The United Nations designated 2017 the International Year of Sustainable Tourism. Today we take a look at what that means. We explore how our industry is impacting environmental, cultural, and economic sustainability for better and worse around the world. We learn how, for mindful travelers, sustainability and a richer travel experience may start with thinking first of local people and ways of life in the places we visit. For all this and more, our conversation this week starts in Venice...
(Feature Erla Zwingle at 1:00; Interview Elizabeth Becker at 13:27; Interview Kelly Galaski at 38:05)
Erla Zwingle
Freelance journalist, Erla Zwingle, has written for myriad magazines on myriad subjects for close to 30 years. She has no specialty, unless you consider "anything" a specialty — from sports, photography, education, phenomena, people, places, and things. Her work has appeared over 25 times in National Geographic Magazine, on topics ranging from population to olive oil, Catherine the Great, globalization, the Ogallala Aquifer, Greece, Naples, the Alps, and so on. Sometimes people call her a travel writer, but she's not. She doesn't write about travel, she travels in order to write about things which happen to be somewhere else. We're honoured to have Erla share with us her take on her hometown of Venice.
Elizabeth Becker
Award-winning author, editor and journalist, Elizabeth Becker, has covered national and international affairs as a Washington correspondent at The New York Times, the Senior Foreign Editor at National Public Radio and a Washington Post correspondent. She began her career as a war reporter in Cambodia in 1972, and is an expert on the Khmer Rouge and modern Cambodia.
In her groundbreaking work Overbooked, Elizabeth helps us understand fully the forces of the trillion-dollar global travel and tourism industry behind the glamour pages of travel magazines. It's not all a pretty picture, but as Arthur Frommer says, OVERBOOKED is “required reading for anyone interested in the future of travel.” We agree.
Kelly Galaski // Planeterra Foundation
Kelly Galaski is Program Manager heading up global programs for the Planeterra Foundation. Established in 2003, by global adventure travel company G Adventures’ founder, Bruce Poon Tip, Planeterra Foundation is a non-profit organization that has contributed millions of dollars towards projects in areas of social enterprise, healthcare, conservation, and emergency response. Their focus is on grassroots, community-based projects that empower some of the most vulnerable populations in the places that G Adventures travels.
