When Shirley Mason was a young girl, she participated in an activity one summer that ended up being a life-altering experience. “They would do special things during this two-week long summer camp and they kept talking about this one special thing we were gonna do,” she says. It was something she has ended up doing […]
Greening up summer festivals (Copyright: Woodford Festival) Synonymous with summer, music festivals welcome large numbers of live music aficionados making long treks to hear their favorite bands perform – as well as pour lots of money into the coffers of organizers. Between 1999 and 2009, the North American concert industry saw profits jump by 40% as […]
“National parks are the best idea we ever had,” wrote author and environmentalist Wallace Stegner in 1983. “Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” Stegner echoes the view of President Franklin D. Roosevelt nearly fifty years earlier when he pronounced, “There is nothing so American as our national […]
It’s hard to find a woman who hasn’t felt the graze of a male hand across her backside on a train or had racing thoughts as she’s confronted with a threatening man. Travel, despite being an industry touted as endless fun and adventure, is no exception to the worldwide epidemic of sexual harassment and assault […]
Purported to be two of the most expensive rail and bus routes per kilometer in the world, the train and bus succession which transports the 1.3 million tourists to Machu Picchu every year has been controlled by a government-granted monopoly for much of the last two decades. Fertransa, the private owner of the 30 km […]
Colonizing. That’s a term Leon Mach has used to describe surf tourism. “Colonizing in the sense that surf tourism often arrives first to remote coastal areas and effectively takes over the development process,” says Mach, the co-founder of SeaState, a program that offers courses related to sustainability in several countries. “Often this entails rapid development […]
In an ambitious plan to eradicate poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in September 2015. Setting out 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), the agenda pledged that, “no one will be left behind.’ Meanwhile, a growing demand for food combined with […]
When Kimberly Lucht volunteered with Panama-based dance service nonprofit Movement Exchange in 2012, the experience of teaching dance to at-risk youth inspired many discussions relating to race and racism in dance among her fellow volunteers. For researchers Zoe Luba and Dr. David Thomas of Mount Allison University in Canada, those are exactly the type of […]
Blaring horns and a cheering crowd greeted me when I arrived in the sleepy town of Puerto Varas, Chile on presidential election-day, December 2017. Sebastian Piñera, a billionaire businessman was elected for the second time by a population disappointed in job growth under Michelle Bachelet. Piñera’s victory marks the latest shift to the right in […]
