How green is my gap year?

Australia, Fiji, Thailand, Hong Kong... it’s a well-trodden rite of passage for thousands of school leavers. But how much good does it really do - and to whom? Hannah Bullock straps on her backpack.

Last year, close to a quarter of a million young Britons cut the apron strings and headed out on gap year travel, spending £2.2 billion between them. Those who make it beyond the beach parties can learn stuff that no university course conveys. Sam Annesley found it “deeply disturbing” in China, “watching all that shit get pumped into the air, as the country goes through that hardcore development stage”. Stephen Rogers says he actually embarked on his round-the-world trip “to personally experience how other people live”. He admits it’s “pretty selfish. I hadn’t considered how much pollution came from my cheap STA air miles! To be honest though, I would do it all again.”

Not all ‘gappers’ would class themselves as ‘selfish’. Volunteering is part and parcel of many a gapper’s plans. Monitoring turtles with Coral Cay Conservation, teaching English with the Project Trust, working in an orphanage with the Global Volunteer Network... Nevertheless, only 6% take the volunteering route. Those who do are mostly female. “Lads are generally after fast, funky gap years... and placement organisers don’t make volunteering look as sexy as bungee jumping in Australia,” explains Tom Griffiths of www.gapyear.com.

Even girls with the best intentions can find it hard to fit in the serious bits. “We wanted to help out with the tsunami relief at the end of our round-the-world trip, but we’d run out of money by then,” admits Rosie Bristow. She’d decided not to set out on a volunteering scheme at the start because it would have cost three to four times as much as her budget round-the-world ticket.

Some gap year travellers who do stump up cash as well as their time aren’t sure where it goes: “The company [who arranged it all] seemed to make an awful lot of money out of us, which didn’t go back into the community,” says Kate Edwards, who worked at a school in Cape Town.

VSO, the mother of overseas volunteering (which now offers its own six-month gap year placement), is concerned at these “extortionate fees”. Its ‘Mind the Gap’ checklist for sound projects demands that: money goes into a local project; volunteers receive training; it’s part of a long-term strategy for work within the host country; and local people are involved.

Might these be the foundations of an ‘ethical gap year’, then? Well, it’s halfway there - but what about all those air miles? Do gappers always have to go abroad? Faith Baker didn’t, opting instead to stay in Berkshire for a year to volunteer in a youth centre. “It was a chance to interact with people who are very different,” she enthuses. The home counties isn’t exactly on everyone’s wish list, though, says Amy Lee at Project Trust. She gives school talks to prospective gappers - and says that virtually all relish the chance to go overseas. Yet she agrees it’s time her organisation advised them on travelling safely overland - as she did herself, spending six weeks coming back via China, Mongolia and Russia after a two-year teaching stint in Japan.

“We’re travellers having fun. Who wants people standing waving placards in the corner?”

For those who haven’t so much time to spare, there’s always the fallback of carbon offsetting. But while ‘carbon neutral’ is being slapped on everything from rock tours to weddings, it’s not something the gap year industry seems to have latched on to. Griffiths himself hates the idea. He’s resisted all such blatant ‘responsible tourism’ messages on his website, explaining that “we’re like a community of travellers, all having fun. Who wants a group of people standing waving placards in the corner?”

True, a year out is a first taste of freedom for school leavers - maybe the last for graduates - and perhaps isn’t the time for guilt trips. But it doesn’t have to be painful - if someone else does the thinking. Why not round-the-world trips with offsets as part of the package? Or ‘gap year gifts’ for parents to buy from offset companies? Teenagers like deals - they buy ‘500 free minutes plus 1,000 texts’. All it needs is some clever marketing, encouraging kids to ‘upgrade’ to a more exclusive generation of gap years. After all, mightn’t there be some kudos in having a year out that’s just a bit different from the other hundreds of thousands?

Hannah Bullock is Green Futures deputy editor. Research by Velika Talyarkhan and Tristan Heath.

12 January 2007

Hannah Bullock