Travel Writing and Climate Crisis: The Ethical Dilemmas of Twenty-first Century

Author: Habiba Shaukat. 

If we think of the climate emergency we’re facing globally as something manageable with a little effort rather than “an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life un-deformed” we’re mistaken (Wallace-Wells 54). The crisis has only worsened in the recent decades to create a situation where we are “currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; at least ten times faster” (Wallace-Wells 22). Transportation is currently the biggest source of greenhouse gases in U.S. which is interestingly the second biggest source of greenhouse gases in the world (Compton 6). So the climate crisis is a monstrous reality and the environmental degradation is taking place at a much faster pace than we seem “to have the capacity to recognize or acknowledge” (Wallace-Wells 76)

Since travelling has a huge role to play in accelerating this climate crisis, travelling seems to be no longer affordable for the planet earth. With an increase in it over time and rising global temperatures, it may eventually lead to seven degrees of warming which would make it “impossible for portions of the planet’s equatorial band and especially the tropics” to support life. If that happens, within “a few hours, human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out” while at eleven or twelve degrees celsius “more than half the world’s population as distributed today would die of direct heat.” This means that in our attempts to create and enter the brave new world, we’ll find one collapsing right below us even before we have set foot on it (Wallace-Wells 144).

On the other hand, if today we cancel “a single round-trip ticket on a trans-Atlantic flight”, it can save carbon dioxide emission that is equivalent to that of an average citizen of India throughout the year (Kaplan 16). So unless we want an apocalyptic disaster, its necessary to drastically cut down travelling thereby curbing the growing global emissions by the necessary rate of 10 percent as required (Compton 11) before it takes us to a point of no-return to re-establishing a safer and greener planet.

Having established that continued travelling can wreak havoc on earth in future, travelling for travel writing is evidently no longer justified as well. This clearly calls for a break in the practice of travel writing on ethical grounds. However, there seems to be only one exception to the above conclusion. If travel writers actively and consciously choose to play a critical role in combating climate change by fulfilling their ethical responsibility to represent the gravity of the climate emergency in their travel writings, some moral legitimacy for undertaking travel-writing for the aforementioned purpose can be argued on the grounds that it will contribute to reversing the worsening climate crisis.

But for that, travel writers need to develop a greater consciousness of the politics of the texts they produce, as what they choose to write and don’t choose to write equally contribute to shaping the perceptions, beliefs and actions of the readers. (Haugen 16) They have an ethical responsibility to mindfully choose the content that’ll become a part of the public discourse and how that content will be interpreted in the larger context of living in a climate crisis. Since their content is also going to be consumed by tour companies and other travel-related service providers, they need to monitor how they will impact people travelling in the future.

If they produce reductionist texts de-emphasizing the climate situation or celebrating the “warm” travel destinations, it is potentially dangerous as it constructs a worldview alienated from reality and the urgency of the situation is diluted (Haugen 45). In that case, not only the readers remain misinformed, they also fail to be empowered as part of the solution, instead becoming the agents of exacerbating the problem at hand.

Normalizing the depictions of climate change in travel writing is like pushing a badly needed conversation under the rug. It produces a false notion of what is normal and develops ignorant behaviours. Whether it is the “unseasonably warm summers, receding glaciers and bleached coral, swimming pools in areas of water scarcity, potential wildfires or hurricanes, extended shoulder seasons or the unreasonably hot summer” (Haugen 64) travel writers need to make space for a conscious depiction of the climate-stricken reality being observed when they write, so that the bubble of living in a fantasy world where everything is running smoothly is effectively burst and the readers are able to grasp the intersection between travelling and the climate situation.

This, besides serving as the travel writer’s ethical responsibility to uncover the true ugliness of climate crisis for future travelers to consider, will also serve to reinvigorate their writings by giving them “a fresh, multi-dimensional and nuanced form of storytelling that doesn’t downplay the dire climate emergency the world faces each and every day” (Haugen 73). It will also renew and replenish the genre of travel-writing by shifting its focus away from the previous “feel-good narratives about places to go, things to do, and experiences to have” (Haugen 36) something which encouraged traveling in the past by infusing a sense of wanderlust in readers.

As this is followed by meaningful behavior change, we can hope for reversing the climate crisis with collective effort globally. The time for travel writers to become an agent of change in this regard is right now; it cannot wait. As Bill McKibben rightly commented in 2019 “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble because the decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” (Sullivan 7)

Works Cited

Compton, Natalie B. "How to actually make your travel better for the planet." The Washington Post 10 September 2021: 5 - 25. Print.

Haugen, Joanna. "Why Travel Writers Play a Critical Role in Fighting the Climate Emergency." Rooted 19 October 2020: 5 -19. Print.

Kaplan, Sarah. "What’s the greenest way to travel?" The Washington Post 12 December 2019: 5 -22. Print.

Sullivan, Paul. Climate crisis: Is travel writing — or even traveling — still morally legitimate? 5 September 2019. Print. 23 April 2022.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019. Print .