purchased $42,962 in merchandise. He donated $50,000 to the ACLU and stated: "Those of us with passports and who are wealthy enough to travel a lot—especially white, straight, Christian males like me—don't often think a lot about civil liberties ... at least, not in an immediate or personal way. Civil liberties just aren't an issue for most of us. If a wealthy person is in trouble with the law, he can hire a good lawyer. It's the poor who are filling our prisons. If I want to smoke pot, no one's going to arrest me. It's poor and black people who get arrested, and then disenfranchised. I have a voice because I fit societal norms and I have money." In June 2019, acknowledging that travel is a source of environmental destruction, he announced that his tour company will donate $1 million a year to a portfolio of environmental nonprofits, to mitigate the carbon emissions made from the 30,000 annual travelers who use his tour program. Critics contend that travel can never be carbon neutral and that his donations amount to being a way for the wealthy to feel better; Steves counters that if travelers prefer booking with his company due to the carbon offset, other travel companies will be forced to follow suit to stay in business. Personal life Steves is an active Lutheran Christian, and has written and hosted educational videos on subjects such as Martin Luther and the European Reformation. He supports liberation theology. He has spoken at the Lutheran Peace Fellowship. To recognize his "outstanding service to church and society", the Luther Institute, an affiliate of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, presented their Wittenberg Award to him. Steves is of Norwegian ancestry. His sister Jan is an Iditarod racer. He was married to Anne Steves until they divorced in 2010. They have two children. Their son Andy Steves followed his father's footsteps and founded his own travel company, Weekend Student Adventures Europe, and wrote Andy Steves' Europe: City-Hopping on a Budget. He began dating the Reverend Shelley Bryan Wee, Bishop of the Northwest Washington Synod in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in December 2019. Steves spends about a third of every year in Europe researching guidebooks and filming TV shows. His home is still in Edmonds, Washington, where he has lived since 1967. References External links 1955 births Living people 20th-century American male writers 20th-century