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After a short week of freezing rain, hail and family coughs in the hilly landscapes of Haute-Saône during this vacation, I found myself dreaming of a distant trip. I love the east of France, a place that has been familiar to me since I was born. But I also love the smell of a change of scenery, the one that hits you by the throat when you set foot on the tarmac of an unknown country. Or should we write “I loved it” instead?
It is undeniable that with three young children we have undertaken fewer planetary excursions than we did before they were born: too expensive, too tiring. It is also undeniable that with the rise in climate anxiety we would think twice before emitting 15 tonnes of CO equivalent2 for a return trip to Bangkok, for example…
Three tonnes each is more than a human will be expected to emit in an entire year, in 2050, so that the planet does not warm above 2°C. In her column “Hot ahead”, my colleague Cécile Cazenave recently talked about adventurous parents about their solutions for introducing their children to the world without (too) burning it up. Results: railway odysseys in a sleeping car and an exploration of the European continent. For San Francisco, we will come back, as a resigned mother says.
A transgression and a mistake
The simple fact of asking this question in these terms is very socially marked: in France, every year, only 55% to 70% of French people go on vacationand, among them, around 20% go abroad. We are therefore talking about a privileged minority, to which I belong. I had the incredible privilege of traveling at a young age – I already realized that at the time – and without any bad ecological conscience – I could hardly have predicted that it would soon be a bygone time. Are our children condemned to experience each trip as a transgression and a mistake? For those of my generation, we stuffed a Backpacker’s Guide, a low-cost ticket and an instruction into their pockets: go far away! And now these doors are already closing and another message is emerging for the following: stay at home!
Honestly, I don’t know what to think about it. Part of me finds the idea of our children renouncing the elsewhere, the very different, the uncomfortable, very sad. But another part of me wonders what they would really find there, in this elsewhere. I read Julien Blanc-Gras’ new book this week, Bungalow (Stock, 200 pages, 19 euros, published May 2). The reporter-writer-traveler has published several works on tourism and its authorship (Like in war, Stock, 2019). This time, he recounts his family stay in Southeast Asia, for four months, with his wife and their 9-year-old son. Four months of escape, literally, to avoid the wall towards which his wife was heading at full speed in her job. As in all his books, Julien Blanc-Gras displays a sort of sarcastic tenderness, a humanist phlegm, a bit as if one had dipped a Houellebecq in a strawberry bubble bath. I found this book incredibly touching. Because to the reflective melancholy of travel writers on the meaning of travel, he adds another dimension: that of childhood.
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