get an honest review, every time.
Find Charish on Twitter: @rollrbaggoddess and on Instagram at @rollerbaggoddess. You can also read more about Charish Badzinski’s professional experience in marketing, public relations and writing.
Rollerbag Goddess Rolls the World by Charish Badzinski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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