Despite growing recognition of the material impacts of fossil fuel extraction and use, many economic sectors remain highly dependent on these fuels. Amid growing pressure to - at a minimum - appear ...to be doing something, businesses increasingly communicate the actions they (seek to) take to reduce their environmental impacts. Oftentimes they aim to build a sense of compatible coexistence of the sector with particular modes of sustainability. For air transport, ‘sustainable aviation’ has emerged as a container term for a suite of actions proposed by sectoral actors in seeking to align the sector with social and environmental sustainability. This paper critically interrogates ‘sustainable aviation’ through an analysis of the websites and reports of 14 international and regional airlines. Our analysis reveals the multiple and diverse ways that dominant logics (1) underpin the status quo, (2) depend on ‘the science’, (3) support techno-organisational changes and (4) prioritise sectoral growth. By recognising the gendered nature of environmentalism, we suggest that ‘sustainable aviation’ can be viewed as an active enactment of aeromasculinities – a gendered system of thinking, being and doing which forecloses radical action and change required for a climate-safe and just energy future.
Space tourism in the Anthropocene Spector, Sam; Higham, James E.S.
Annals of tourism research,
November 2019, 2019-11-00, Letnik:
79
Journal Article
Recenzirano
There is growing acceptance that we are living through a transition between geological ages, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. This paper examines the burgeoning space tourism industry in ...relation to the Anthropocene. The development of outer space has significant implications for Earth's inhabitants, yet only a small cadre of individuals, companies, and governments are involved in this process. Space tourism provides a germane context for conceptualising the ongoing debates regarding the extent to which Anthropos - humankind as an undifferentiated, unitary geological force - is responsible for the impacts that have culminated in the Anthropocene. We apply the Capitalocene framework to elucidate how the factors that brought the Anthropocene to fruition are now extending beyond Earth.
•Space tourism is contributing to the rapid commercialisation of outer space.•A very small segment of society exerts growing impacts beyond Earth.•The factors that caused the Anthropocene are now extending into space.•Space tourism is implicated in the search for ‘capitalist fixes’ in the cosmos.•The Capitalocene framework is useful in theorising space tourism.
Encouraging positive public behaviour change has been touted as a pathway for mitigating the climate impacts of air travel. There is, however, growing evidence that two gaps, one between attitudes ...and behaviour, and the other between practices of "home" and "away", pose significant barriers to changing discretionary air travel behaviour. This paper uses both modern sociological theory on tourism as liminoid space, and postmodern theory that views identities as contextual, to provide a deeper understanding of why these gaps occur in the context of tourism spaces. Based on 50 in-depth consumer interviews in Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom, our findings confirm that tourism spaces are often subject to lower levels of environmental concern than daily domestic contexts. The majority of participants reduced, suppressed or abandoned their climate concern when in tourism spaces, and rationalised their resulting behavioural contradictions. Only a minority held there was no difference between the environmental sustainability of their practices in domestic situations versus those on holiday. These findings suggest that scope for voluntary positive behaviour change in the air travel context is limited and will not come without stronger intervention, which is a key finding for policy makers seeking reductions in air travel's climate impacts.
The concept of relative vulnerability allows for comparisons between analogous units in a regional context. It is utilised within tourism studies to consider how climate change might affect demand ...and perceived attractiveness of destinations relative to their competitors. This paper examines Australian tourists travelling to New Zealand’s ski fields, responding to the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) assertion that, “tourist flows from Australia to New Zealand might grow as a result of the relatively poorer snow conditions in Australia” (Hennessy et al.
2007
: p 523). This travel flow is not a new phenomenon; however, it is forecast to increase as climate change impacts upon Australia’s natural and man-made snowmaking capacity with implications for the viability of the ski industries in both Australia and New Zealand. The Queenstown Lakes Region (South Island, New Zealand) serves as the field area for this study. The empirical research utilises a qualitative methodology for which in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with New Zealand ski industry representatives and Australian tourists during the southern hemisphere winter season of 2011. Findings suggest that the social context of vulnerability creates difficulty in forecasting the outcomes and behaviours associated with relative vulnerability. While tourism representatives’ focus on snow reliability and availability to conceptualise relative vulnerability, Australian tourists are influenced by a broader range of factors including their own travel experience. This paper demonstrates a clear need to move beyond a focus on snow reliability to consider the broad range of factors that contribute to regional variations in vulnerability. In doing so, it confirms the critical importance of situating relative vulnerability within a social context.
•Flying anxiety and climate change are dialectically-related symptoms of the risk society.•Risk-free flying via commodity fetishism is not yet technologically feasible.•Alternative futures are ...themselves science-fiction-based cultural productions.•We are unable to imagine emancipatory futures due to our ideological subjectification.•We are obliged to attempt a philosophical resolution to this ‘dilemma of ahistoricity’.
We position pleasure travel within Beck’s risk society as a contradictory form of consumption that simultaneously produces individual pleasure and global environmental risk. We examine the paradoxical emergence of the ‘anxious traveler’ from this contradiction, arguing that this social category is necessary to individualize and apportion the global, environmental risk associated with frequent flying, and hence legitimate the reproduction of unsustainable travel practices. We identify several future scenarios that may synthesize this frequent-flying dialectic. On reflection, these scenarios themselves appear as cultural productions, suggesting that our attempts to imagine the future are crippled by the hegemonic ahistoricism associated with contemporary capitalism.
This paper explores the suitability of community-based conservation measures to complement a proposed command-and-control approach for two multi-user bays with spinner dolphins in Hawai`i, USA, which ...have considerable dolphin watching tourist activities and human-dolphin interactions. The paper uses Ostrom's common-pool resource theory as an analytical lens, with an assessment of the attributes of the resource and the user(s) to explore questions of governance and sustainability. In Hawai`i, spinner dolphins move predictably from offshore overnight feeding grounds into shallow bays for daytime rest, interacting frequently with humans using these bays for tourism and other social, recreational, and subsistence purposes. To reduce the current negative interactions with dolphins, managers are seeking to implement a command-and-control approach, namely time-area closures. Our analysis indicates that viewing the bay as a resource with tourism as one of many human demands, instead of specifically focusing on dolphins, reflects an ecosystem-based approach and acknowledges complex management demands. We found that while unrealistic to expect community-based conservation to spontaneously emerge here, cultivating some of Ostrom's attributes among stakeholders might lead to a more productive set of institutional arrangements that would benefit the dolphin population, with the methodology used potentially leading to a global management model.
Habituation typically is viewed as a negative consequence of human interactions with wildlife (
Higginbottom, 2004; Newsome, Dowling, & Moore, 2005; Shackley, 1996). While animal habituation commonly ...is used in the laboratory and field-based zoology studies, attempts to consider deliberate habituation specifically in a tourism management context (
Shelton, Higham, & Seddon, 2004) has been received unsympathetically by biological scientists and wildlife managers on the grounds that habituation, by definition, is undesirable. This paper puts forward the case that the global and stable behavioural descriptor,
habituation, is not the most useful way to formulate most observed lack-of-wildlife-response to visitor approach and observation. It presents an applied behaviour analysis of wildlife habituation that is situated within learning theory. This analysis differentiates between avoidance/approach behaviours, tolerance, habituation and sensitisation. This provides a formulative framework for human–wildlife interactions, that is then considered specifically in terms of tourism businesses seeking to provide sustainable visitor interactions with wild animals. A tourism management model derived from this critique of habituation is presented and discussed.
Continued growth in the demand for sport tourism experiences has heightened the need for advanced, in-depth and critical insights that are theoretically informed. This incisive book has been written ...to address that need and to stimulate the curiosity of students, educators and practitioners alike.
Read the Feature Paper: The social side of human‐wildlife interaction: wildlife can learn harmful behaviours from each other
Other Commentaries on this paper: Individual dolphins as tools for ...conservation; Conservation issues arising from maladaptive behaviours spreading socially
Response from the authors: Social learning of risky behaviour: importance for impact assessments, conservation and management of human‐wildlife interactions
•Some have argued frequent flying can be a behavioural addiction.•The application of the addiction model to flying consumption is problematic.•The flying-addict trope blames individuals for ...environmental damage.•Flying ‘addiction’ is necessary for the ideological reproduction of air-capital.•We argue for a structural approach to the analysis of flying consumption.
The ‘flyers’ dilemma’, where an individual’s self-identity as an environmentally-responsible consumer conflicts with the environmental impacts of frequent air travel, has been shown to produce a range of negative psychological effects. Some have argued that frequent flying may represent a site of behavioural addiction, characterized by guilt, suppression and denial. While this sort of pathologisation finds parallels in other forms of excessive consumption, its application in a tourist context is problematic in terms of classification validity, attribution of negative consequences, transfer of responsibility, and tendency towards social control and domination. We argue for an alternative conceptual approach to frequent flying which elaborates the structural reproduction of the ‘flyers’ dilemma’, rather than its individual, psychological effects.
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