Share your experience and help inspire change

The heart of Look Near First is a bank of stories and ideas which inspire and help us to enjoy the world nearby, improving our own happiness and wellbeing, and reducing the urge to get away as far as possible.

The project is just beginning. Your ideas and stories will inspire others, and momentum will build. Will you join us?

Here are some ideas for contributions to help get the ball rolling:

• Special Places: Tell us about a place you know and love well. It could be somewhere very close to you – a piece of woodland, coast or river, a hill, a park or part of a park, a road, a building – anything! Tell us why this place has become important to you, what it gives you, and why, and how spending time there and returning to it over and over again has made it more and more special.
• (We hope to get stories from all over the world, and the point is that every part of the world has places which can be special – some may be well known, spectacular, and unique and some may be much more regular and seemingly mundane. It is how much we appreciate them that counts).

• Ways to see and connect better: Tell us about something you do – an activity, technique, or hobby which helps you appreciate and connect with a place. Examples might include arts like drawing, painting or photography, or other adventurous ways to see the world differently, like wild swimming, kayaking, hang-gliding. We’d love to hear even more practical ways to interact with your surroundings, such as keeping an allotment or volunteering in a local group. How has this activity helped you understand, love and connect with the world close to you?

• Epic challenges and adventures, with a light tread: Share your story on how choosing to travel less far does not have to be less ambitious or compromising on the adventure. What great challenges and experiences have you found without having to go to Mount Everest, Antarctica, or the Amazon? If you have had multiple epic adventures, both near and far, how have they compared in terms of the challenge, the experience, the reward, the enjoyment? What advice do you have for someone who is looking to have a huge adventure without travelling big distances to the more obvious places?

• Finding nearer substitutes: This is Look Near First in its simplest form. Have you, deliberately and intentionally, ever looked to substitute one holiday destination for another one which offers a very similar experience but is significantly closer? For example, have you cut down on your mileage to find winter sun from the UK by flying to Morocco instead of Egypt? Decided to replace a far-flung city break with a much closer one? Or possibly choose to get up-close with the most spectacular wildlife on your continent instead of going on a safari in the Maasai Mara?

• Why it matters: Look Near First is about choosing low-energy travel to improve your happiness and wellbeing here and now. We also do it because our planet is warming dangerously due to our thirst for energy, and the less energy we can use, the brighter our future will be. If you are feeling climate-anxiety, you are not alone, and many are finding that one of the best ways to alleviate that feeling is to do something positive to reduce climate-change. Reducing how much we travel, especially by air, can be the easiest way for many of us to reduce our personal carbon footprints. Many people who have made significant efforts to cut their carbon footprints find that the low-energy lifestyle is more rewarding. If climate-awareness or climate-anxiety are intertwined with your own low-energy travel story, then we would love to hear about it.

We hope these prompts help you shape your story, so you can continue to inspire us and others.

Thank you again for being here, and for being pioneers of the movement!

Send your stories, photos, videos, or audio recordings to joel@looknearfirst.com.