The World We Share

There is a contradiction in the way Carla and I live, and we are very aware of it. We care deeply about climate change. We believe it is one of the greatest challenges humanity faces, and we try to live in ways that reflect that concern. And yet we also spend much of each year traveling internationally, which means getting on airplanes, and airplanes produce greenhouse gas emissions. We know that, and we have thought about it a lot.

There are certainly plenty of other things demanding our attention these days. People are struggling with the cost of housing, health care, food, and nearly everything else. Wars continue. The divide between those who have enormous wealth and those who barely have enough keeps widening. Around the world, people are dealing with problems that are immediate, painful, and very real. But climate change sits underneath all of them in a way that is easy to forget.

We can argue about how to build a fairer economy, create affordable housing, provide health care, reduce poverty, or make our political systems work better, and we should. Those things matter enormously. But if we continue making the planet itself increasingly difficult to live on, every other problem becomes harder. At some point, keeping our shared home livable has to come first.

The science is clear. Human activity has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and climate change is already affecting extreme heat, heavy rainfall, drought, fires, ecosystems, communities, and people throughout the world. The risks increase as temperatures rise.

Part of the difficulty is that climate change does not always announce itself in a way that feels urgent to us personally. Most of us will wake up tomorrow morning, make coffee, check our phones, go to work, walk the dog, take the kids to school, or get on with whatever fills an ordinary day. Climate change can feel distant compared with a rent payment due Friday or a medical bill sitting on the kitchen table. I understand that. But that is also what makes it so difficult. By the time climate change feels equally urgent to everyone, we will have allowed a great deal more damage to occur, much of it harder and more expensive to address.

So I keep coming back to a fairly simple idea: all of us have some role to play. The largest responsibility certainly belongs with governments, industries, energy producers, and institutions capable of changing entire systems. Personal choices alone will not solve climate change. We need policy, cleaner energy, better transportation, smarter cities, technological innovation, and businesses willing - or required - to put the long-term health of the planet alongside short-term profitability.

But I also don’t think that lets the rest of us off the hook. If I say climate change matters to me, I want the way I live to reflect that as much as reasonably possible.

Carla and I try. We eat very little red meat. We aren’t strict vegetarians when we travel because food is one of the ways we experience another culture, and every now and then we’ll try something traditional that includes meat. But it is a very small part of our diet. The reason is simple: beef and lamb are among the most greenhouse-gas-intensive foods we produce, and shifting toward a more plant-based diet is one of the more meaningful ways an individual can reduce the climate impact of food.

We also drive remarkably little. For much of the year we live in places where walking and public transportation are simply part of everyday life. We walk miles every day. We take trains and buses. We choose places where a car is often unnecessary. When we return to the United States, driving becomes much harder to avoid because so much of American life has been designed around the automobile, but even then our mileage is very low. None of this makes us environmentally pure. There really is no such thing. It simply means we are trying to pay attention.

And then there is flying. That is the difficult part for us.

Aviation contributes significantly to climate change, and for people who fly frequently, air travel can become a substantial part of their personal carbon footprint. We try to reduce that impact by traveling slowly. Rather than flying from country to country every few days, we tend to cross the Atlantic once, stay for months, and use trains, buses, ferries, or our feet whenever possible after we arrive.

But none of that changes the basic truth. We still fly.

And we have asked ourselves whether the answer should simply be to stop. For us, at least at this point in our lives, we don’t believe it is. And this is where the question becomes more complicated, because travel has given us something else that I believe the world desperately needs right now.

It has made the world harder to divide into us and them.

When you spend time in another culture, people stop being abstractions. A country stops being something you saw on the news. A religion stops being a label. A culture stops being a stereotype. You sit across a table from someone. You laugh together. Someone helps you when you’re lost. Someone tells you about their children. Someone serves you food their grandmother taught them to make. You discover that the people you were taught to think of as different are worried about their parents, proud of their children, trying to pay their bills, falling in love, grieving losses, laughing at ridiculous things, and hoping their lives will turn out all right.

Just like us.

Travel has reinforced for me, again and again, something I have long believed: we are one human family. We dress differently. We worship differently. We eat different food and speak different languages. Our histories are different, and those differences are real and worth respecting. But underneath them, there is so much that is shared.

And at a time when fear of the other seems so easily encouraged, I don’t know many experiences more powerful than stepping directly into the life of another culture with curiosity rather than judgment. For Carla and me, travel has become part of our education in empathy. It has taught us to listen more carefully and assume less. It has made simplistic stories about entire groups of people much harder to believe. It has reminded us how much beauty human beings have created in thousands of different ways and how much poorer our lives would be if every culture looked, believed, ate, built, celebrated, and thought exactly like our own.

And strangely enough, that brings me right back to climate change, because there may be no problem that demonstrates our interdependence more clearly. The atmosphere does not recognize national borders. No country can solve climate change by itself. We are going to have to cooperate across languages, religions, political systems, economies, and cultures. And that becomes much harder if we increasingly see people beyond our borders as strangers to fear rather than partners with whom we share a planet.

We cannot solve a planetary problem while forgetting that we belong to one another.

So Carla and I have decided to live with the contradiction rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. We continue to travel, but we try to travel thoughtfully. We stay longer. We fly less frequently than we would if we were moving quickly from destination to destination. We walk. We use public transportation. We eat lightly on the food chain. And because we know our flights still create emissions, we impose what we think of as a personal carbon tax on ourselves.

In the past, we called this carbon offsetting, but I think it is more honest to describe it differently. A donation does not magically erase the carbon that came out of an airplane engine. So we don’t tell ourselves that writing a check makes our flights disappear. It doesn’t. Reducing our emissions has to come first. The money we contribute is simply another way of taking responsibility for the impact we know we still have and putting something toward people and communities working for a healthier and more resilient world.

One organization we support is Agros International, which works with rural farming families in Latin America to help break cycles of poverty through land ownership, market-led agriculture, financial empowerment, and stronger family resources. That matters to us because climate change is profoundly unequal. The people and communities with the fewest resources are often among those most vulnerable to climate impacts, despite having contributed far less to the problem than wealthier nations and populations.

None of this creates a perfect equation. We cannot say, We flew across the Atlantic, donated some money, and now everything balances. Life is rarely that tidy. What we can say is that we are trying to live consciously inside the contradictions of being human. We want to see the world without unnecessarily damaging it. We want to experience other cultures while respecting the people who live there. We want to keep learning from this enormous, beautiful planet while doing what we reasonably can to protect it.

And perhaps most importantly, we want travel to make us more responsible citizens of the world rather than simply better-traveled tourists.

I would love to see more people experience the world this way. You don’t have to fly thousands of miles to do that. Travel can begin much closer to home. The point is simply to get beyond whatever boundaries keep us surrounded only by people who look like us, think like us, worship like us, vote like us, or live like us. Go somewhere where you are not entirely comfortable. Listen. Stay curious. Let another way of living challenge you. Let another person’s humanity become impossible to ignore.

And when we do travel farther, let’s do it with some awareness of the cost. Stay longer when we can. Walk more. Take the train. Support local communities. Make choices that reduce our footprint and contribute something back to the places and people carrying the greatest burdens. Not because any of us can live perfectly. We can’t. But we can live thoughtfully.

The world needs protecting. It also needs understanding. And I don’t think those two things are as separate as they may seem. The more time we spend in other cultures, walking their streets, sharing their food, listening to their stories, and discovering how much we have in common with people we once thought of as strangers, the harder it becomes to think of the world as a collection of separate places and separate people. It begins to feel more like what it has always been:

one home, shared by all of us.

And a home this beautiful is surely worth both knowing and saving.