While Rhodes burned, tourists kept flocking in. Homes were being turned to ash, thousands of holidaymakers were being evacuated, and still the visitors came. In the wake of the Hawaii wildfires, which have killed at least 115 people, the island of Maui experienced the same phenomenon.
These images played on my mind as I set off on my own holiday abroad a week later. They niggled at me as I fumbled my way through Turkish thank-yous and waited dutifully in line to see Istanbul’s Blue Mosque. Why did they do it? There were partial explanations available: a lack of funds to book alternative trips, the lingering question of whether refunds would be issued, the quest to escape the grim British summer. But none of these felt enough to explain why people would walk towards the flames – why they’d put their lives and welfare at risk for a holiday.
Clearly there was a compulsion that went deeper than simply sun-seeking. And even though this particular crop of tourists – willingly heading into a climate disaster zone – were taking that impulse to the extreme, it was likely that same invisible hand was guiding my travels too.
Why do we travel? Maui residents told media of their horror at seeing tourists “swimming in the same waters our people died in”. Surely, that level of compartmentalisation in dogged pursuit of a particular experience goes beyond the pursuit of “leisure”? That’s certainly the view of the anthropologist Dean MacCannell. His 1976 book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class argues that in a post-industrial, increasingly secular world, travel occupies a ritualistic space. Modern western societies are defined by the “freedom” they offer us – but, he writes, this is accompanied by feelings of fragmentation and alienation. Sightseeing in far-off locales is, MacCannell observes, “a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into a unified experience” (albeit one “doomed to eventual failure”, he cheerily adds). How? Leisure travel gives us perspective, it makes us feel connected to history, and helps connect personal experience with other cultures, people and places – making us feel less isolated. Tourism gives us a sense of selfhood and purpose.
Added to this is the framing of travel as an “authentic” experience in an inauthentic world; a dichotomy that has only become more stark over time. Travel offers one-off experiences; things we can only do in one place. Modern life is marked by its impossible and contradictory obsession with the “authentic”, as any lifestyle marketing bod will testify to. We see travel, rather than our everyday existence, as the portal to “finding ourselves”.
I was reading The Tourist, and its dissection of how various attractions are marked out as important sites of pilgrimage, while I planned my days navigating Istanbul’s own “must-sees”. It may have been published in the 70s, but it feels more relevant than ever. My generation in particular have embraced travelling internationally for “leisure” as almost a right, rather than a luxury; a response I suspect is motivated in part by the “traditional” markers of adulthood and self-actualisation (house ownership, lifelong career, 2.5 children) becoming either more unattainable or less appealing.
As MacCannell perceived almost 50 years ago, there is a moral superiority attached to the well-travelled, too. Those who stay at home have failed to “break the bounds of their everyday experience and beg[un] to ‘live’”. Yet this belief that international travel will always expand our mental horizons – especially given the proliferation of commercialised and sheltered touristic experiences wherever you go – doesn’t bear much scrutiny. A friend spoke recently of an acquaintance who’d returned home after a thrilling world tour, only to exclaim their disgust at the sight of a “tramp” begging on their local streets.
As the climate crisis intensifies, the moral aspect of travel becomes even harder to defend. International travel may give us, as individuals, a sense of connection and purpose within the maelstrom of modernity. But how can we square engaging in ritualistic pilgrimage to Giza’s pyramids, or the hot air balloons of Cappadocia, with a keen awareness of just exactly what mass tourism means for the very sites we have been taught to worship?
Tourism is responsible for 8-10% of annual global CO2 emissions. The rise of cheap flights opened up access to international travel, and yet is surely no longer sustainable. Meanwhile, pandemic-induced shutdowns showed that wildlife around tourist hotspots, at least can, and will, regroup if given half the chance.
We need a substantial and widespread shift in both understanding why we travel – beyond simply “for leisure” – and unpicking our feelings of personal entitlement to the self-actualisation and connection we expect to find in far-flung places.
This is horribly hard. I don’t want to scale back my ambitions to see the world on a whim. I want sunset epiphanies while sitting in Lycian amphitheatres; to hear the toucan’s call in Costa Rica and to inhale as much mansaf as humanly possible after finally seeing the marvels of Petra with my own eyes. In my heart of hearts, I believe that it’s how I will find myself.
This is why the tourists pile out of airports as acrid black smoke still chokes local countryside: service to the self. But shelving that self is the only way out – and perhaps would lead us back towards more collective forms of organising society that don’t require us to go on such quests in the first place. The problem is, that would require us to cut back, stay home more, forgo cheap travel in favour of pricier and slower overland international routes, or more local excursions. And when luxury has been repackaged as basic human need, who’s going to give that up?
• This article was amended on 30 August 2023. An earlier version said that the Hawaii wildfires had killed “hundreds”; to clarify the current total is at least 115 people.
Moya Lothian-McLean is a contributing editor at Novara Media
