In 1782, William Gilpin published his theory of the Picturesque — the idea that nature is most beautiful when it resembles a painting. Travellers began crossing Britain in search of landscapes that looked like Claude Lorrain canvases: misty, composed, unspoiled. They called it touring. We call it tourism. And somewhere between Gilpin’s rowing boat and a budget airline, something went very wrong.
I thought about Gilpin constantly across five months, travelling through Istanbul, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Melbourne. Because everywhere I went, I saw the same painful paradox: the most beautiful places on earth are being quietly destroyed by our collective desire to see them.
Angkor Wat at sunrise looks, genuinely, like a painting. It is also receiving over two million visitors a year, and the groundwater extraction required to sustain that tourism is causing the ancient site to slowly sink.
This is what art historians might call the sublime turned into spectacle. What moves us most is what we consume most aggressively.
Travelling as a student of art history trained me to look carefully — not at what something is, but what it means, and what it costs. Applying that lens to sustainable travel transformed how I moved through the world and shaped practical choices I made along the way.
Before each leg of the journey, I used Rome2Rio to compare transport routes by carbon emissions, consistently choosing slower, lower-impact options over convenience. I took the slow boat down the Mekong through Laos rather than flying — two days on the river rather than forty minutes in the air, supporting SDG 13 (Climate Action). In Melbourne, I ditched public transport almost entirely and cycled everywhere, supporting SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) giving me the city in a way no tram could.
I invested in a Grayl GeoPress water filter bottle before leaving — a single purchase that eliminated my reliance on single-use plastic bottles across seven countries, addressing SDG 14 (Life Below Water) in regions where ocean plastic pollution is at a crisis point. I ate seasonally and locally throughout Melbourne, shopping at farmers’ markets and choosing restaurants that sourced from nearby producers, cutting the carbon cost of my food without it ever feeling like a sacrifice.
My proudest choice is where I slept. In Kampot, Cambodia, I stayed at Eden Eco Village — a community-led eco lodge powered by renewable energy, built from sustainable materials, and embedded in the local economy. Staying there felt less like consuming a place and more like being genuinely welcomed by it.
This is, I think, what Gilpin’s Picturesque always got wrong. He taught travellers to frame landscape as a view — something to stand before, admire, and move on from. Sustainable travel asks us to do the opposite: to slow down, participate, and take responsibility for what our presence costs.
The most radical thing a traveller can do is refuse to treat the world as a painting to be collected.
Gilpin would have understood that, I think. Eventually.
