Terran Travelers move around the planet on foot, by train, bus, ship or car. It is deliberately not flown.
“Flying is simply the Achilles’ heel of tourism,” says Christoph Mülleder. The 56-year-old from Gallneukirchner, as a tour operator for “Weltanschauen”, has specialized professionally in conscious and sustainable travel: “Due to the advancing climate catastrophe, the massive reduction in air traffic and the switch to terrestrial travel is simply the order of the day and, so to speak, the highest railroad.”
From selfie to selfie
Within Europe in particular, he considers flying to be absolutely dispensable: “There are other ways to travel more consciously, you take more time. A day on the train is also a day to prepare for the destination, to read a book and the slow change of the Enjoying the landscape. There’s no time for that in the stressful everyday work anyway.”
excesses of our time
The shopping weekend in New York or the short stopover in Paris ruin our climate, the hunt for the next selfie in front of the Instagram spot, around which hundreds of others are crowding, are excesses of our time. Not flying is the strongest lever that a private individual can use to protect the climate, emphasizes Jana Strecker, the founder of the Terran association, which was founded in Germany in 2019. Together with her comrades-in-arms, Strecker wants to anchor “terran” in people’s minds as a positive word. Some suspect that the invention of the word “flight shame” alone led to a reduction in air traffic in Scandinavian countries – it is undisputed that flying is increasingly associated with a sinful image.
The challenge of terran travel is to take enough time, says Mülleder. In general, the entire holiday planning had to be rethought. “What do I want on my vacation? Do I want to swim, relax, do I want culture?”
Only then should the where be determined. “We have to get away from this to-do thinking, from these bucket lists – I still have to make a snag there and add this sight to the list,” says Mülleder: “Courage to leave gaps, less is more.” He took his last flight to date in 2018. “It’s a question of dosage. If a long-distance trip every two or three years, then deliberately stay longer at the destination and then compensate for the CO2 emissions.”
This compensation works through a financial donation for a project – for example for reforestation or solar systems. “A bit of an indulgence,” says Müller, and warns against buying oneself mentally free from responsibility.
Of course, every type of travel has its own challenges, including those by train. Not only do you have to laboriously buy tickets for routes through different countries from different railway lines, the track widths of the rails also differ in Europe.
This created a travel memory for Mülleder that he still fondly recalls years later: “Because the different track widths required conversion work, we once stood at the border on the return journey from the Ukraine to Vienna. Suddenly the train left without our wagon “. Unfortunately, the next train that took us along didn’t have a dining car, and we were all very hungry. The conductor saved us – he organized coffee and croissants to be brought in especially for us at the next station. Those are the experiences and encounters that remain in the memory.”
Travel – for a change
Get out of your own four walls, get to know new things – there is no question that traveling is one of the best leisure activities of all. How nice were the times when there was no talk of climate change and you could fly to the furthest corners of the world without a guilty conscience. But meanwhile the natural disasters are piling up – and not just somewhere in “Djibouti”. Floods, periods of drought and hurricanes are now up to mischief here too, claiming human lives. Everyone knows that one of the reasons for this is massive air traffic. Bad news for our desire for foreign countries and cultures, because at first glance it spoils our carefree travel. But at second glance, it also opens up the horizon for new forms of vacationing. How about a train journey to Sylt in a super comfortable sleeping car?
New Horizons
The first impulse is self-defence: I have flown privately three times in the past ten years, so it is miles away from being a frequent flyer. Because: Of course, there are many unnecessary flights, if you can find an alternative by train, you should choose this one. You can also relax and splash around on Austrian lakes, and our country is a dream for hiking anyway.
However, unpacking the moral club immediately every time someone goes on a long-distance trip also seems to be the wrong way to go.
Travel opens up new worlds, new horizons, especially when the unknown awaits at the destination. The fact that we as humans have created the opportunity for ourselves to get to know other cultures and continents in a manageable amount of time can still be considered an achievement. This is certainly not a horizon that is exhausted by Lake Neusiedl.
Source: Nachrichten
