The anthropocenic imaginary: political ecologies of tourism in a geological epoch

Abstract

The Anthropocene is fundamentally a social imaginary that is both shaped by and is reshaping tourism practice. In this article, we enroll the concept of the anthropocenic imaginary to describe how the Anthropocene is symbolically and materially produced as well as the ways in which it draws on the historical separation of Humanity and Nature. As the structural roots from which the anthropocenic imaginary has grown, this binary co-produces new and old forms of political and ecological inclusion and exclusion. We demonstrate how core themes in tourism studies have fertilized the seeds from which the theoretical branches of post-humanist, capitalist and ecological imaginaries in tourism have taken shape. These anthropocenic imaginaries, we argue, are appropriated in market-based solutions to environmental degradation that emanate from neoliberal contexts internal to the problem. Thus, we question the reconciliation of capitalist accumulation and environmental limits in sustainable tourism. This article and the papers in this issue push forward emerging approaches in the political ecology of tourism that recognize the Anthropocene as both a geological epoch and conceptual regime. In doing so, the issue contributes to emerging conversations on the relationship between politics, ecology and tourism in the so-called recent age of man.

Keywords:

• Anthropocence
• Political Ecology
• Anthropocenic Imaginary
• Human–Environment Relations
• Neoliberalism
• Sustainable Tourism

Introduction

The Anthropocene is having a moment. Already half a decade ago, the term Anthropocene was showing up brandished all over the place in academia’s various outposts: journals, conferences, course syllabi, panels, podcasts and public punditry (Moore, 2015). Today, the Anthropocene is the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of articles that span the social and natural sciences and the arts and humanities. Academic disciplines have coalesced and mobilized around the term, broadening their research agendas and forging new cross-disciplinary fields (Castree, 2014a, 2014b; Häusler and Häusler, 2018). Since Crutzen’s Anthropocene, then limited to the geophysical sciences, and the Anthropocene of today, now engaged inside and out by scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well as in popular culture, the topic of anthropogenic environmental change has consumed modern thought, public debate and planetary anxieties. Across its short lifespan, Anthropocene has become a discussion about geological periodization, a conversation about environmental sustainability and the origins of ecological crisis (Moore, 2017). Indeed, it would appear that scholars from nearly every discipline have boarded the thematic bandwagon, an excitement that has yet to abate. As Tsing, Bubandt, Gan, and Swanson (2017, p. 1) and others observe, “the word tells a big story”. But what exactly is that story? Whose story is it? And how does tourism figure into that story?

In this article, we argue that the Anthropocene is fundamentally a social imaginary that is both shaped by and is reshaping tourism practice. We enroll the concept of the anthropocenic imaginary to describe how the Anthropocene is symbolically, materially and discursively produced. An entity unto itself, the anthropocenic imaginary perpetuates and challenges new and old forms of political and ecological inclusion and exclusion as it coauthors the script for humans in the Anthropocene story. Building on emerging research on the relationship between the Anthropocene and tourism, we question what role such imaginations of human–environment engagement play in contemporary tourism industries and encounters. How, for example, do people engage in and conceive of leisure in times of uncertain political, economic or environmental futures? In what ways do new tourism infrastructures structure our imaginative relationship with nature? Considerations of the anthropocenic imaginary inspire answers, while raising new questions. The anthropocenic imaginary directs our attention to the ways in which Nature has become a repository for social values, as the human imagination is triggered by fantasies of anthropogenic doom and destruction. It may be, too, that there is heuristic value here, since it is through emergent anthropocenic imaginaries that new and more complex societal solutions to environmental problems might be developed.

To begin with the acknowledged coinage of American biologist Eugene Stoermer and Dutch geochemist Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene is at its very root a new geological epoch, one in which human activity and agency have become a planetary force acting at many scales across the planet. As an epochal change, Anthropocene denotes a specific marker in the geologic record – a geophysical shift in the planet’s rock layer that can be scientifically determined as distinct from the biogeological conditions of the Holocene (Boggs, 2016). While Anthropocene denotes a new era that is dominated by humans’ transformation of the Earth’s atmosphere, it has also come to encompass a range of human activities and resultant environmental phenomenon (Hamilton, Gemenne, & Bonneuil, 2015). When the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London met in 2008 to discuss whether a new epoch in planetary history had indeed begun, the empirically available signs of such a shift were aplenty. By that year, climate change had already begun to distemper seasons across the planet with extreme weather events including droughts, cold freezes and hot spells which have contributes to the so-called sixth extinction (Barnosky et al., 2011).

Champions of the term Anthropocene seek to account for life on a planet that five hundred years ago supported some 450 million humans and today struggles to support over 7.5 billion. They wield the term to explain that due to industrial progress and economic growth, each of those 7.5 billion humans now has a vastly more consequential impact than they would have a millennium ago. They demonstrate how societies and their relationships to environment have indeed changed, perhaps irrevocably. In many parts of the world, natural systems are effectively becoming another element of regional and global systems, and few would argue with the statement that we now live in a period of “rapid, unpredictable, and fundamental change that is literally planetary in scope” (Chester and Allenby, 2018). Given society’s penchant for coinages, acronyms and catch-all buzzwords, it makes sense that we would end up with a term whose lexical heft both reflects the gravity of the current situation and the momentousness of what it stands for, while also communicating its share of reference, paradox and irony.

But the Anthropocene has morphed into more than just a descriptive term. It has also become a mobilizing concept that has empowered scholars and scientists from across multiple disciplines to collectively brainstorm a pathway forward for humans and non-humans alike (Haraway et al., 2016; Tsing et al., 2017). Now in place as an epistemological regime, Anthropocene has become a core debate about humanity and the planet while simultaneously being a critique of that very debate (Castree, 2014b). It points to the problem of living on a planet damaged by the excesses of overaccumulated capital (Tsing et al., 2017). Finally, and perhaps most potently, it has become a political label intended to draw attention to superlative planetary change and the agentive role and responsibility of humans in such change in ways that suggest global uniformity and problematically write out difference and locality (Moore, 2016). As one of the world’s biggest industries, tourism is a lead player in ongoing debates about the future of the planet. Thus, if the Anthropocene is now a shorthand – if a mouthful of one – for the current climate of concern over socio-environmental issues, human excess and consumptive regimes, then tourism is both part of the problem and solution.

Tourism and the anthropocenic imaginary

The anthropocenic imaginary reflects a discourse about the past that contains warnings about the future. It highlights how the world is pushing up against planetary boundaries into a zone of high turbulence and uncertainty. It also represents a break with ecological imaginations of a self-contained earth system. Andrew Reszitnyk can be attributed with first coining the term “anthropocenic imaginary” as an instrumentalization and distortion of the language of earth sciences (Reszitnyk, 2015, p. 4). These practices, he argues, have perpetuated projects of depoliticization in ways that re-assign responsibility for the degradation of the earth and its atmosphere through discursive regimes of neoliberalism. As a political, economic, and cultural ideology, neoliberal discourses wrapped in the cloak of the Anthropocene naturalize environmental degradation as a collective responsibility that demands individual, privatized responses. This has provided opportunities for tourism development to facilitate a spatio-temporal fix for capitalism via the transformation of disaster into commodity form.

The narrative of the Anthropocene, insofar as it can be pinned to any one narrative, evokes at once visions of a future environmental apocalypse while also speaking to past and present inequality and suffering. And yet the very use of the term itself invites critique that this hubristic belief that humans could (or should) wield power against the planet employs the same logics that created the problem in the first place (Chakrabarty, 2016; Hamilton, 2016; Marcus, 1995). This discourse is particularly explicit in tourism in which imaginaries are traded on through narratives about the current state of the world, its people and its future. As a creative, flexible conceptualization, imaginaries accommodate the complex range of social and cultural practices that exist across multiple, embodied worlds, and are applicable across a range of individual and group experiences. The imaginary, in the words of social theorist Charles Taylor, “incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of one another, the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life” (Taylor, 2002, pp. 106–107). Social imaginaries do not just tell about how we see the world in our heads; they make that very world. Through social imaginaries, beliefs about reality are unconsciously shaped through representational practices (Althusser, 1971). As an industry driven in large part by practices of representation, tourism is compelled to circulate imaginaries that become vehicles for the Anthropocene to take shape, which in turn reshapes the tourism industry itself. Food production, for instance, is one key site where the anthropocenic imaginary has taken hold. In the Caribbean, for instance, Amelia Moore (this issue) demonstrates how Anthropocene imaginaries push forward new commodity frontiers through the rebranding of tourism “products” such as a small island farm in the Bahamas. Moore’s work demonstrates the ways in which anthropocenic imaginaries have reconfigured the role of the farm in both symbolic and material forms. It also provides fodder for the imagining and materialization of new leisure spaces.

Indeed, new leisure spaces have been developed globally that confirm the potency of the anthropocenic imaginary. Popular reenactments of the Anthropocene are now thoroughly integrated into a range of leisure spaces. Beyond new forms of agricultural, dark and apocalyptic tourism experiences, museum exhibits, art shows and urban infrastructures speak directly to the anthropocenic imaginations. In September of 2018, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History appointed Nicole Heller as the world’s first curator of the Anthropocene. Heller’s role is to “tell the epoch’s story, noting both the positive and negative ways that humans are changing the planet, how biotic organisms are responding, and what this may mean for the future” (Pickels, 2018). Anthropocene themed exhibitions are now on display in natural history and art museums around the world, where titles such as the Smithsonian’s “Anthropocene: Life in the Age of Humans” abound. These exhibits produce new imaginaries of humankind’s fall from grace amidst a disruption the social order. The once-niche-now-popular genre of cli-fi (climate fiction) similarly reflects the broader assemblage of the anthropocenic imaginary.

Imagination is not opposed to reality, but makes reality a more creative human experience. As Tim Ingold argues, imagination is intimately entangled with perception and memory such that they cannot be considered independently (Ingold, 2013). Images and visual culture are integral to the ways we imagine, perceive and remember. The souvenir, Facebook profile or AirBnB review help us to trigger memories and sense the experience. There is a temporality to imagination in that it reflects the ways in which we are always running ahead of ourselves and the materiality of our intentions. As Ingold notes, the experience of life is caught in the tension between the onward rush and the friction of materials; the pull of hopes and dreams and the drag of material restraint (Ingold, 1993).

Significantly, the meaning of “imagination” has inherited more than three centuries of European thought, since when it was associated with fantasy rather than fact (Ingold, 2013; Janowski & Ingold, 2016). The imagination long been taken up by the humanities and social sciences; the topic has also been especially influential in transdisciplinary tourism studies (Salazar, 2012). Benedict Anderson, for instance, ascribed the significance of media in the development of collective imaginaries of the nation. His work demonstrated the ways in which the imagination shifts in accordance with the development of new media technologies; this is especially true in tourism where the development of social media has radically altered how tourists imagine, perceive and remember. Edward Said’s analysis of Orientalism was particularly influential in tourism studies. His work demonstrated how, through early travel writing, the West’s imaginary of the Arab world as backwards, overly sexual and dangerous contributed to geographical imaginaries of the entire region. These insights have helped tourism scholars address how these stereotypes media tourism images and encounters (Bryce, 2007; Hall & Tucker, 2004; Said, 1978; Yan & Santos, 2009; Yoshihara, 2004). Long before social media took hold, Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-lughod and others described the imagining of homogenous cultures and the intertextual production of the state through new media technologies (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, & Brian 2002). The growing representation of indigenous imaginaries have reshaped the way we think through indigenous tourism experiences (Smith, 1999). Finally, Erik Swyngedouw has been at the forefront of demonstrating the political imaginaries of nature. For instance, he describes an apocalyptic imaginary which he argues, in the context of a neoliberal hegemony, forecloses asking serious political questions about possible socio-environmental trajectories (Swyngedouw, 2007). Such types of apocalyptic thinking are now deeply embedded in the tourism industry and its imaginaries (Tucker & Shelton, 2014). Together, this broad range of multiple imaginaries becomes part of the discourses embedded in anthropocenic thought, now one of the most influential framings through which tourists experience the world.

A political ecology of the anthropocenic imaginary

Political ecology is an interdisciplinary framework characterized by a focus on place-based, historically situated and multi-scalar accounts of socio-environmental change. Political ecologists examine environmental matters from a broadly defined political economy perspective (Bryant & Michael, 2006; Gössling, 2003; Peet & Watts, 2004; Susan, Lisa, & Michael, 2003). Originating as a critique against an allegedly apolitical cultural ecology and ecological anthropology, political ecology illustrates the unavoidable entanglement of political economy with ecological concerns (Stonich, 1998, p. 28). Political ecological perspectives on the both the environment and the socio-environmental anxieties of the Anthropocene illustrate, diachronically, how power and structural relations at different scales have held implications for local people’s natural resource and land use practices. They also demonstrate how tourism is mediated by a range of political, economic and cultural relations of power. As a result of these relations, some ecological concerns become privileged while others are discarded of deemed unactionable. Marxist and post-structural perspectives have been particularly helpful frameworks for tourism scholars to make sense of the ways in which anthropocenic imaginaries perpetuate differential interests, benefitting some while marginalizing others. Thus, as Fletcher (2018) notes, bringing Marxist and post-structural perspectives together, affords an understanding of tourism development as both the embodiment of a particular discursive perspective and approach to human–environment relations and a political-economic process entailing pursuit of capitalist accumulation (this volume).

Humanity and nature in the anthropocenic imaginary

Musings on the Anthropocene in everyday tourism encounters are a well-positioned perch from which to observe the discursive separation of Humanity from Nature. Rooted in the Cartesian dualism that developed in early modern Europe, this separation is reified by the anthropocenic imaginary through an understanding of the social structures of capitalism as unhinged from Nature. Humanity is subsequently framed as an undifferentiated whole which has become the bearer of responsibility for global environmental change rather than the socio-environmental relations of capitalist production (Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2015). This position depoliticizes and naturalizes all humans everywhere as equally responsible for global environmental destruction.

Tourists and tourism practitioners perpetuate the Humanity/Nature dualism in both implicit and explicit ways. Anthropocenic imaginaries conceal the symbolic, material and often times bloody violence of the Humanity/Nature dualism which is typically backed by what Moore refers to as “imperial power and capitalist rationality” with the sole aim of capital accumulation (Moore, 2016, p. 78). In the wake of this realization, scholars such as Haraway, Moore and others have called for alternative concepts to the Anthropocene so as to account for the ways in which planetary crisis is pushed forward by this blind drive for progress, growth and the accumulation of capital (Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2017). In order to examine how anthropocenic imaginaries are appropriated in ways that build upon some of the core sociological categories on which tourism has often been predicated, in the following section, we outline three conceptual imaginaries of anthropocenic thought: posthuman, capitalist and ecological.

Post-Human imaginaries: metaphor and materiality

The anthropocenic imaginary speaks to the renewed, transdisciplinary interest among scholars in human interaction with the material world (Anderson & Wylie, 2009; Haraway, 2015; Miller, 2005). This interest reflects new relations of humans with the environment, inviting in new materialities, socialities and positionialities. Environmental, development and social policy are being reconfigured through the anthropocenic imaginary, as contemporary experiences with forest, water, land, ecologies, technologies and viruses elucidate alternative ways of living – and perhaps more sustainable ways of being. Global ecological movements have been catalysts for the Ontological turn in tourism studies. These are not merely social constructivist, they are not restricted to humans. They give agency to non-human and more-than-human natures, what Haraway, Tsing and others refer to as a multi-species-ism, within which we are inextricably entwined (Haraway et al., 2016; Tsing et al., 2017).

Over the past decade, tourism scholarship has been repopulated with non-human beings in ways that account for their agency as social agents. The popularity of Actor-Network theory has brought Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars into conversation with environmental scholars and philosophers, anthropologists and geographers (Callon, 1999; Latour, 2005). Processes of ordering are significant here. As van der Duim explains, the tourist researcher’s task is to follow how meanings are co-produced in tourism practice. Drawing on Latour’s actor-network theory, van der Duim describes “tourismscapes” as human and non-human entanglements dispersed across time and space (Van der Duim, 2007; van der Duim, Ren, & Thór 2013).

Moving beyond social-constructivist approaches to the study of human–environment relations, tourism scholars now account for the agency of actors ranging from lice in the hair volunteer tourists in Nepal (Benali & Ren, 2018) to trash in the lives of garbage pickers (Fisher, this volume). Such work that considers the multiple agentive roles played by the non-human has lent a critical depth to tourism studies (Picken, 2010, p. 245). Indeed, this approach compels us to reconsider the very ontological positions of tourism research (Cohen & Cohen, 2012; Jóhannesson, 2005; Tribe, 2010; van der Duim et al., 2013). Thus, in ways similar to how the gendered dimensions of tourism reinforce the Nature/Humanity binary, representations of human and non-human relations. For instance, whale watching in the Arctic fulfils a long-standing touristic cliché through its promotion of pristine nature beyond the human realm (Norum, Kramvig & Kristoffersen, 2015). The widespread belief in the role of humans to “protect nature” through neoliberal practices of conservation, enclosure and regulation perpetuates the separation of humans and nature in ways that overshadow the structural drivers of environmental degradation and species extinction.

In tourism, the separation of nature from culture has long been perhaps most visible in the nature/culture and male/female dualisms. Anthropologist, Ortner (1974) famously argued that women’s universal subordination is a result of their discursive ties with nature (Ortner, 1974). Donna Haraway has similarly pointed out how Western regulatory fiction presumes that motherhood is natural and fatherhood is cultural (Haraway, 2001). The representation of nature as feminine has a long presence in the history of colonial and imperial ambitions. In tourism, this engagement often takes on gendered forms where “Nature” is seen as thoroughly female (Besio, Johnston, & Longhurst, 2008; Enloe, 1989). For instance, the overdetermined category of nature and the female body has been widely used to naturalize the relationship between females and nature and males and culture (Swain, 1995). In tourism, the binary opposition between male/female and nature/culture is reiterated in myriad ways where women’s bodies become the metonymic signifier of “nature” in tourism destinations (Johnston, 2001; Swain, 1995). Thus, overdetermined aspect of nature and the female body has contributed to the naturalization of women as the hegemonic signifier of nature.

Capitalist imaginaries: Alienation and authenticity

In 1979, Dean MacCannell made the astute observation that tourists often seek out authentic experiences in places perceived to be beyond the realm of capitalist modernity. The ruse has long been to present a touristic experience that can be sold and consumed through its interpretation as unmediated by any capitalist exchange (e.g. non-touristic). This practice still holds true in many forms today, where desires for authentic, non-commodified, intimate experiences are widespread, and for which many tourists will still spend top dollar to realize (Conran, 2006). In this way, political ecologies of tourism are reimagined in the Anthropocene epoch where alienation drives a desire for authentic cultures and environments that are seen to naturally exist in places perceived to have weaker links to neoliberal capital (Norum & Mostafanezhad, 2016). As Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway point out, “what thinking through capital means for knowing the Anthropocene might be to consider the importance of long-distance investors in creating an abstract relationship between investment and property” which can be conceptualized as alienation (Haraway et al., 2016, p. 556). Marx originally conceived of alienation as a process via which the mechanistic nature of workers’ labor leads to a separation of actor from self, such that she is unable to conceive of themselves as determinants of their own actions and desires. Transposed to the present-day (capitalist) tourism industry and tourist encounters, then, the tourist becomes ruled by her own desire (labor). People are in this way bound to becoming estranged from themselves and each other under the conditions of capitalist industrial process. Alienation is one of the clearest expressions of the Humanity/Nature dualism in tourism. This observation suggests new ways to think through the dynamics through which people, culture and identities become alienated resources. Alienation and authenticity play leading roles in the long-standing search by the tourist for redemption and self-fulfillment in and through other times, other places and other people. As a result, authenticity becomes an important discursive arena that shapes anthropocenic imaginaries in tourism.

The Humanity/Nature binary that drives the so-called search for authenticity has paved the way for the development of new tourism spaces. In Myanmar, for instance, spaces that have only recently been opened to tourism, such as post-conflict border regions, are widely perceived by tourists to be in relative isolation from Western capitalism. They are frequently represented by popular and travel media and timeless destinations that should be witnessed before it is “too late”. Frontiers also evoke a range of spatial concepts such as borders, hinterlands, and enclaves (Watts, 2017). States of insecurity characterize frontiers which are developed through “an influx and presence of non-native private actors in pursuit of the newly discovered resources” (Peluso & Lund, 2011, p. 1). Yet, land and resources are not the whole story, as Watts points out, because “The frontier is primarily a social space within which forms of rule and authority, and multiple sovereignties, are in question” (Watts, 2017, p. 480). Thus, capital accumulation can be described as a frontier process which is driven by “cheap Natures”. Capitalist competition drives cheap Natures that materialize as new commodity frontiers (Watts, 2017, p. 479).

In tourism, enclosures are one core strategy through which new land is privatized and commodified (Büscher, 2013). Tourism frontiers are sites where national identities (e.g. settlers, indigenous, natives) are both homogenized as well as distinguished. The tourism encounter as a “contact zone” facilitates opportunities for native territory to be enclosed for tourism development. Sometimes through violence and sometimes through persuasion, the territorialization of new land for the pursuit of tourism profits is widespread globally. International peace parks (Büscher, 2013), safaris in Tanzania (Gardner, 2016) and conservation areas in Myanmar (Winton & Ocampo‐Peñuela, 2018) become practices of territorialization through conservation which bear witness to long and often violent histories. Indeed, primitive accumulation, in which propertyless laborers work for capitalists holding the means of production (Marx 1976 [1867]), is integral to the tourism frontier making process. Through the strategic framing of capitalist anthropocenic imaginaries, new land, resource and commodity frontiers are developed in ways that further marginalize the landless while empowering the global bourgeois class.

Ecological imaginaries: Commodification and nature

Tourism is frequently one of the first industries to develop in frontier regions, in part because of the facility of appropriating “nature” and “culture” as commodity forms (Krakover & Gradus, 2002). The commodification of intangible “products” such as culture and nature produce new kinds of anthropocenic imaginaries that speak to our relationship to and understanding of planetary and human ecologies. Through tourism, material and social categories such as Nature (including human nature) are developed as commodities which are then attributed with exchange value. Such value is created through human and non-human social relations that exist outside capital, producing commodity forms from non-capitalist forms of value (Tsing, 2013, p. 21). Mushrooms, the object of Tsing’s analysis, become valuable not through qualitative changes but through new social relations of exchange; in similar ways, culture and nature attain value through new practices of differentiation. Scholars have drawn upon Marx’s conceptualization of “free gifts of nature” and the exploitation and commodification of unpaid work in order to demonstrate how capitalism depends on not-only capitalist modes of exchange (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Moore, 2015, 2016; Tsing, 2009, 2015). The commodification of the “free gifts of nature” includes human nature, the appropriation of which is widespread in the tourism industry. In tourism, being essentially a commodification process, the “stuff” of the tourism industry is commodified (human) nature. As Büscher and Fletcher (2017) describe, there are violent processes through which tourism products are made into capital. Their work speaks to show structural violence is done to human and non-human nature through “the systematic production of inequalities, waste and ‘spaces of exception’” (Büscher & Fletcher, 2017, p. 651). While scholars acknowledge that human nature, too, is exploited for capital accumulation, emerging scholarship demonstrates the ways in which these practices are shaped by and for tourism. Indeed, as Fletcher (2018, this volume) shows, the emergence of an Anthropocene tourism is illustrative of the ways in which the tourism industry provides a spatio-temporal fix for capitalism through of creation of new commodity frontiers. In this way, a particular form of disaster capitalism emerges, contributing to new ecological anthropocenic imaginaries (Klein, 2007). These imaginaries are perpetuated through commodity and land frontiers where the Humanity/Nature binary is the basis on which culture, identity, and nature is commodified by tourism industry practitioners.

Sustainable tourism in the anthropocene?

The Anthropocene looms large in sustainable tourism. Yet, like the Anthropocene itself, the concept of sustainability has a pervasive obscuring effect. Indeed, what is needed is the politicization of the environment predicated on the recognition of a multitude of potential socio-environmental futures and imaginaries. As Swyngedouw argues, a policy of sustainability is constructed around a single Nature, insofar as there are a multitude of natures and a multitude of existing or possible socio-natural relations, perpetuates a kind of post-political and post-democratic condition that forecloses the possibility of a real politics of the environment (Swyngedouw, 2007). While the call for a sustainable future is hardly contestable or controversial, it nevertheless presents a paradox (Krueger & Gibbs, 2007). While no one can lodge much argument with the economic, social, environmental and political ideals of the idea of sustainability, the policies and practices which have developed around it are frequently pursued within the broader context of neoliberal global capitalism – which, by definition, is throttled by the bottom line.

Ecomodernist Manifesto argues that since we are entering new era of intervention, we have the responsibility, duty and capacity to change the environment using the tools available to us. Such tools at our disposal include socio-technological capacities, such as nuclear power and carbon offsetting. Via a process of “selling nature to save it”, the green fixes we come up with can easily end up perpetuating injustices globally (McAfee, 1999). Though it hardly makes it into discussion about the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, processes such as biodiversity protection, conservation and other forms of environmental protection through tourism frequently deprive local people of resources (Igoe & Brockington, 2007; Igoe, Neves, & Brockington, 2010; West, Igoe, & Brockington, 2006). Indeed, in order to have any marked effect on the global environmental justice, the planet’s current environmental crisis must be seen to be as much geopolitical as geological (Grove & Chandler, 2017). In a similar way, so-called sustainable tourism is limited by the tourism industry’s proverbial bottom line. As we write about the consequences of the Anthropocene, when we discuss the “consequences” or “impacts” of tourism, we must remember that the kinds of questions we ask will shape the kinds of answers we create. For instance, in the context of the Anthropocene, Jason Moore asks, “But consequences of what? Of humanity as a whole? Of population? Of industrial civilization? Of the West? Of capitalism?” (Moore, 2016, p. 78).

A myopic focus on sustainable tourism can cause one to lose sight of the structural violence of accumulation processes on which the tourism industry depends. The relationship between the extent of environmental degradation in so-called developing countries, poverty and the colonial experience is hardly happenstance. Still, as is the case with the recent climate change negotiations, many of the most critical scholars “will dislike their in-built assumptions that capitalism and nation-states are non-negotiable givens” (Castree, 2014b, p. 468). Part of teasing out these relationships is to pay attention to how the Humanity/Nature binary is appropriated and perpetuated in tourism practice where place-making via techniques of branding is a form of structural violence that is naturalized through the tourism industry (Büscher & Fletcher, 2017, p. 651). Tourism, as one of the world’s largest industries – and as one of the planet’s greatest dramaturg for encounters between humans and nature – plays a key, if underappreciated role in the historical development of the anthropocenic imaginary.

One must also reconsider what it means to speak about “tourism management” when the widening economic gap between the “hosts” and “guests” make it all but impossible for many “hosts” to either remain strictly local or to become “guests”. Thus, the widespread focus on tourism management and social impacts reveals the analytical bias towards the symptoms rather than the causes of the emergence of the Anthropocene. The ways in which the anthropocenic imaginary informs our worldview drives our understanding and practice of tourism as both scholars and tourists. Like the abstraction of tourism, the Anthropocene also finds value in its imprecise nature. Indeed, the historical argument for the Anthropocene conceals more than it reveals (Moore, 2017, p. 10).

The concept of sustainable tourism has developed as an antidote to the Humanity/Nature binary and its ecological, social and economic implications. This binary links humans and nature as dead abstractions “that connect to each other as cascades of consequences rather than constitutive relations” (Moore, 2017, p. 5). The violence done by the Humanity/Nature binary is in the strategic removal of the relations of historical change through which contemporary tourism practice takes place. This binary thereby propagates actually existing systems of domination, exploitation and appropriation (Moore, 2017). This makes it clear how the very category of “sustainable” tourism is but duplicitous misnomer: its existence depends on a wider capitalist system of economic exchange that is driven by the tendency towards the overaccumulation of capital, necessitating expansion into new geographic spaces, diversified markets and further privatization and exploitation of both nature and humanity.

Efforts to attribute economic value to the environment, culture and/or identity of peoples and places through mechanisms such as cultural ecosystem services are one among many neoliberal strategies that threaten to turn the entire planet into a value to be traded, sold or stolen. Tourism plays a core role in such econometric processes. Such practices are echoed in conservation arenas where payments for ecosystem services, carbon trading, and other such schemes are widely floated as viable options for ameliorating the ecological violence that poverty entails. Yet what these schemes all have in common is the shallow logic on which they are based. Telltale examples are not few in number. International efforts led by the Global North to enhance climate change resilience in places such as Vanuatu appear grossly disingenuous given that the U.S. and China alone account for a combined 45% of the global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel. Sustainable tourism campaigns kindly asking that guests not send their towels to the laundry in order to save water in Bali matter less when locals do not even have access to potable water for personal use in the first place (Cole & Browne, 2015). The idea of “sustainable” tourism often focuses on the symptoms rather than the linchpins of environmental, social and economic problems linked to over-, under- or just poorly-managed tourism. The same might be said for the increasing calls for “peace through tourism”, in which frequently misguided efforts by tourism practitioners to find that their practices merely fertilize the roots of inequality in egregious manner (Lisle, 2016).

Yet, all this is not to say that there is no alternative. Indeed, as others have pointed out, people have already begun developing non-carbon and stay-at-home tourism campaigns which challenge traditional associations of the industry (Huijbens & Gren, 2015). Anthropocenic imaginaries are deeply enmeshed in such alterative visions of tourism and they facilitate new possibilities for thinking through human-environment relations. These ways of thinking about and representing humans’ role in environmental change have also contributed to a number of forms of tourism in the Anthropocene emerging from the loss of “natural” resources which take shape in forms of “self-conscious Anthropocene tourism” that also go by the names of e.g. disaster, extinction, development and volunteer (Fletcher, 2018, this volume). If social scientists can agree on anything about the Anthropocene, it might be that it has reshaped many of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks through which we have come to understand human–environment relationships. Tourism scholars have a unique role to play in this reassessment by asking tough questions about global sustainability and environmental ethics to enact “geo-ethically informed geo-hospitality” (Huijbens & Gren, 2015).

Thus, if as Amelia Moore argues, “our collective sense of ‘environmental consequences has never been greater” (Moore, 2016, p. 78), then the role the anthropocenic imaginary plays in tourism forces us to address critical questions around how one ought to live in such a deeply vulnerable geological epoch. Simple, fundamental questions such as “How should we live? (Castree, 2014b) must now be reconsidered within the broader context of neoliberal and other forms of globalization that increasingly drive economic, social, political and ecological practices globally. Sustainable tourism, often defined in opposition to an otherwise unsustainable tourism, is but one response to this call for how to position ourselves among human and non-human others. Yet, tourism scholarship’s often narrow focus on the tourism industry itself can blind us to the broader system of neoliberal global capitalism within which the tourism industry exists. If, as the World Tourism Organization describes it, tourism “entails movement of people to countries or places outside of their usual environment for personal or business/professional purposes” (World Tourism Organization, 2015), then the very industry itself is deeply dependent on environmental degradation. For example, the tourism industry’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is estimated to be as high as eight percent with a forecasted global growth rate of four percent (Lenzen et al., 2018). Let us not forget that both: (a) most of this carbon footprint is exerted by high-income countries; and (b) the decarbonization of tourism-related technology is not keeping up with the growing demand for tourism globally (Lenzen et al., 2018). It seems that what is needed is both global economic structural change and technocratic solutions, both of which require tourism industry practitioners and scholars to reach outside of the comfort of their disciplinary and epistemic homes.

If the anthropocenic imaginary has enabled something positive thing, it is the interdisciplinary conversations we are now having about the current and future state of the world. Anthropologists now work alongside biologists and ecologists to co-create new ways of knowing. Creative writers are in conversation with field biologists who tell stories of landscape and memory while measuring the particulate matter that swirls in the airstream around them. New fields in communication and journalism are developing a focus on science communication and public outreach. These are significant for how they integrate natural and social science with popular culture. Situated within the field’s long history of interdisciplinary work, tourism focused scholars are often well equipped with the analytic tools to think through relationships between people, capital and the environment that frame the anthropocenic imaginary. Still: many of us are frequently confronted with our own lifestyles and the paradoxes and conflicts with which we are often slapped in the face. As we write this conclusion from opposite ends of the planet, we are both packing our carry-on bags to attend a conference several thousand kilometers away in order to network and engage with colleagues over what we as scholars can do about anthropogenic change. The issues involved are large and complex, but they are also simple and personal – and often contradictory.

Conclusion

In the late 1990s, Donna Haraway asked: “What forms does the love of nature take in particular historical contexts?” (Haraway, 2013, p. 1). She was concerned with the genealogies and geographies through which nature was increasingly being constructed as and fetishistic object of intellectual desire. While Haraway’s interest at the time was human-primate relations, her questions are ever more significant today. The ways in which tourists and tourism industry practitioners engage with “nature” is a driving force behind the ways in which we come to “love” nature which has both material and symbolic implications for humans and non-humans everywhere. The means we have of understanding, discussing and representing contemporary human environmental change – our own anthropocenic imaginaries – exist as both irritants and salves for the growing number of societal and ecological problems we are faced with.

The aim of this article, and the articles which follow, has been to outline this notion of the anthropocenic imaginary and show how it relates to practices, encounters and regimes of tourism. In so doing, we call for more nuanced scholarship that leverages political ecology approaches to help identify exactly who Anthropos is when we can so swiftly place blame on Humanity at large the issues we face. Local communities are also making sense – perhaps their own, perhaps shared – of and within the Anthropocene, and its concomitant post-human, capitalist and ecological imaginaries. We have highlighted how the concept of the Anthropocene is shaping planetary social and cultural imaginations, while also changing practices across a range of human techno-social interventions. The Nature/Humanity binary, we have argued, is both appropriated and perpetuated by tourism industry stakeholders. The anthropocenic imaginary has critical discursive and material implications for the planet.

Tourism is a unique starting point from which to examine how human–environment relations is shifting in the current geological epoch. The articles that now follow investigate distinct contexts and various understandings of habitation and habitability – the lifestyles people enact and the actions they take to ensure their continuance. Together, they ask what kinds of socialities are produced in tourism's many forms. By attending to the everyday lives of tourism actors across a range of spaces that include nature parks, ecotourism attractions, agritourism initiatives and green urban spaces, among other tourism geographies, we can consider how tourism helps us to theorize key questions about development, environment and modernity.

The articles in this collection address key issues around the political ecology of tourism in an era of anthropogenic environmental change. They build on emerging work that brings a political ecology lens to tourism (Mostafanezhad, Norum, Shelton, & Thompson-Carr, 2016; Nepal & Saarinen, 2016), pushing this agenda forward by integrating the roles played by conceptual regimes that both embody and produce anthropogenic planetary socio-environmental change. The papers contribute new theoretical and empirical insights to nascent scholarship that links assemblages of political ecological action with globalizing processes of tourism. Geographically broad in scope, they offer nuanced understandings of global and local socio-environmental relationships and, importantly, speak to relationships between so-called First and Third World political ecologies (Bryant & Bailey, 1997).

Despite a few notable exceptions (Brockington & Duffy, 2010; Cole, 2012; Gössling, 2003; Mostafanezhad, Norum, Shelton, & Thompson-Carr, 2016; Nepal & Saarinen, 2016; Stonich & Gössling, 2003), scholars have yet to examine from an explicitly political ecology framework the familiar dilemma between the desire for both tourism-related economic growth and environmental sustainability. In seeking to illustrate the ways in which local tourism-related environmental challenges can be productively addressed through political ecology analyses, the papers that comprise this Special Issue theorize emerging interconnections between tourism and fundamental anthropocenic logics. The questions asked by the authors create new connections between political ecology and the anthropocenic imaginary. They ask tough questions around who wins and who loses from the enactment of such imaginaries in tourism practice. As Jason Moore has cogently explained, “the story of Humanity and Nature conceals a dirty secret of modern world history. That secret is how capitalism was built on excluding most humans from Humanity – indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, nearly all women, and even many white-skinned men (Slavs, Jews, the Irish). From the perspective of imperial administrators, merchants, planters, and conquistadores, these humans were not Human at all. They were regarded as part of Nature, along with trees and soils and rivers – and treated accordingly.” (Moore, 2016, p. 78). If this observation gives tourism scholars pause, they may come to find reason to consider the ways in which the tourism industry is deeply embedded in the packaging, promotion and perpetuation of the broader implications of the anthropocenic imaginary and its concomitant discursive separation of humans and nature.

The authors in this special issue focus on the multiple and sometimes contradictory political ecological imaginaries implicit in both tourist practices and environmental subjectivities across a number of core themes, including gender, health, conservation, agriculture, climate change, disaster and coastal marine management. Taken individually, each of the papers theoretically and empirically integrate linkages between tourism practice and political ecological responses to tourism through the lens of the Anthropocene. But thought of as an integrated collection of engaged scholarly research projects that speak to each other, they identify and problematize core themes, concepts and issues for critical scientific scholarship.

Finally, the papers in this issue reflect a range of geographically situated research among tourism focused scholars on the thought, politics and practices that drive the anthropocenic imaginary. Each author makes clear that the Anthropocene is both a powerfully symbolic and material entity that fascinates both scholars and practitioners of tourism alike. Grounded in ethnographic and qualitative research, this collection is interdisciplinary in scope, yet linked in the shared interest in addressing the political threat as well as the potential that the concept encapsulates. By bringing tourism studies and political ecology to bear on the Anthropocene, we hope that this collection will start new conversations and interventions into sustainable tourism and practice along the Anthropocene tour.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Mostafanezhad

Dr Mary Mostafanezhad is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

Roger Norum

Dr Roger Norum is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oulu.