See the world responsibly!
Saving the planet – one tour at a time

Travel’s great – that’s why we love it. The benefits of travel are significant and well understood, in terms of opening our minds and hearts, exposing us to different ways of thinking and living, and promoting a greater understanding of the world and our place in it. One of the best ways to lessen, if not eliminate, cultural misunderstandings and global tensions would be for many more people to visit another country and spend time getting to know its people, experiencing its culture and seeing its sights. It would likely make the world a much better and more tolerant place.
Something else we’re passionate about is protecting the environment, because the negative effects of Climate Change are becoming more and more obvious. It’s clear we’re not talking about changes that will occur in the distant future, we’re talking about today. Whether it’s Hurricane Irma, the dying out of the Great Barrier Reef (the largest natural eco-system in the world) or the record-setting fires we’re experiencing in California, it’s clear that the situation is critical. Traveling by plane, car or even train can create significant amounts of pollution, thereby making the environment worse, so what is eco travel? How are we going to travel sustainably?
Well, think exploratory expedition of the urban jungle and do a tour with The Real Los Angeles Tours. All of our experiences are 100% sustainable, being based around walking, cycling and/or public transport, so they’re all, effectively, eco tours. It happens to be the best way to learn about and experience a city, which is why we’ve always done it that way since we first launched, in 2013. This is the whole idea of eco travel, to always create minimal, or no, pollution when traveling and mitigate whatever emissions we do create.

However, we wanted to go further, so in 2017 we partnered with Climate Cents, a Los Angeles based non-profit that does amazing work right here in Southern California. It’s a great example of how the climate crisis affects so many elements of society The projects that we’ve supported include fitting solar panels on youth homeless shelters in Venice, restoring kelp forests in Santa Monica Bay and tree-planting to create urban forests in the San Fernando Valley. We contribute a percentage of our annual revenue to Climate Cents and since partnering with them we’ve raised over $3,000.
Unfortunately, doing something positive about the environment doesn’t end with coming on a tour with us, even if it is an eco tour, but it’s not always clear what actions we can take. Climate Change is such an enormous, multi-faceted, problem that it’s easy to feel that there’s nothing that we can do, as individuals, that would make any difference. Luckily, that isn’t the case – because there’s lots we can achieve on our own. If you think about it every single movement in human history started with just an individual, so why shouldn’t this one start with you?

WHAT CAN WE DO?
1. Try to steadily reduce the carbon emissions that our lifestyle creates and switch to using only renewable energy, if we can.
2. Encourage our friends, family members and colleagues to get involved in climate activism (we’re often much more influential than we think and not everyone cares as much about this as us).
3. Advocate for climate change solutions at local, state and national levels by writing to our representatives at the various levels of government. Only government can make the necessary systemic changes to society and the economy. We have to make government.
4. Support a Climate Change non-profit. Even a small donation helps a lot.

Thanks for reading this and being interested in such a hugely important issue. Please let us know if you have any ideas for ways that we can do even more to fight climate change, we’re always looking new suggestions,
– Damien, founder of The Real Los Angeles Tours
Damien blogs about eco travel and many aspects of the climate crisis as A Climate Crisis Activist, and looks at some things that we, as individuals, can do to help.
- CLIMATE CRISIS LESSONS FROM CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC (4)
I’m definitely not the first person to see a similarity between the world’s efforts to...Posted on : 08th May 2020 - CLIMATE CRISIS LESSONS FROM CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC (3)
What is radical change? One of the main charges leveled at Climate Change protesters is...Posted on : 27th Apr 2020 - CLIMATE CRISIS LESSONS FROM CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC (2)
Another thing we’ve learned is to listen to experts. It seemed like politicians had little...Posted on : 16th Apr 2020 - CLIMATE CRISIS LESSONS FROM CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC (1)
The current crisis is unprecedented. Nothing like it has ever happened before (in terms of...Posted on : 05th Apr 2020 - CLIMATE CRISIS? WHAT CLIMATE CRISIS?
Hardly surprisingly the Coronavirus Pandemic has totally stopped most people from worrying about the climate....Posted on : 27th Mar 2020 - A GLOBAL COLLECTIVE ACTION PROBLEM
What does that mean? It means that the Climate Crisis cannot be solved by one...Posted on : 12th Feb 2020 - THE LITTLE THINGS...
With the bushfires raging in Australia & a relentless barrage of bad news on the...Posted on : 11th Jan 2020 - AN ECO-FRIENDLY LIFESTYLE
What does that mean? From my point of view it means thinking about the climate...Posted on : 16th Dec 2019 - ECO-FRIENDLY TRAVEL, PART 6
Aiyana & I loved our week in Switzerland, but now we had to get to...Posted on : 13th Nov 2019 - ECO-FRIENDLY TRAVEL, PART 5
We’d arrived in Zurich by train, from Milan, & that’s how we got around Switzerland...Posted on : 06th Nov 2019 - ECO-FRIENDLY TRAVEL, PART 4
Having landed in Italy, in Ancona, Aiyana & I had to train it up to...Posted on : 04th Nov 2019 - ECO-FRIENDLY TRAVEL, PART 3
As you can see it was quite windy on deck! So we took the Minoan Lines’...Posted on : 25th Oct 2019 - ECO-FRIENDLY TRAVEL, PART 2
Having decided to go from Greece to Switzerland and then to Spain without flying, and...Posted on : 24th Oct 2019 - ECO-FRIENDLY TRAVEL, PART 1
Last summer I went with the family to Athens on vacation for a week. We...Posted on : 18th Oct 2019 - WHAT CAN WE DO?
It’s something that, if we’re honest, a lot of us ask ourselves. If the worsening...Posted on : 09th Oct 2019