The theme of this year’s Travel & Words Conference for Pacific Northwest travel writers was “sustainable, green travel and tourism” – something that struck me as ironic as I sat in a room filled with journalists, editors, and travel PR folks who had most likely clocked hundreds of thousands of collective miles in jet fuel since the start of the year.
We discussed what ‘sustainable’ means, examining the United Nations definition of the word: “Meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” We listened to panels and sat in roundtable discussions that covered everything from food photography to pitching magazines, but all with the shared angle: “How do we do these things in a way that is mindful of sustainability?”
I left the conference with a few concrete ideas and an invitation to visit the Long Beach Peninsula in southwest Washington, where I might put those ideas into practice.