When you really think about it it's we, the affluent, middle class travellers, especially in the west but increasingly in the booming east, who are actually far more anti-social than the "travellers" of Ireland or the Roma and other such groups . We are the ones who are never off the road and never out of the air, business travellers on junkets, seminars, conventions and redundant face-to-face meetings in an electronically connected world, on our serial foreign vacations, weekend "getaways", racking up road/air miles on holidays or visiting family in far off places, spewing our CO2 into our climate-changing earth's thin layer of life, directly and indirectly contributing to extreme weather events like the drought in the Horn of Africa and furthermore, causing valuable farmland to be devoted to biofuels so we can travel more cheaply, driving up the cost of food that should be grown on those very fields of biofuel-producing crops. Every litre of fuel, petroleum or ethanol, we use for our wasteful touristic, "travellers" lifestyle is another portion of food lost to the people of the Horn of Africa and countless places like it.
Puritanical? Killjoy? Perhaps ... but surely there are ways to do business and enjoy life's "highway" without this endless, restless, frantic, long-distance to-ing and fro-ing? Certainly coal-fired industrial China is contributing massively to climate change but so much of that industry is now producing the vehicles and infrastructure of travel which just compounds the problem.
Of course there are those who say, "But we have to "live", we have to enjoy life, we have to get out and see the world, broaden the mind, meet other cultures, see how the other half lives! And we have to get out of our hum-drum, urban wastelands and get away from cold, snow and ice in the winter." Of course! But it's the frequency, the volume and the sheer inequality of opportunity to do these things that is leading us to a blind, fateful intersection.
Listen to The Horn.
It's loud and clear, a blast of awakening.
We are "travelling" towards a disastrous collision with the earth, through a smog of ignorance, and we are half-asleep at the wheel.