Outstanding reporting.

Solidarity

900 - How To Be A Better Tourist With Cameron Hewitt YouTube video by Public Health On Call

Travel can make us better global citizens—but there’s no denying its environmental impacts.

@cameronhewitt.bsky.social shares how to be more mindful when traveling and how a travel company thinks about the industry's carbon footprint.

Hear the episode: www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9xO...

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Today, let me just say: Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦

Slovenia's Logarska Dolina, along the "Panoramic Road"

Thanks, Cami! I just posted it here on Bluesky, too.

The act of travel can be a bridge over the troubled waters of our time.

And we travelers can strive to be bridges, ourselves, as we connect our increasingly isolated and hostile homeland to the world beyond our borders. #

We are entering an era where walls, suspicion, and division are in vogue.

Inspired by my travels, I will remind myself, whenever I can, of how bridges represent the transcendent power of connection and cooperation.

And what’s the other feature you’ll find on each euro banknote?

A doorway.

That’s right: a passage that leads through a wall.

In fact, Europe embraces the bridge — certainly not the wall — as its most prized symbol.

Take a close look at some euro banknotes: Each one features a bridge, from round Roman arches to pointy Gothic ones to sleek modern cables.

Bridges fill the wallets and purses of 350 million Europeans.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mostar's Old Bridge (c. 1557) symbolized a multiethnic community of Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. Its destruction in the Yugoslav Wars made it a symbol of loss. And its reconstruction transformed it again, into a symbol of reconciliation. Such is the versatility of the bridge.

While societies outgrow their walls constantly — and while the dismantling of a wall is celebrated as a marker of progress — I can’t think of a single place that has ever outgrown a bridge. What bridge has ever been taken down, and not replaced, because it’s a bother?

Historically, as kingdoms and empires expanded, they built bridges. Anywhere you go in Europe, you stumble upon old Roman, Celtic, or Ottoman bridges that still stand strong and proud, even as other vestiges of those civilizations have long since been pulverized by the passage of time.

A bridge can allow two thriving cities to become a single megalopolis, such as when Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube, became Budapest; or the Øresund Bridge that spans the strait between Denmark and Sweden, integrating Copenhagen and Malmö into a transnational economic powerhouse.

A bridge can revitalize a neighborhood, such as when London’s Millennium Bridge reintegrated its South Bank more fully into the city.

It can connect continents, such as the mighty suspension bridges arcing over the Bosporus in Istanbul, linking Europe to Asia.

Budapest’s Chain Bridge; London’s Tower Bridge; Prague’s Charles Bridge; Porto’s Dom Luís I Bridge; Luzern’s Chapel Bridge — all of these are as beautiful as they are practical, and each one is synonymous with a world-class city.

A bridge connects people and places. It allows the flow of both goods and ideas. It strengthens a city, a country, an empire.

Think of the many iconic bridges that symbolize a great city: Florence's Ponte Vecchio, Venice's Rialto Bridge, Rome's Ponte Sant’Angelo.

So, then: What about bridges?

Well, bridges are simply everything. Aren't they?

And then there are the walls you don't see anymore: prosperous, beautiful cities — Vienna, Copenhagen, Kraków — that long ago tore down their walls to create a park or boulevard. As the world around them evolved and advanced, removing these walls became the only way to grow and flourish.

Europe also has “beautiful” walls — Dubrovnik, Carcassonne, Rhodes — that evoke an age when conflict never cased. Today, travelers freely walk upon these artifacts of an earlier stage in societal evolution. Each picturesque loop feels like a victory lap, marking how far we've progressed.

Walls create the illusion of providing a "solution." But they solve nothing. They simply keep the problem at arm’s length, festering, bloating from inattention... until it explodes into a much bigger problem.

Walls are ugly: Belfast; Berlin; Israel and Palestine. In these conflicts, the wall is a blunt instrument, an act of desperation, a diplomatic failure that embodies misunderstanding, anger, hate. It's a barrier to empathy, making it easier to demonize those who live on “the other side.”

The great challenges of our time — from pandemics to climate change — are, as Rick Steves has said, blind to borders. So, too, must be the solutions, through collaboration and compromise. And that requires building bridges, not walls. As a traveler, I've seen many illustrative examples of both:

On the other side, we view the world as a vast, intricate, interwoven network of distinct societies, each one a proud product of its own complicated story. This informs a diversity of solutions — creative approaches to tackling the same vexing problems.

One faction embraces walls: borders between nations; trade barriers; cages for locking up enemies. Their world is a zero-sum game — a mountain with America at the top, encircled by a thick wall, and everyone else desperate to get here. Anyone outside is an enemy who must be vanquished.

As the USA's political pendulum takes an abrupt swing, my lifetime of travel has got me thinking about how two starkly opposed worldviews are vying for the soul of our society: Building walls... or building bridges. 🧵

One of my favorite places on earth: Ljubljana, Slovenia

Prizren, Kosovo