In June 2022, I set off on a 10,650-mile, six-week motorcycle trip from Tennessee to Alaska and back again, carrying not too much more than my GPS and phone. The ride kick-started a year of travel for research – and despite the horror stories of delayed and canceled flights, I couldn’t be happier.

Just about everywhere I went, even in remote parts of the Yukon and British Columbia, folks were traveling. Many of the trailers being pulled were brand-new, suggesting the owners had bought them recently. After yet another cooped-up pandemic winter, it seems people’s appetite to get away is just as keen.

But why do we travel in the first place? What is the allure of the open road?

As a professor of religion, psychology and culture, I study experiences that lie at the intersection of all three. And in my research on travel, I’m struck by its unsolvable paradoxes: Many of us seek to get away in order to be present; we speed to destinations in order to slow down; we may care about the environment but still leave carbon footprints.

Ultimately, many people hope to return transformed. Travel is often viewed as what anthropologists call a “rite of passage”: structured rituals in which individuals separate themselves from their familiar surroundings, undergo change and return rejuvenated or “reborn.”

But travelers are not just concerned with themselves. The desire to explore may be a defining human trait, as I argue in my latest book, “Just Traveling: God, Leaving Home, and a Spirituality for the Road.” The ability to do it, however, is a privilege that can come at a cost to host communities. Increasingly, the tourism industry and scholars alike are interested in ethical travel, which minimizes visitors’ harm on the places and people they encounter.

The media inundate tourists with advice and enticements about where to travel and what to do there. But in order to meet the deeper goals of transformative, ethical travel, the “why” and “how” demand deeper discernment.

During my book research, I studied travel stories in sacred scriptures and researched findings from psychologists, sociologists, ethicists, economists and tourism scholars. I argue that meaningful travel is best understood not as a three-stage rite but as a six-phase practice, based on core human experiences. These phases can repeat and overlap within the same journey, just as adventures twist and turn.

1. Anticipating

Traveling begins long before departure, as we research and plan. But anticipation is more than logistics. The Dutch aptly call it “voorpret”: literally, the pleasure before.

How and what people anticipate in any given situation has the power to shape their experience, for better or worse – even when it comes to prejudice. Psychology experiments, for example, have shown that when children anticipate greater cooperation between groups, it can reduce their bias in favor of their own group.

But phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that studies human experience and consciousness, emphasizes that anticipation is also “empty”: our conscious intentions and expectations of what’s to come could be fulfilled or dashed by a future moment.

With that in mind, travelers should try to remain open to uncertainty and even disappointment.

2. Leaving

Leaving can awaken deep emotions that are tied to our earliest experiences of separation. The attachment styles psychologists study in infants, which shape how secure people feel in their relationships, continue to shape us as adults. These experiences can also affect how comfortable people feel exploring new experiences and leaving home, which can affect how they travel.

Some travelers leave with excitement, while others experience hesitation or guilt before the relief and excitement of departure. Mindfulness about the stages of travel can help people manage anxiety.

3. Surrendering

Travelers cannot control their journey: A flight is canceled, or a vehicle breaks down; the weather report predicts sunshine, but it rains for days on end. To some extent, they have to surrender to the unknown.

Modern Western cultures tend to see “surrendering” as something negative – as hoisting a white flag. But as a therapeutic concept, surrendering helps people let go of inhibiting habits, discover a sense of wholeness and experience togetherness with others. The perfectionist learns that a changed itinerary doesn’t mean a diminished travel experience and lets go of the fear of failure. The person with a strong sense of independence grows in vulnerability when receiving care from strangers.

In fact, some psychological theories hold that the self longs for surrender, in the sense of liberation: letting down its defensive barriers and finding freedom from attempts to control one’s surroundings. Embracing that view can help travelers cope with the reality that things may not go according to plan.

4. Meeting

Meeting, traveling’s fourth phase, is the invitation to discover oneself and others anew.

All cultures have unconscious “rules of recognition,” their own ingrained customs and ways of thinking, making it more difficult to forge cross-cultural connections. Carrying conscious and unconscious stereotypes, travelers may see some people and places as uneducated, dangerous, poor or sexual, while hosts may see travelers as rich, ignorant and exploitable.

Going beyond such stereotypes requires that travelers be mindful of behaviors that can add tension to their interactions – knowing conversational topics to avoid, for example, or following local dress codes.

In many parts of the world, those challenges are intensified by the legacy of colonization, which makes it harder for people to meet in authentic ways. Colonial views still influence Western perceptions of nonwhite groups as exotic, dangerous and inferior.

Starting to overcome these barriers demands an attitude known as cultural humility, which is deeper than “cultural competence” – simply knowing about a different culture. Cultural humility helps travelers ask questions like, “I don’t know,” “Please help me understand” or “How should I …?”

5. Caring

Caring involves overcoming “privileged irresponsibility”: when a traveler does not recognize their own privilege and take responsibility for it, or does not recognize other people’s lack of privilege.

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Travel becomes irresponsible when tourists ignore injustices and inequities they witness or the way their travels contribute to the unfolding climate crisis. Ethically, “empathy” is not enough; travelers must pursue solidarity, as an act of “caring with.” That might mean hiring local guides, eating in family-owned restaurants and being mindful of the resources like food and water that they use.

6. Returning

Travels do end, and returning home can be a disorienting experience.

Coming back can cause reverse culture shock if travelers struggle to readjust. But that shock can diminish as travelers share their experiences with others, stay connected to the places they visited, deepen their knowledge about the place and culture, anticipate a possible return trip or get involved in causes that they discovered on their trip.

I believe that reflecting on these six phases can invite the kind of mindfulness needed for transformative, ethical travel. And amid a pandemic, the need for thoughtful travel that prioritizes host communities’ well-being is clear.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Sept. 28, 2021.

Jaco J. Hamman, Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture, Vanderbilt Divinity School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

COVID-19 was the third-most-common cause of death between March 2020 and October 2021 in the U.S., behind only heart disease and cancer, according to a recent study.

Older adults face the greatest risk of dying from COVID-19, but infection with the coronavirus remains a serious risk for younger people, too. In 2021, COVID-19 was the leading cause of death in adults aged 45 to 54, the second leading cause for adults aged 35 to 44 and the fourth leading cause for those aged 15 to 34.

As sociologists who study population health, we have been assessing how losing a loved one to COVID-19 has affected people’s well-being. Our research shows that more than 9 million people have lost a close relative to COVID-19 in the U.S. This dramatic rise in bereavement is troubling because our research finds that COVID-19 bereavement not only increases people’s risk of depression, but can make them uniquely vulnerable to mental distress.

The distinctness of grieving COVID-19 deaths

Researchers have a sense of what constitutes “good” and “bad” deaths. Bad deaths are those that involve pain or discomfort and happen in isolation. Their unexpectedness also makes these deaths more distressing. People whose loved ones die “bad deaths” tend to report greater mental distress than those whose loved ones died in more favorable circumstances.

COVID-19 deaths often bear many hallmarks of “bad” deaths. They are preceded by physical pain and distress, often occur in isolated hospital settings and happen suddenly – leaving family members unprepared. The ongoing nature of the pandemic has inflicted an added layer of agony, as individuals are grieving during a time of protracted social isolation, economic precarity and general uncertainty.

In another recent study, our team used national survey data from 27 countries to test whether the mental health impacts of COVID-19 deaths are more severe than death from other causes. We focused on the case of spousal death and compared two groups of people: those whose spouses died of COVID-19 in the pandemic’s first wave and those whose spouses died of other causes just before the pandemic began. We found that COVID-19 widows and widowers face higher rates of depression and loneliness than expected based on widow and widower mental health outcomes pre-pandemic.

The secondary population health consequences of COVID-19 deaths

The outsized effects of COVID-19 deaths on grieving spouses’ mental health is troubling because we estimate that nearly 500,000 people have already lost a spouse to COVID-19 in the U.S. alone. The mental health problems that people face after losing a loved one can also lead to declines in physical health and even increase a person’s risk of death.

Our research suggests that COVID-19 not only increased rates of family bereavement, but that people who lost loved ones to the coronavirus were particularly distressed afterward. But we studied only widowhood; future research needs to identify the potentially unique health, social and economic consequences of COVID-19 losses for other bereaved relatives.

With COVID-19 representing 1 in every 8 deaths between March 2020 and October 2021, there are millions of people who could benefit greatly from financial, social and mental health support. It is also critical to continue taking steps to prevent future COVID-19 deaths. Each death averted not only saves a life but also saves numerous loved ones from the harm that follows these tragedies.

Emily Smith-Greenaway, Associate Professor of Sociology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; Ashton Verdery, Professor of Sociology, Demography and Social Data Analytics, Penn State; Haowei Wang, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Sociology, Penn State, and Shawn Bauldry, Associate Professor of Sociology, Purdue University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Wildfires in the American West are getting larger, more frequent and more severe. Although efforts are underway to create fire-adapted communities, it’s important to realize that we cannot simply design our way out of wildfire – some communities will need to begin planning a retreat.

Paradise, California, is an example. For decades, this community has worked to reduce dry grasses, brush and forest overgrowth in the surrounding wildlands that could burn. It built firebreaks to prevent fires from spreading, and promoted defensible space around homes.

But in 2018, these efforts were not enough. The Camp Fire started from wind-damaged power lines, swept up the ravine and destroyed over 18,800 structures. Eighty-five people died.

Across the America West, thousands of communities like Paradise are at risk. Many, if not most, are in the wildland-urban interface, a zone between undeveloped land and urban areas where both wildfires and unchecked growth are common. From 1990 to 2010, new housing in the wildland-urban interface in the continental U.S. grew by 41%.

Whether in the form of large, master-planned communities or incremental, house-by-house construction, developers have been placing new homes in danger zones.

It has been nearly four years since the Camp Fire, but the population of Paradise is now less than 30% of what it once was. This makes Paradise one of the first documented cases of voluntary retreat in the face of wildfire risk. And while the notion of wildfire retreat is controversial, politically fraught and not yet endorsed by the general public, as experts in urban planning and environmental design, we believe the necessity for retreat will become increasingly unavoidable.

But retreat isn’t only about wholesale moving. Here are four forms of retreat being used to keep people out of harm’s way.

Limiting future development

On one end of the wildfire retreat spectrum are development-limiting policies that create stricter standards for new construction. These might be employed in moderate-risk areas or communities disinclined to change.

An example is San Diego’s steep hillside guidelines that restrict construction in areas with significant grade change, as wildfires burn faster uphill. In the guidelines, steep hillsides have a gradient of at least 25% and a vertical elevation of at least 50 feet. In most cases, new buildings cannot encroach into this zone and must be located at least 30 feet from the hillside.

While development-limiting policies like this prevent new construction in some of the most hazardous conditions, they often cannot eliminate fire risk.

Halting new construction

Further along the spectrum are construction-halting measures, which prevent new construction to manage growth in high-risk parts of the wildland-urban interface.

These first two levels of action could both be implemented using basic urban planning tools, starting with county and city general plans and zoning, and subdivision ordinances. For example, Los Angeles County recently updated its general plan to limit new sprawl in wildfire hazard zones. Urban growth boundaries could also be adopted locally, as many suburban communities north of San Francisco have done, or could be mandated by states, as Oregon did in 1973.

To assist the process, states and the federal government could designate fire-risk areas, similar to Federal Emergency Management Agency flood maps. California already designates zones with three levels of fire risk: moderate, high and very high.

They could also develop fire-prone landscape zoning acts, similar to legislation that has helped limit new development along coasts, on wetlands and along earthquake faults.

Incentives for local governments to adopt these frameworks could be provided through planning and technical assistance grants or preference for infrastructure funding. At the same time, states or federal agencies could refuse funding for local authorities that enable development in severe-risk areas.

In some cases, state officials might turn to the courts to stop county-approved projects to prevent loss of life and property and reduce the costs that taxpayers might pay to maintain and protect at-risk properties

Threehigh-profile projects in California’s wildland-urban interface have been stopped in the courts because their environmental impact reports fail to adequately address the increased wildfire risk that the projects create. (Full disclosure: For a short time in 2018, one of us, Emily Schlickman, worked as a design consultant on one of these – an experience that inspired this article.)

Incentives to encourage people to relocate

In severe risk areas, the technique of “incentivized relocating” could be tested to help people move out of wildfire’s way through programs such as voluntary buyouts. Similar programs have been used after floods.

Local governments would work with FEMA to offer eligible homeowners the pre-disaster value of their home in exchange for not rebuilding. To date, this type of federally backed buyout program has yet to be implemented for wildfire areas, but some vulnerable communities have developed their own.

The city of Paradise created a buyout program funded with nonprofit grant money and donations. However, only 300 acres of patchworked parcels have been acquired, suggesting that stronger incentives and more funding may be required.

Removing government-backed fire insurance plans or instituting variable fire insurance rates based on risk could also encourage people to avoid high-risk areas.

Another potential tool is a “transferable development rights” framework. Under such a framework, developers wishing to build more intensively in lower-risk town centers could purchase development rights from landowners in rural areas where fire-prone land is to be preserved or returned to unbuilt status. The rural landowners are thus compensated for the lost use of their property. These frameworks have been used for growth management purposes in Montgomery County, Maryland, and in Massachusetts and Colorado.

Moving entire communities, wholesale

Vulnerable communities may want to relocate but don’t want to leave neighbors and friends. “Wholesale moving” involves managing the entire resettlement of a vulnerable community.

While this technique has yet to be implemented for wildfire-prone areas, there is a long history of its use after catastrophic floods. One place it is currently being used is Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, which has lost 98% of its landmass since 1955 because of erosion and sea level rise. In 2016, the community received a federal grant to plan a retreat to higher ground, including the design of a new community center 40 miles north and upland of the island.

This technique, though, has drawbacks – from the complicated logistics and support needed to move an entire community to the time frame needed to develop a resettlement plan to potentially overloading existing communities with those displaced.

Even with ideal landscape management, wildfire risks to communities will continue to increase, and retreat from the wildland-urban interface will become increasingly necessary. The primary question is whether that retreat will be planned, safe and equitable, or delayed, forced and catastrophic.

Emily E. Schlickman, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design, University of California, Davis; Brett Milligan, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design, University of California, Davis, and Stephen M. Wheeler, Professor of Urban Design, Planning, and Sustainability, University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.