Climate Change and ‘Last-chance Tourism’

Climate Change and ‘Last-chance Tourism’ - The New York Times

The Morning

Travelers are racing to see parts of the world that may soon vanish.

A 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 glacier

One 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 cons

There 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.”

Read Paige’s full story here.

THE LATEST NEWS

2024 Election
Donald Trump
leads President Biden by 5 percentage points among registered voters nationwide, according to a new Times/Siena poll.
Only a quarter of voters think the country is moving in the right direction, the poll found, and a majority think the economy is in poor condition.
Biden’s age also poses a threat: Most voters who supported him in 2020 now
believe he is too old to lead the country effectively, the poll found.
Trump
won Republican caucuses in Michigan, Missouri and Idaho.
Texas’ governor and attorney general hope to
bring down incumbent Republicans in Tuesday’s primary and shift the state further right.

More on Politics
Trump has
said little about the war in Gaza, a reflection of the anti-interventionist shift he has brought to Republican politics — and his personal feelings about Benjamin Netanyahu.
Local politicians in recovery for drug addiction are embracing
honesty about their pasts.

Israel-Hamas War
U.S. Air Force cargo planes dropped
38,000 ready-to-eat meals into Gaza.
An Israeli airstrike near a hospital in Rafah
killed at least 11 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Israel is reluctant to fill the leadership vacuum in northern Gaza. Experts say that gangs or Hamas members could fill the gap.
Read Patrick Kingsley’s analysis.

International
South Korea is increasingly dependent on foreign workers, who routinely face
predatory employers and inhumane conditions.
Pakistan’s Parliament chose a former prime minister,
Shehbaz Sharif, to fill the role again. His government faces questions of legitimacy after accusations of military interference in elections.
After years of declining vaccination rates, Britain is experiencing
a measles outbreak.
The authorities in Russia long sought to portray Aleksei Navalny as inconsequential, while vilifying him in a way that suggested the opposite.
Little has changed since his death.

Education
The University of Florida has terminated all positions
associated with diversity, equity and inclusion to comply with new state regulations.
The University of Idaho, preparing for a drop in the college-age population, plans to
take over the University of Phoenix, a for-profit online school known for misleading claims and low graduation rates.

Weather
Cattle ranchers across the Great Plains
face an uncertain future after wildfires.
Thousands are without power after a winter storm
brought snow to California and Nevada.
Rains in California have temporarily
resurrected a lake in Death Valley, The Washington Post reports.

Other Big Stories
Trash in New York City blocks sidewalks, feeds rats and spills into the street.
Fixing the problem requires trade-offs.
A firefighter in Kentucky rescued a driver from a truck that was dangling off the side of a bridge.
See a video.
LeBron James became the first player in N.B.A. history to score
40,000 career points.

THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Should Michigan’s protest vote worry Biden?

Yes. That 100,000 Michigan voters vented their discontent with Biden, many over his handling of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, is a problem for him. “The Biden campaign has to deal with how the president’s policy could impact his re-election effort,” USA Today’s Sara Pequeño writes.

No. There are more moderates who agree with Biden’s policies than there are progressives who disagree with him. “It would be a mistake to think that shifting his policy to the left would be a net gain for him,” John Halpin writes for CNN.

MORE OPINIONS

Josephine Sittenfeld has been journaling for decades. Apple’s new Journal app is a weak substitute for the real thing, she writes.

Much of Israel’s war is what a justifiable campaign against a terrorist enemy inevitably looks like, Ross Douthat argues.

Here are columns by Maureen Dowd on the speech she hopes Biden gives this week and Nicholas Kristof on the U.N.’s double standard for Israel.

MORNING READS

Hidden history: Alderney, a windswept island in the English Channel, feels like a remote haven. During World War II, it was a site of Nazi atrocities.

Thank you very much: As a boy in Pakistan, Airaj Jilani idolized Elvis. Decades later in the U.S., he still has his passion — and his impeccable impersonation.

Vows: Their corporate speak turned into a language of love.

Lives Lived: Nancy Wallace helped transform the Bronx River from a watery graveyard for automobiles and appliances into an urban greenbelt for New York City. She died at 93.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Why go to a great steakhouse? For the food, sure, but
also for the dinner theater.
Criterion has succeeded in Hollywood by creating the anti-algorithm: Film lovers trust its heavily curated catalog to show them
beautiful, strange, complex movies.
The Ethicist: My dad cut my brother out of his will.
Should I secretly split my inheritance?

TALK | FROM THE MAGAZINE

The A.I. industry continues to boom, and to poke at our anxieties. In late 2022, I spoke with the pioneering researcher Yejin Choi, who works on developing common sense and ethical reasoning in A.I.

Can you explain what “common sense” means in the context of teaching it to A.I.?

It’s the unspoken, implicit knowledge that you and I have. It’s so obvious that we often don’t talk about it. You and I know birds can fly, and we know penguins generally cannot. So A.I. researchers thought, we can code this up: Birds usually fly, except for penguins. But in fact, newborn baby birds cannot fly, birds covered in oil cannot fly. The point being, exceptions are not exceptional, and you and I can think of them even though nobody told us. It’s not so easy for A.I.

What’s most exciting to you right now about your work in A.I.?

I’m excited about value pluralism. Another way to put it is that there’s no universal truth. A lot of people feel uncomfortable about this. As scientists, we’re trained to be very precise and strive for one truth. Now I’m thinking, well, there’s no universal truth — can birds fly or not? Moral rules: There must be some moral truth. Don’t kill people, for example. But what if it’s a mercy killing? Then what?

How could you possibly teach A.I. to make moral decisions when almost every rule or truth has exceptions?

A.I. should learn exactly that: There are cases that are more clean-cut, and then there are cases that are more discretionary. Instead of making binary, clean-cut decisions, it should sometimes make decisions based on This looks really bad. Or you have your position, but it understands that, well, half the country thinks otherwise.

Read more of the interview here.

BOOKS

New fiction: “Wandering Stars,” the follow-up to Tommy Orange’s “There There,” follows the descendants of a massacre on Native Americans over a century and a half. Our review calls it a towering achievement.

Our editors’ picks: In “The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels,” readers sift through texts, emails and more to discover the story behind a series of occult deaths.

Times best sellers: “The Chaos Agent,” the 13th book in Mark Greaney’s Gray Man series, is new this week on the hardcover fiction best-seller list.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Check in on your emotional well-being.

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THE WEEK AHEAD

What to Watch For
North Dakota holds Republican caucuses tomorrow.
Then it’s
Super Tuesday. Sixteen states have primary elections or caucuses, including California, where Representatives Katie Porter and Adam Schiff are competing for a Senate seat.
Biden will make
the State of the Union address on Thursday.
International Women’s Day is Friday.
Congress’s deadline to avert a government shutdown is Friday.
Trump is scheduled to host Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, at Mar-a-Lago on Friday.

What to Cook This Week

In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein suggests making Eric Kim’s five-ingredient peanut butter noodles, which she calls “a Parmesan-tossed classic in the making.” Her other suggestions include an orange-glazed baked salmon, a one-pan crispy chicken and chickpeas and a cheesy and spicy black bean bake.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was grownup.

Can you put eight pieces of history — including the printing press, chemotherapy and Frida Kahlo — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections.

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