The Hidden Cost of Vanlife // S03E12

The objective of the Combi Life channel is not political. We aim to share our discoveries whatever they might be about the world and life as full-time nomads as we drive around the planet. Right now it's kind of hard to ignore the current state of our planet and whether you believe that humans cause climate change or not the one thing that we can all agree on is that right now our planet is getting warmer and at a frightening pace. This is a problem affecting all of us and sometimes it feels like there is nothing that we can do to help but there is a part that we play in this important story and in this episode we're explaining why we think we need to take responsibility for our carbon footprint and what we're doing about it. Yeah that's pretty good, it's pretty good. Morning. It's hard to know what time of the morning it is when the bells sound like that isn't it? So welcome to Portugal guys. We stayed here last night in the Douro valley which is basically a beautiful wine growing region of Portugal. The Douro valley basically follows the Douro river which goes all the way down I think pretty much from the Spanish border. We woke up this morning with 10 degrees celsius, it's now 17 degrees celsius which is much more comfortable so we haven't had much opportunity to use this heater but I think that it's going to be coming in handy. I should turn it down, let's get a taste in here. We are here in the oldest country in Europe trying to navigate our way to the small town of Coxa. You cannot find the way through, this is the third road we tried. What's going on? You have to go to there, you can pass there. Okay. There are the machines in the route you cannot pass. Okay. Okay, you have to go back. Where we've been invited to join a group of people doing important work in the remote hills of Portugal. That's cool. It's a pretty nice view for our camp spot today, tonight. We're staying here babes, can we stay here? Can we keep this one? Look how many burnt trees there are. Definitely missing some trees around here, all of these ones seem to be burnt obviously from a recent fire. It's really interesting to see the land here and how it's been carved out because basically the people that lived here previously had no space to do any farming so they've had to carve the mountain to get little strips of flat land. So much work has gone into this area through generations and generations of Portuguese people and these days it's completely abandoned because I guess like people are making their living in a but a lot of work was done here and now it's just been left to the wild. So there's going to be about 40 to 50 people here tomorrow at this spot to do the same thing as what we're here to do and hopefully we get to meet some people that have come from all over Europe that are now living here up in the mountains. Yeah, really excited for tomorrow. We're getting prepared for tomorrow by just getting a few things sorted so we can just wake up in the morning and go straight to the site. So we've got camera all ready to go, set up, ready to film. We've got an umbrella so we can film outside because it's going to be some weather. We've got Alaska's raincoat ready because it's going to be pouring with rain and she's going be out with us. I'm just going to get wet. Got a towel drying for Alaska when she gets in the car after a long day outside. Where's yours? And I'm going to be making some quick overnight oats and get prepared with a nice healthy breakfast. It's just going to be a banana and cocoa oats and they're really really easy to make. The reason why we like making them is because it's healthy and it's ready to eat in the morning so you don't have to cook anything. They're just ready to eat cold. For this recipe we've got milk. We don't have any almond milk or yogurt unfortunately so we're just going to have milk, oats, banana, cacao and honey. I have one to two teaspoons of cacao, one teaspoon of honey, half a jar of oats and half a jar of milk and mash the banana in there and then that should mix it all together. Put it in the fridge overnight and tomorrow morning we'll just add some nuts on top and it should be delicious to eat. So your one's the yellow one. Ben wanted cranberries in his. Yours is yellow Ben. Mine's red. So you can either stir it like I just did or shaking it's much easier. Can you do two at a time? Shake it and put it in the fridge overnight and then they're going to be ready for tomorrow. Easy. So today... Why are we having such a special high energy breakfast today Leah? Because we've got a lot of fun work to do today. Today we are meeting up with an awesome company who plant trees to offset people's travels. So today we'll be planting I don't know how many trees actually we'll be finding out today to offset our travels so far. We want to basically repay our carbon debt and we have been doing a lot of driving in not the most modern vehicle and so today we will be planting enough trees to cover all of the carbon that we burnt from driving from Chile all the way to Alaska and from America to here to this point. Yes and all the way across America up to the UK down to Portugal exactly where we are right now. Yes we didn't know how many miles we're going to be doing after this so we couldn't really calculate how much we'd be doing so the next part of the trip we'll be doing something else to offset our carbon for that part of the trip but we did the calculations of miles we did and how much CO2 we produced from those miles. For Copito's journey it was about a 65,000 mile journey from Chile to Alaska on 20 miles per gallon and it was about 28,800 kilograms. Boomerang's journey from Arizona to here is 12,529 miles and that calculated to be at 18 miles per gallon roughly 6,186 kilograms worth of CO2. So all up we produced 35,000 kilograms of CO2 in our travel so far in this van traveling around the world so we're going to offset that. I don't know how many trees that is we'll find out today. We don't exactly know what we're committing to but we want to do it so however long it takes we will be here in Coja putting trees in the ground. Quite a nice mixed bunch of people this morning actually. This whole area looks like it was hit by the fire. I think it's going to rain today so hopefully everything's okay. I want to say that we're all here to plant this amazing forest of which Gone West is helping us and I want to say that we're all here voluntarily helping. I don't want anyone to chew on more that they can take. There are some slopes quite steep. You put this in the ground you want to make sure that you can get right into the ground. If I cannot get to this root plate I'm not going to plant the tree in the ground okay. My name's Una and I'm 15 in a week. My parents they've always like lived on farm and stuff where we planted trees so I've yeah I've grown up with it and I'm really enjoying it actually. So what we do here is that we made a start today planting native trees in woodlands because for us it's really important to prepare our life support systems that are the oceans but as well as our forests that are really important and without them there's a very little chance for humanity to survive. So what we do here is we create native forests which not only increase wildlife habitat but simultaneously it's a very resilient landscape and we had a national disaster here in October 2017 where thousands of people got homeless and lost their homes, farms, a lot of damage was done. So it works both ways. We can create a safer environment for us to live and for animals, wild animals to live and at the same time we do a lot better in terms of ecosystem restoration. That's what we're doing. This is Alaska approved digging site. Alaska's first tree. You've got to offset your carbon too. Christina was telling us it gets pretty dry in this area so these species of trees that we're planting is quite resistant to drought so they should be able to survive in this environment here. Luckily today is ideal conditions for tree planting. It's definitely moist, it's not too hot so hopefully there's a bit of rain coming that'll be good for these little guys. My name's James, I'm from Gone West. I actually started the company. I've been planting trees for like 10 years and I've been doing it for a living like since I was 19 years old. So basically I'm very committed to the industry and the environmental benefit is we plant trees and we create new ecosystems, regenerative ecosystems and then basically the social benefit is we empower people to make a living from planting trees and also to learn that nature is something that gives back and that's something that's important in our lives and just as an example you know we have people that work on their little rigs they've decided it wasn't they have no meaning in their life right they're just pillaging the earth pillaging the earth and yeah they're making some good money and they're hard workers and they switch over to working with Gone West and they also make good money planting trees and slowly but surely they get connected with the nature more. We have people from all walks of life working together so businesses can contribute towards these tree planting operations and basically they can make a positive impact on the planet whilst also you know they can make money still that's fine it's not not everyone has to be a charity living in a tree house but basically they can make money but they should give back more than they've taken and if they've taken a lot they should give back more if they've taken hardly anything then they should only give back a little bit right it's a good way to look at things that's kind of the motivation eh yeah so basically i'd say that we have a couple of offerings so you can offset your travels uh well we say offset your life right so basically on average the european average is every each person creates 12 tons of carbon per year that equates to 12 trees so we offer people the chance to buy 12 trees and it means that they live without doing what i said before giving more than they've taken so basically offsetting all of their carbon emissions but it's much more than just the carbon emissions to us because that's an old age old thing carbonation is important but it's also the benefits that they're creating as well we calculated how much carbon our whole this travel that we're doing this journey that we're doing is creating and we're trying to offset that so i think it's good for people because there is a lot of people that travel that don't like the fact that they're creating so much carbon like if they take flights and stuff even though they love traveling but they still have concerns about that so it's really nice for travelers yeah like us to be able to have that option to exactly get back like yeah we love to meet people from all walks of life especially when they have chosen an alternative way to live here people had come from all different places and we were curious to find out why they have adopted this rural lifestyle i'm linby lu and we are here with the wildlings and that's a group of people who left the city because they worked for years in the corporate world and we strongly felt that something ain't right in this so we moved into nature and we tried to find a different way of life but we were we were traveling around for quite a while because we decided that we didn't want to live in holland um it didn't really it just didn't seem like it was us it was funny because every time we searched anything about self-sufficiency or sustainable living every google hit came to portugal central portugal and so we ended up wolfing here for a little while and then just fell in love with it when we got here basically so we only spent three four months here and then decided that we wanted to live here and then we started looking for land and then we came across this plot of land and fell in love with it and that was it it's really impractical there's like really bad access and we said we're definitely going to be able to drive our car right to our house we can't get our car anywhere near but yeah but that's uh it just you know sometimes you find a place and it speaks to you and i think we still like traveling and we still probably will want to go back to traveling but right now we wanted to raise a family and this just makes the most sense right now yeah there's all types of different people like there's architects and eco builders we have project managers among us regenerative farmers alternative doctors so it's actually a really great pool of people to start a new type of little community where we're really self-sufficient and for the wildlings it's mainly about rewilding the planet and rewilding our human selves because we feel like in society today we're so detached from nature and therefore ourselves that we have to rewild ourselves again and find that connection we haven't been in portugal long but it's easy to see why people chose to make their homes here our time with the wildlings reminded us of the importance of nature after all as david attenborough recently said we rely on it so much for every aspect of life from the air we breathe to the food we eat we've arrived in paradise we've just come this is where we camped um last night and we wake up to all these fruit trees somewhere along the way we as a species have started to take nature for granted but sometimes fixing a planetary scale problem seems too big to know where to start and it feels like it's out of our control i'm all right but there is something that we can do and it starts right now we all need to step up together and take responsibility for our share of the damage to change our ways and give back to our planet which has already given us so much from here we are pushing south further into portugal to experience the country from the locals perspective and to prepare for our crossing into africa i don't know if you guys can see that but that is africa over there but let me tell you now our final days in europe did not at all go to plan but that is a story for next time