What are Your Travel Ethics?

Bill Frederick kicks off Verge Magazine's new Travel Ethics column with a look at the counterpoint of competing values.

Two American women are kissing in the middle of the dance floor oblivious to the hostile stares of the grandmothers in a conservative, Catholic community in rural Mexico. A visitor to Panama becomes incensed at the prevalence of polystyrene cups being used at restaurants: "Don't they know about the health and environmental impacts of Styrofoam?"

A young man arrives in Burma to begin what he hopes will be a long, arduous training in Vipassana meditation. It is the 13th anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi's confinement.

After bargaining aggressively to pay the local rate instead of the "tourist rate" to the rickshaw driver, a young traveller celebrates his newly won "cultural competence" with an ice cream at the Hilton.

What do you do when someone you've befriended brings you home to dinner, and endangered turtle soup is the chosen entrée?

What are your travel ethics? What do you admire or abhor in other travellers' choices? Choices are where ethics begin, and, as travel options multiply for so many, a conversation regarding the moral dimensions of travel has arisen. Not many of us question the ethics of those who travel for survival, be it refugees from Darfur or brown bears migrating south in Wyoming. It is when we travel for less urgent purposes that we begin to examine all the other choices that go along with it.

Most discretionary travel comes under the heading of tourism. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people who "travel to and stay in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business, and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited." This includes those of us travelling to perform good deeds of service as well as those of us going on holiday. It includes students, adventurers, sex tourists, scientists, writers, medical tourists, and what is left of the big game hunting crowd. It presumably includes missionaries and soldiers if their tours are less than one year's duration. Tourism is an enormous industry and ethical tourism is the organic option.