Translator: Katie Granger Reviewer: Trina Orsic
Today I want to ask you to take a journey with me.
I want to ask you to close your eyes, please
and consciously bring to mind
all of the memories and feelings from when you were children
and you had your first contact with the natural world.
Bring to mind the feeling of walking barefoot on the grass or along the sand,
the feeling of getting dirty with soil
the smell of water mixed with earth.
Of not feeling the need to rush in when the rain got us wet,
or that sensation of warmth that we felt when we sat around a fire.
You may open your eyes.
In that exercise of imagination that we just did,
there was no physical journey
because like many of the most incredible journeys that we go on,
it’s a journey inside our mind.
Today I want to invite you to think about travel not just literally,
but also, metaphorically.
But above all, I want to invite you to think about travel
as a way of understanding.
All journeys start out as a search.
Oftentimes, we don’t know what the search is for.
It’s something like nostalgia;
very similar to what we felt a moment ago
in our exercise with the imagination.
It’s on that search for what is unknown, that we become travellers.
It’s the momentum of the journey.
Personally, I was fortunate enough to grow up amid nature,
spending weekends on the farm with my cousins,
where every day was an adventure that came about thanks to our imagination.
On those days on the farm, time ceased to exist.
And I’d never feel that wonderful sensation of timelessness again.
2020 arrived with the pandemic.
March.
And after a few days of much uncertainty,
that wonderful sensation came back to me.
I’m a hotelier and lockdown began when I was at the hotel,
surrounded by a forest that you couldn’t leave or enter
because the entrance to Salento had been closed.
And paradoxically, after a great deal of uncertainty,
I reconnected with the girl on the farm where time didn’t exist
and every day was an adventure thanks to the imagination.
I reconnected with the earth, the grass, nature
and with that feeling of timelessness.
And it was during those days of isolation
that I began a new journey and a new search.
And like all the fantastic journeys that humanity has undertaken,
it turned out that it wasn’t an individual journey, but rather a collective search,
and that paths were being woven to take us on a journey together.
There were people from the most remote areas of this country
who had started this search a long time ago.
And it was the quest to believe in sustainable tourism as a force for change,
like a motor for communities to conserve natural resources
and protect ecosystems.
And those paths that I mentioned, paths that were being woven,
brought people together
from Nuquí, San Onofre, Jardín, Cocora Valley and Salento
to meet and join to reestablish the real meaning of the word “sustainability”
so that sustainable tourism would be a force for change
and not just a pretty turn of phrase.
To be sustainable you don’t need radical transformations,
but rather subtle ones.
These transformations stem from
questioning how we travel around the world,
not just literally, but metaphorically.
The aim was to relearn how to be a traveller of this planet that we inhabit,
and I say “relearn” because the path to sustainability
is no different from what our families used to do
or even the children that we remembered today.
So, returning to the metaphorical journey that I was telling you about,
we came together and created a community
whose aim is to disguise sustainability schools as hotels
and today we have six of them around the country.
Because we began to think:
“Well, what do the vast majority of us have in common
when it comes to enjoying time together?”
Well, travelling, seeing new things, exploring.
So, what better way to spread our message,
or at least to spark people’s interest in sustainability,
than disguising sustainability schools as hotels?
Hence, the invitation that I made at the beginning to think about travel
as a way of understanding things
because travelling trains us to look at things.
And like most travellers need a map.
And our route map is made up of 10 pillars
which we believe should be the foundation
of any touristic or commercial venture
or we could even apply them to our daily lives,
and it’s a 360-degree vision of sustainability.
The first one:
who forms part of my team and how does it contribute to the community?
How am I using water?
How am I using energy?
What do I offer on my menu?
and where are the products sourced?
The fifth one:
what am I doing with the waste I produce?
and this is connected to the next:
what am I doing to reduce that waste?
The sixth is:
In terms of interior design and architecture,
how am I consistent with my goal?
Because process is everything.
How is the marketing and publicity that I do consistent with my aims?
How am I spreading our message?
How am I educating or learning from those around me?
And finally, how am I offsetting my carbon footprint?
As a community we know that sustainability is not something you achieve
but rather a continuous path of learning.
And I say a path of continuous learning
because we know that we are not perfect,
and I’m sure that we will never be
and because of that we base everything on 80/20, so
we achieve 80% of our route map
and we are working towards the remaining 20%.
The easiest way to explain what 80/20 is,
is like when someone says to you:
“Listen, I’d love be to be vegetarian, but I love pork scratchings.”
Okay, reduce your consumption of animal protein by 80%
and carry on with the remaining 20%.
Sustainability is not rocket science or being a hippy,
or achieving an impossible.
It’s a never-ending road, like nature
and it’s the only path that makes sense to conserve the planet where we live
as if its resources were infinite
but it turns out they’re not.
Going back to the invitation that I made to think about travel,
the first travellers invented the world that we know today by telling us about it.
And that will still be valid
if, and only if, we change the way we travel around the world.
For me, sustainability should be a journey;
one of the wonderful ones that humanity has made together.
Even if the only story we’ve been told is that it’s too late.
For me, the most dangerous story is one of desperation.
I would like to propose a message of hope:
from local change, global changes can be made
and that collective action is the way.
Our efforts to change our habits as individuals and communities
will never be too late
so that future generations can remember
what it was like to walk barefoot on the grass
and be surrounded by nature for the time that we have left.
(Applause)