TV show 'How to holiday greener'...

Being British there are a few things I hang onto living up here in the Arctic. One of them is British TV. We have a satellite package that includes BBC Prime. Now this is a matter of annoyance in our household as it was supposed to be the best of BBC programming but now has disintegrated into a channel that shows old repeats and utter rubbish. That’s a irrelevant rant on my part but needed to get it off my chest! Now to my point, I have found a program called ‘How to holiday greener’. It’s actually not even on Prime but on the Travel channel. It basically shows you how to lessen your carbon footprint when holidaying. This seems to boil down to taking remote camping holidays in the UK which might be well and good but personally I’d rather stay at home (sorry for being flippant but my idea of a holiday isn’t being alone in a tent in the cold with a flask and wind up torch – don’t get me wrong, I care a great deal about the environment but if everyone stopped eating meat, there would be no issue as meat eating is responsible for a huge amount of global warming..more on that in a later post). The first episode I watched had me stunned. It showed the presenter visiting a farm which had buffalo roaming around, majestic animals, the presenter was taken aback by their beauty. Cut to the same woman, eating a buffalo steak in the farm kitchen or restaurant (I can’t remember which) and salivating over the tenderness of the meat’. I called her some names I won’t repeat here and switched it off. When I saw it was on again yesterday my curiosity got the better of me. This week, they were advertising a remote Scottish village which there were no roads to, you could walk or take a boat. The presenter took the boat as it was an opportunity to go seal watching. I was ready, Seal watching, surely this would be followed by the eating of seal meat (they eat that in Norway on occasion – one comment I’ve heard is ‘It’s so hard eating them when you picture their cute faces’...). I was ready. No. Didn’t happen. Thank goodness! Two minutes later, a discussion about red deer, how they are so beautiful and many groups living in Scotland, but the numbers sometimes got too many (rather like Glaswegians) so here’s a green holiday idea, deer stalking! Yes, it’s all the rage, culls the deer and keeps the tourists happy.

So if you want to make a positive holiday choice, a green holiday choice, a carbon friendly holiday choice, then eat animals, shoot animals for pleasure... do anything other than what will really make a difference - stop breeding animals to be killed for food, therefore stopping all the methane emissions that have as much combined impact on the environment as all transport! Yes, really.

If you have time to spare please drop the travel channel a line and tell them what you think.