Something strange happened this past year. Sustainability didn’t disappear from the world. It disappeared from the conversation.
In 2025 the United States moved to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and began rolling back dozens of climate regulations. Europe, normally the strict teacher at the front of the class, started “simplifying” its own rules. Corporate net-zero pledges were rewritten, postponed, or quietly deleted from websites. ESG became a phrase companies avoid saying out loud, like a name you don’t bring up at the dinner table.
And here is the part that never makes the headlines: most of them didn’t actually stop. A 2025 EcoVadis survey of 400 senior executives at large US companies found that 87 percent had maintained or increased their sustainability investment, even as the political noise grew louder. Nearly a third were investing more while deliberately talking about it less. There’s a word for this now. Greenhushing. Doing the work, but under your breath.
I understand why a multinational whispers. I don’t understand why our industry would.
The problem with silence
When sustainability stops being discussed in public, four things happen.
First, the people who never believed in it claim victory. Silence reads as surrender, even when it isn’t.
Second, the public loses its bearings. Travelers still care, the data on that is not subtle, but caring needs somewhere to go. If no operator, no hotel, no destination is talking about it, that impulse has nowhere to land.
Third, and this is the quietly dangerous one, the next generation of businesses gets built without it. When sustainability is loud, new companies design it into the foundations from day one. When it’s silent, it becomes an optional extra. A box you tick. A badge you buy.
Fourth, and this is the only one that truly matters: the problem doesn’t go away just because we stopped talking about it. That’s the easy thing to forget when you’re lost in figures and strategy. The planet doesn’t read the news. Temperatures keep climbing whether or not it’s on the agenda. Extreme weather doesn’t wait for the election cycle. Air pollution kills people every single year, regardless of what’s convenient to say this season. The agenda changed in press releases. Reality never got the memo.
That is the problem beyond tourism. Beyond business. It has nothing to do with reviews, or differentiation, or margins. It has to do with the air our children breathe, the places that will or won’t still exist in thirty years, the society we’re building while we look the other way. Everything else, the incentives, the markets, the opportunities, comes second. What comes first is the plain, uncomfortable fact that all of this is true, and that not saying so doesn’t make it any less true.
I started EcoEcho Tours with sustainability in the name, not the footnotes. So take this as the opposite of greenhushing.
Why tourism is a different animal
Most industries can afford to treat sustainability as a question of values. Tourism can’t, because for us it’s a question of inventory.
A software company’s product lives on a server. My product is a field of tulips in April. It’s a seventeenth-century windmill still standing only because the Dutch learned to bargain with water instead of fighting it. It’s a quiet canal in Giethoorn, a polder sitting below sea level, a forest path outside Amsterdam where I tell people how this country literally pulled itself out of the sea.
Tourism is responsible for roughly 8.8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That is not a rounding error. We are one of the few industries that is both a serious part of the problem and entirely dependent on the thing being damaged. We are burning the furniture to heat the showroom.
If the landscapes go, the brochures go with them. No change of agenda, no election, no quarterly report alters that arithmetic.
The travelers never changed the agenda
Here is what the political noise conceals: traveler behavior didn’t follow the backlash anywhere.
Booking.com’s 2025 research, drawn from more than 32,000 travelers across 34 markets, is remarkably steady. Traveling more sustainably remains important to 84 percent of them. Ninety-three percent say they want to make more sustainable choices, and to some degree already have. Seventy-three percent want the money they spend to stay in the local community. Sixty-nine percent want to leave the places they visit better than they found them.
Read that again. While governments were walking the rules back, travelers were quietly raising the bar.
That is precisely the gap our industry should be standing in. The demand is there, it’s growing, and right now it’s underserved because half the field decided the subject had become politically awkward. Awkwardness is not a strategy. Neither is pretending your customers don’t care about something they keep telling researchers they care about.
The incentives aren’t abstract
Let me put this in plain commercial terms, because I run a small business and I don’t have the luxury of pretty words.
When the big players go quiet, the small and honest ones get heard. The loudest voices stepping back from sustainability handed the rest of us the cheapest marketing of the decade.
Authenticity is now safer than marketing, legally as well as morally. Greenwashing lawsuits climbed sharply through 2025, even as federal enforcement pulled back, and the companies in trouble are not the ones doing the work. They’re the ones claiming it without doing it. If your practices are real, transparency is your shield, not your risk.
Then there’s the most practical thing of all: the vehicles. We run newer, low-emission vans, not because it sounds good on a leaflet, but because that is what sustainability looks like on an ordinary Tuesday. And on foot, we never put more than fifteen people behind a single guide. That’s not fussiness, it’s the limit our operating licence sets, and our small-group tours stay well under it. A column of forty blocks roads, bridges and narrow lanes, and it ruins the city for the people who live there as much as for the people visiting it. So when the larger groups come, the universities, the schools, the teams, we bring in extra guides and break the crowd into human-sized pieces. That isn’t a limitation. It’s respect for the place that feeds us.
Size, substance, and what we’re actually saying
Let me be clear about one thing, because it’s easily misread. Sustainability does not mean “small.” I work with couples and I work with entire universities, with school groups and corporate teams, and the principle holds at every scale: real conversation, local partners, stories that stay with you. Forty students on a sustainability walk through Amsterdam Noord may leave understanding far more than eight tourists on a shallow photo loop. Group size is logistics. Connection is the product.
And the connection doesn’t stop at history, however inspiring the history is, and it is. When I show people a windmill, I’m showing them a four-hundred-year-old renewable energy machine. When we stand on a polder, we’re standing on climate adaptation that began centuries before the word existed. But I don’t leave them in the past. We talk about the present and the future. We talk about peace, and about what wars cost the environment. We talk about how a crowded country below sea level stays prosperous and livable at the same time. We think out loud together. We look for ideas. The Netherlands isn’t a museum. It’s living proof that the conversation everyone is avoiding has answers that are practical, visible, and occasionally beautiful.
That’s the real job of our industry right now. Not to preach. To show. Tourism is one of the last places where millions of people willingly put themselves in front of new ideas, with an open mind and a free afternoon. It would be a waste to squander that.
The quiet part, out loud
So no, I won’t adjust to the new agenda. Not out of stubbornness, though my friends might disagree, but because the agenda changed in press releases, not in reality. The climate didn’t read the news. Neither did the travelers.
The companies whispering their work are betting the storm passes. Maybe they’re right. But while they whisper, the rest of us get to define what responsible travel actually looks like. Real connection. Local partners. Honest stories. Places left better than we found them.
Sustainability didn’t die. It just went quiet.
We won’t.