Amanda E. Machado is a writer, public speaker and facilitator whose work explores how race, gender, sexuality, and power affect the way we travel and experience the outdoors. She has written and facilitated on topics of social justice and adventure and lived in Cape Town, Havana, Mexico City, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities. She has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, NPR, and other publications. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that expands how we tell stories about nature in a way that considers ancestry, colonization, migration trauma, and other issues.

“I think that was definitely a pattern that I unknowingly replicated when I first started traveling. I think that's how the travel industry has kind of marketed to us, right? This idea that, you know, bucket lists and wanting to like check boxes of things you're going to do in each place and becomes this thing of, rather than consuming a product that's an actual physical thing, you're consuming a country or consuming an experience. It's the same framework. We're still grasping at things. We're still compulsively trying to do XYZ without really thinking about its impact, without really thinking about the relationships that we're making in those places, without really thinking about reciprocity. And a lot of it comes from a deeply colonial mindset also, right? So much of the travel industry was built on the idea of colonialism which really makes us all inherit this idea that whatever we need in life is going to come from seeking it elsewhere and grabbing it from somewhere else, right? Which I think is the more modern 2023 way that we kind of replicate that colonial travel mindset of–My life right now is not great. I'm going to take a vacation. I'm going to take a break and go somewhere else where I can get what I need? Which I think is in a lot of ways can describe what I did at 24 as well.

I think looking at that. Really deeply and really thinking about what is lost from that mindset and the harm that is caused by it has been something I've been trying to do over the last few years. And a lot of that has to do with land trauma, right? Like really acknowledging where our settlement of land comes from and how we can heal that in the ways that we travel.”

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