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There, Then Back There Again: A Personal Reflection On Environmental Responsibility While Traveling Abroad, Stacy Vars

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

In my personal journey essay, “There, Then Back There Again”, I combine personal reflection with travel writing to explore my own conflicted feelings about traveling. I love to travel and hope to one day be able to travel more than I have been able to thus far. It is in my recent trip to Ecuador to study abroad that I started to grapple with concerns about the impact my traveling could have on the communities and environments around me. I began noticing the economic conditions of various neighborhoods we traveled through, as well as learned about environmental impacts of human …