Full August, and many of us are on vacation. This article is written as if sending a message in a bottle thrown into the sea: it will arrive perhaps in another galaxy, if we're lucky. I hope, and I say this as a premonition, that everything goes well. It's hard not to think that, if a few years ago, the question at this time was about the privilege of the tourist (who can travel and who cannot), now the issue has more to do with the meaning of the act (taking a plane and fleeing, being a temporary witness to another life in a country far away) in times of severe climate crisis. That is to say: at a time when speed and mobility cease to produce freedom and begin to cause inequality.It has been thought about a lot: the tourist not only seeks to know other cultures, but also participates in a form of consumption and production of authenticity; tourism as an industry is a socially organized way of looking at and consuming places; holidays function as a temporary ceasefire from work through a logic of consumption hidden in the aesthetics of rest. As I said, before we wondered who could enjoy this luck and now we wonder, or should wonder, who pays for the mobility possibilities of others. We know this well here, in Catalonia, and especially in Barcelona, where the impact of tourism, beyond gentrifying neighborhoods, also affects its climate: it is a mistake to believe that the impact of tourists only has to do with an economic issue or standard of living, and that global tourism is responsible for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2018 study in Nature Climate Change. I mean: this infernal heat also has to do with this.Regarding gentrification and the transformation of cities, I doubt whether there is a kind tourism, harmless. A few days ago, I saw a Catalan who, from Shanghai, defended the possibility of traveling in such a way that it would not alter the local economic system. He argued that being against gentrification does not mean stopping traveling and advocated for non-gentrifying tourism: no tourist apartments or bookings through Booking. Other slogans: always remembering that one is a secondary actor in the culture one visits; not wanting the city to adapt to one's own needs, and being clear about the intention that brings you to places (that is, not conceiving the home of others as a schoolyard, as an amusement park). I don't know if this is enough not to destroy the places we visit. What is clear is that, in terms of ecological footprint, there is no possible re-signification.
I think it was Brossa who said that traveling didn't make much sense: one got off the plane, in some remote place, and continued to be the same as always. We cross countries with the promise that we will discover a hidden, unpredictable part of ourselves, that we can be, for a while, different people, but the surprise comes when we realize that the transformation is not far from home, in another time zone. That is to say: perhaps what is needed is to question the value, the ultimate promise, that we have historically attributed to travel. However, travel offers new possibilities, small respites from everyday life: I think of my family, now, reunited for the first time in a long time, sharing time for consecutive days, rediscovering that part of ourselves that we had forgotten. We know that we are approaching a new era in which, contrary to what we have experienced in recent years, with low-cost flights and the Airbnb pandemic, the end of tourism will be imposed. It will not be, however, a conscious, meditated, and kind decision for our environment, but a forced imposition due to the end of natural resources: the day will come when the lack of fuel, for example, or the exorbitant price of tickets will prevent taking flights at will. It would be good if a new tourism model were then initiated, although everything suggests that this will not be the case: only the number of people who can enjoy tourism will be reduced, and the number of people who will be its collateral victims will increase. It seems that, in the meantime, the chosen option is to enjoy the end, like someone dancing in hell. A Twitter user wrote a few days ago: climate change will manifest in the form of images that we will reproduce on our phones, until we are the ones who record them in person.
