Travel special: Roman holidays
Paralysed by global warming? Saving the planet by staying at home? Don't be a fool, says Marcus Fairs. Join the new breed of travellers - inspired by the Emperor Nero - who are diving the Barrier Reef and hanging with orang-utans while you stare at your carbon footprint
Published: 04 February 2007
I am changing my travel plans this year. Alarmed by global warming, shocked by the imminent mass extinction of species and distraught at the environmental damage wreaked by mass tourism, I have decided to act before it is too late. Yes, carbon-neutral travel can wait. I'm off to see polar bears, tigers and low-lying Pacific atolls while they're still there.
I am not alone. A friend, Jeffrey, has just returned from a gorilla-watching trip to Uganda; he felt compelled to go before this threatened species was wiped out completely. Another friend, Rosanne, is planning to head off to Patagonia later this month; she wants to see the immense Andean glaciers before they melt to nothing.
In the spirit of Nero - the Roman emperor who sang to the beauty of the flames while Rome burned to the ground - we are determined to enjoy the final days of our beautiful Earth. We are aware that mass tourism damages the very things we are going to see, but this only increases our urgency. We are aware that we will soon have to act more sustainably, which gives us all the more reason to be irresponsible while we still can.
Not for us the angsty despair of the eco-worriers, nor the stay-home moralising of the greenhouse gasbags. For we are the travel Neroists, and we have spotted a window of opportunity. Air travel has never been easier or cheaper, but that cannot last as environmental pressure mounts on the industry to clean up its act. Meanwhile, scientific predictions on the effects of global warming get worse by the day, with some reports suggesting the "tipping point" where climate change starts to race out of control is just a decade away.
Time is against us. Half of all vertebrate species are reckoned to be under threat and the journal Nature reports that a million species could become extinct by 2050. With accelerating pollution and habitat destruction, ours may be the last generation able to experience pristine areas of the planet and the wildlife they support before they change radically. Pleasures such as skiing in the Alps and snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef may not be possible in just a few years' time.
So, on behalf of future generations, we should go now. They will be glad we did, and they will want to see our photographs.
The tour companies have noticed the rise of travel Neroism. "I think it is definitely a case of getting in there now while it's still there for these people," says Julian Matthews, founding director of conservation-minded travel company Discovery Initiatives, which reports surging demand for trips to see threatened killer whales in Norway and the disappearing polar ice sheets. "In the past few years I've seen an exponential growth in demand for cruises to the Arctic and the Antarctic. Two to three years ago we would organise trips for 20 to 30 people. Now we're organising trips for 65 to 75 people and this number is growing. It is the same with our tiger study tours in India. There are so few tigers left now that people are afraid they will miss them if they don't get in there quickly."
As public awareness of impending catastrophe rises, so more people want to visit threatened sites, says Justin Francis, a co-founder of the travel agency Responsibletravel.com. "There is no doubt that the TV coverage relating to the environment is increasing, and that this too is drawing people to particular places and wildlife," he says. "Polar bear watching is a good example. There has always been a demand for people to see rare and charismatic animals, and as they get rarer I suspect their appeal will increase."
Yet in some cases we are already too late. Want to witness the annual wildebeest migration across the Serengeti? Forget it - drought has turned the grasslands of Kenya and Tanzania into deserts and the wildebeest are dying en masse. Want to see tigers in the famous Sariska National Park in India's Rajasthan? Too late - conservationists fear they have all been poached.
The travel Neroist reads science journals as avidly as newspaper travel sections, for the former are where you'll find the most up-to-date reports on nature's clearance sales. Last month's draft of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, predicted that within a century, acidification of the oceans caused by carbon emissions will kill off coral reefs; rising sea levels will inundate idyllic atolls; and malaria, desertification and killer heatwaves will make parts of tourist-friendly southern Spain and Italy virtually uninhabitable.
A report published by Conservation International and the United Nations Environment Programme in 2003 appears to confirm the idea that tourists are flocking to endangered sites. It found that visits to the world's most threatened areas grew by an astonishing 100 per cent between 1990 and 2000 - almost double the growth rate for tourism in general. The "threatened areas" were identified as wilderness locations like Amazonia, the Congo Forest of Central Africa and the island of New Guinea; coral reefs; and "biodiversity hotspots" - areas harbouring significant diversity of endemic species that are under threat from human activity. On average, these biodiversity hotspots have lost 90 per cent of their original habitat.
But Neroism is not the same as nihilism. Neroists care deeply about the planet; it's just they don't think that staying home is going to help much. Travel is often unfairly demonised by the eco-lobby: flying accounts for around 3 per cent of global C02 emissions (compared to 20 per cent for domestic heating and a similar amount for road transport). According to the Carbon Trust, of the 11 tonnes of CO2 emitted each year by the average person in the UK, just 0.68 tonnes comes from flying - whereas a full tonne derives from the manufacture and transport of our clothing. "Demanding that people stop flying is not the solution to all our problems," says Responsibletravel.com's Francis, "especially when many developing countries rely on responsible tourism as a significant source of income to protect and conserve their environment."
"There has been increased awareness of the problems associated with climate change and people are becoming more conscious of the role they play in that," says Kimberly Kay, corporate responsibility manager at Thomson Holidays. "People who are aware of the effect global warming is having on the physical landscape are questioning whether visiting these places is the right thing to do. [But] I can't say people have stopped travelling to these tourist attractions. In the case of cruises around the ice caps and swimming in coral reefs, people are well aware that they are fast diminishing and it is a case of 'see it while you still can'."
Our urgency is only increased by responsible travel companies' rising concerns at the harm their own tours are doing. "It's a vicious circle," says Matthews of Discovery Initiative. "The more endangered an animal is or the more fragile an ecosystem becomes, the more that people want to see it, which degrades the area further. We may be cancelling a trip that involves viewing orca whales as we feel this may be doing more damage than good. It is hard to find the right balance between running our company and doing what's right for the ecology of this planet."
So what are the world's most threatened tourist sites, and how long have we got left to see them? Turn the page for the Neroist's guide to our vanishing world.
