Broken Promises, Futures Past

Did you miss the Emperor Penguin story from last week? It was caught somewhere between the ‘Aw / funny story at the end of the news’ and your daily ‘Dystopian Update’. Three huge colonies of Emperor Penguin’s (approximately 60,000 chicks) died of cold because the sea ice melted much earlier than usual before their waterproof feathers were fully developed. It was estimated to be about 4% of the total global population. As Barbara Wienecke, senior research scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division, Hobart said: “Deeply concerning is that such events happened at some of the southern-most colonies. The Weddell and Ross seas were considered possible climate refuge for emperors as Antarctica is getting warmer.”

What we are watching is the intersection between the climate catastrophe and the nature crisis beginning to form new grotesque synergies.

Still with the birds … the climate crisis is also driving some, especially migratory species, to adapt in new patterns. Deterred by increased crosswinds some species are not making the crossing from southern Europe to northern Africa but remaining in southern Spain where they can gorge themselves among the mountains of garbage in the dump at Los Barrios, near Cádiz. White Storks, Kites and Vultures are attracted in huge numbers, as too are the ornithologists flocking to see them in their new ‘habitat’. There is now a stable population of about 37,000 birds wintering there feeding on the rubbish, the rats, the plastic and the waste.

But while animals are changing their behaviour patterns, humans aren’t.

In a remarkable piece of writing Moya Lothian-McLean looks at the phenomenon of tourists flying into climate disaster zones as if nothing untoward was happening. She describes how as Rhodes burned, tourists kept flocking in:

“Homes were being turned to ash, thousands of holidaymakers were being evacuated, and still the visitors came. In the wake of the Hawaii wildfires, which have killed at least 115 people, the island of Maui experienced the same phenomenon.”

What is going on?

Lothian-McLean asks: “Why do we travel? Maui residents told media of their horror at seeing tourists “swimming in the same waters our people died in”. Surely, that level of compartmentalisation in dogged pursuit of a particular experience goes beyond the pursuit of “leisure”?”

The paradox of western tourists flying in to areas in search of ‘authenticity’ or ‘experience’ while their actions are actively contributing to their demise is astonishing, but no more so perhaps than our everyday lives. But the dark irony is compounded by the idea that over-tourism erodes distinctiveness so that places become more and more alike, visited by the same displaced hordes of people seeking a something from their meaningless lives. In doing so they create a No Place, societies hollowed-out, their cities as theme-parks, ‘locals’ either tied-in to the industry and reduced to stereotype or socially cleansed and removed. The rewards therefore for ‘travel’ will become less and less.

The problem is not just selfishness, ignorance or lack of alternatives. We have created a system where cheap air-travel is a right not a gift, and flying (anywhere/anytime) is considered a ‘luxury repackaged as basic human need’. In our time-poor lives, ‘slow travel’ is anathema.

Watching the scenes of chaos as the air traffic control failure spiralled out across Europe, the results were the inevitable stranded people, stories of people abandoned by airlines and helpless without the packaged, managed process. We’re not really ‘travellers’ as such just people being flown-about.

We have been attuned to ‘No Place’ – are quite at home with system collapse and breakdown – and are utterly unphased by flying into disaster, after all its what we’ve been doing most of our lives. Nothing will challenge the global tourism industry which is hard-wired to ignore the chaos and the suffering in pursuit of vast profit, there is precisely zero sign of ‘Jet Zero’ and no-one, no-one will give up the hard-wired urge and presumed ‘right’ of westerners to fly anywhere they like.