Good morning. Travelers are racing to see parts of the world that may soon vanish.
Melting awayA lot of climate discussion revolves around time. Lines rise across charts predicting the next century. Scientists set deadlines for the coming decades. Each month seems to bring news of a new heat record. The sense that time is running out can be heady. As the Earth warms, natural wonders — coral reefs, glaciers, archipelagos — are at risk of damage and disappearance. This has motivated some travelers to engage in "last-chance tourism," visiting places threatened by climate change before it's too late. "For thousands of years, humans have raced to be the first to scale a peak, cross a frontier, or document a new species or landscape," Paige McClanahan writes in a piece for The Times. "Now, in some cases, we're racing to be the last." A vanishing glacierOne such destination is the Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in the French Alps, where thousands of people go each year to ski. (Early tourists included Mary Shelley and Mark Twain.) The glacier, like many others, is melting rapidly. A new, higher lift opened recently to stay closer to the retreating ice. And a study published in the journal Science last year found that around half of the world's glaciers will have melted by the end of this century, even if nations stick to the goals of the Paris climate agreement. "For someone who doesn't know how it used to be, it's a beautiful scene," a visitor to the glacier told Paige. "But when you know the difference, it really is sad." Pros and consThere is some evidence that visiting an ecosystem threatened by climate change could lead people to become more aware of their impact on the environment. In a 2020 survey conducted by researchers at the Mer de Glace, 80 percent of visitors said that they would try to learn more about how to protect the environment, and 77 percent said they would reduce their water and energy consumption. Some tourist spots have leaned into education. In Peru, officials renamed a trek to the Pastoruri glacier "La Ruta del Cambio Climático," or "The Route of Climate Change." And at the Mer de Glace, an exhibit about climate change — called the Glaciorium — is set to open later this year. There are some, however, who question of the value of last-chance tourism. Visiting fragile environments can do more harm than good. Some people travel to Antarctica because they fear it is being destroyed. But, as Sara Clemence highlighted in a piece in The Atlantic last year, travel there requires a lot of fuel, while visitors can introduce disease and damage wildlife. And research by Karla Boluk, an academic from the University of Waterloo, found that a majority of last-chance tourists to two sites in Canada were unwilling to pay extra to offset the carbon footprint of their trip. "There's an ethical paradox of last-chance tourism," Boluk told The Times, "and it involves the moral question of whether travelers acknowledge and respond to the harm they promote."
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The Morning: Climate change and ‘last-chance tourism’
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