Michael Cronin is the current holder of the Chair of French at Trinity College Dublin and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is a specialist in culture, travel literature, translation studies and languages and has published extensively, such as The Expanding World: Towards a Politics of Microspection (John Hunt Publishing, 2012) and Eco-Translation: translation and ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (Taylor & Francis, 2017). Recently, Michael Cronin has been working on the notion of eco-criticism in the light of translation and modern languages, focusing on population movement and language identities.
In his lecture entitled “Travel writing and the environment,” Michael Cronin drew on his last book Eco-Travel (Cambridge university Press, 2022) and wondered if travel had a viable future. According to many French scholars, awareness of environmental damage has been around for a very long time. Human activities are causing incalculable harm to the environment and many of the people who articulate this issue happen to be travel writers. One of the dilemmas for contemporary travel writing is the very activity that justifies its existence: travel. As Michael Cronin argues, travel may in fact bring about the end of its own existence for the mode of travel itself becomes fundamentally destructive for the planet.
To begin with, Michael Cronin mentioned the distinction between subject and object. In the current climate crisis, he explained that familiar distinctions become chaotic: subjects are no longer sure about their subjectivity and objects no longer know their place. Travel writing, which has been dominated by an emphasis on the individual subject, is now faced with the revolt of the objects. While Elizabeth Povinelli, an American anthropologist, has coined the term “geontology” to speak about the world view of many indigenous groups in Australia who do not establish a hierarchical distinction between human subjects and non-human objects, in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Duke University Press, 2010) the political theorist Jane Bennett argues for a “vital materiality” that runs through and across both human and non-human bodies. As human beings, she claims that we are encouraged to brush aside the vitality of matter as well as the powers of material formation.
As Timothy Morton puts it, there is a clear relationship between subject hubris and climate horror. According to him, correlationism – the belief that the world isn’t real until some correlator, usually linked to human beings, has realised it – creates the fantasy that reality is like a blank space, waiting for human beings to fill it in. This form of cultural constructivism that holds that things only exist when humans say they do, reveals the cruel limits to subjective idealism.
Writing about the narwhal whale in his work Arctic Dreams (Vintage, 2001), the American naturalist Barry Lopez advocates for a respectful attitude that, in the age of the Anthropocene, obviously needs to be extended to the entire material universe. But how does the more than human world find a voice in travel writing, a genre deeply bound up with the activities and ruminations of a frequently white male middle class subject, where subjectivity is a guarantor of authenticity? Is there a role for travel writing in an age of anthropocentric climate change?
The French travel writer Ludovic Hubler, in his book Le monde en stop (Pocket, 2016), speaks of what he learnt from his five years hitchhiking around the world. As he explains, his world tour rekindled his curiosity, opened up his mind and encouraged him to reconsider his preconceptions. However, although he witnessed deforestation and melting glaciers, joy was also central to his experience. The variousness of the world was a source of happiness and it is in this credo, repeatedly recited by other travel writers, that lies an important antidote to the toxic tone of much environmental country.
In his book, Morton claims that the main ecological information delivery mode in the media is an “information dump,” aligning one appalling statistic after another, and speculates that the readers may be informed but not necessarily transformed. If they were, there would be no climate crisis. According to him, it is not enough to know about ecology. Muddling through an information dump of doomsday data may cause the concerned citizen to curl up in despair rather than live out ecological information in any meaningful way. For Morton, we talk to ourselves about ecology in a horror mode, guilt, repulsion and shame.
But there is also a bearing witness to the beauty and variety of the world in travel writing. As Michael Cronin suggested in his lecture, caring is as much about celebration as about condemnation. In Tracks (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2013), the Australian travel writer Robyn Davidson describes the beginning of her camel trek and explains that all around her was magnificence. Here, the magnificence of the surroundings becomes its own argument. Information about the uniqueness of the environment is conveyed but it is not the numerical accountability of despair: instead, the traveller does attest of the value of this immersion in the more than human world. In this way, travel writing provides an alternative mode of delivering ecological information and shows that there is a way of communicating climate crisis which is neither the information dump nor the horror show. It is the capacity for joy and imaginative empathy that releases travel writing into a different space of communicative possibility.
In the age of the Anthopocene, Deborah Bird Rose, drawing on the legacy of the Australian eco-feminist Val Plumwood, argues that the search for poetic forms of writing is motivated by the need to vivify, connect imaginative realms and empathize. Therefore, consciously drawing on the narrative resources of fiction and the expressive possibilities of poetic language, travel writing has the capacity to give real meaning to ecological literacy.
Sylvain Tesson in Tibet, on the tracks of the snow leopard, speculates on the condition of that literacy. Accompanying the photographer Thierry Munier, he spends days and weeks patiently awaiting the appearance of the reclusive animal. In the course of his Tibetan expedition, Tesson learns that being still is as instructive than moving on. According to him, discretion, stillness, and patience allow a world to emerge that is richly populated by the non-human, by the animate world of the organic and the material. But Tesson also acknowledges that witnessing is not knowing. He and Munier understand that there was much of the natural world that they did not understand and yet, they were happy with that. The travel writer is aware of the ecological catastrophe he deploys in his work but rendering the beauty of the animals and their environment allows them to mount a defence against the forces of extinction. As travel writing shows, part of being ecological is a capacity for connection or reconnection.
In Sightlines (Sort of Books, 2012), Kathleen Jamie comments on the fury of interpretation. On a visit to an underground cave, the guide metaphorically compared the stalagmites to a human construction, a castle, a community, a family. Jamie wonders whether the main drivers for human cultural evolution are not, on the one hand, discrimination and resentment, and on the other, our ability to think in metaphor. Division and connection are the binary building blocks of human reflection. While taxonomic preoccupation was central to forms of engagement in scientific travel writing in the 17th and 18th century, the poetic ability to use simile or metaphor is also present in the prose of travel. The desire to discriminate and the desire to connect happen to be part of an aesthetic impulse which aims to understand in a more complete way.
As travel writers have repeatedly reminded us, there is nothing natural about the end of nature. But what happens when the end of nature means the end of travel itself? As the critic Rune Graulund observes, travel writers and travel writing critics have been proclaiming the end of travel for at least a century and a half. Recently, there has been much more pressing and urgent concerns around the existential threat posed not to travel but by travel. Since 1990, carbon dioxide emissions from international aviation have increased by 83%. One of the special characteristics of aircraft emissions is that most of them are produced at cruising altitude high in the atmosphere. These high-altitude emissions have more harmful climate impact and as they trigger a series of chemical reaction, they eventually increase the warming effect.
Nowadays, flying is the quickest and cheapest way to warm the planet. If the Swedish term “flygskam” or “flight shaming” has become part of the vocabulary of the international environmental movement, the global covid-19 pandemic would give a very graphic illustration of what the end of traveling might look like. As the historian of epidemics Frank M. Snowden observes, every age gets the pandemic it deserves. According to him, Covid-19 flared up and spread because we live in a society that creates renewable opportunities for viruses. At the same time, the invasion and destruction of animal habitat was the necessary context for the pandemic, a context that was magnified in its effects on human societies by continuous air travel. Therefore, the end of travel in the age of the Anthropocene is no longer a dystopian fiction but a lived reality.
Nowadays, it is the very act of traveling that becomes problematic for it has made the world an infinitely more dangerous place. In Notes from an Apocalypse (Granta Books, 2020) Mark O’Connell embarks on a journey where the end of the world might be glimpse, tracking places where individuals or groups prepare for a post-apocalyptic world. However, it might be that the end of the travel is not about the end of travel per se, but about the end of a certain kind of traveling. In other words, the climate crisis compels writers and readers to think about new kinds of travel and by extension, new ways of articulating and understanding travel.
The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, up to the time of his death in 2018, was one of the most public champions of the back-up planet thesis. Indeed, unlike climate activists who argue that there is no planet B, some people believe that such a planet exists: its name is Mars. Noting that colonization is the term most often used to describe settling on Mars, O’Connell sees the frontier rhetoric around the planet as a further extension of an endlessly expansionist form of white American capitalism that projects fantasies of Terra Nullius into outer space.
While extra-terrestrial expansion is cast in terms of a noble end of exploration, the despoliation of ecological means back on earth – soil, air, water, non-human species – is passed over in silence. Environmental recklessness is condoned in tragic indifference. Privatized space travel provides the environmental exit strategy for a vanishingly small numbers of billionaires while the rest of humanity is left behind on the abandoned planet. In Notes from an Apocalypse, O’Connell points to sites of ecological devastation which provide a glimpse into a possible human future as much as they serve as a reminder of a neglectful political past.
If travel writing has been a quintessentially human activity, then a world in which humans had ceased entirely to exist would mean not just the end of human travel but the end of human travel writing. The excitable fantasies of delusional plutocrats, if realized, would ensure that travel writing would survive, but at what unimaginable cost? Visions of a Martian exodus are almost only a male concern and for the theorist Sarah Sharma, this is not particularly surprising. Everyone is free to dream of exiting the tedious, the unpleasurable, the constraining, but when the rough gets tough, only one gender can, and classically does, leave the house. For women, Sharma argues, exit has only rarely been an option for they have always been unable to choose when to leave or enter power relations, let alone enter or exit in a carefree manner.
Thus, in opposition to a culture of exit is a culture of care, which she defines as responding to the mutual precariousness of humanity. The culture of exit, – Brexit, Build the Wall, the current attempt by Russia to destroy the Ukrainian autonomy – tends to come to the fore in periods when gender, race and ethic privilege are threatened, precisely at a moment when non-gendered culture of care is needed more than ever to ensure species survival. The allure of a culture of exit for travel writing is all too obvious: indeed, one of the challenges for the genre is how to incorporate a culture of care into its practices and makes this culture manifest in the overall context of the climate emergency.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Léa Mulvet (April 12, 2022). 07/04/22 – Michael Cronin: « Travel writing and the environment. ». AIRE IRLANDE. Retrieved September 9, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/awqk