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The end of travel? Or a time to rethink it as vertical, not horizontal?

Mass air travel has made the world not so much a smaller place as a more dangerous one

Volunteers collect plastic waste during a cleaning exercise organised by Ocean Sole Africa, in Kilifi county. They are the footwear of choice for much of the world but cheap flip flops, like other plastic trash, are polluting oceans and pristine white-sand beaches such as Kilifi on the Indian Ocean. Photograph: Simon Maina/AFP via Getty

Michael Cronin
Tue Jun 21 2022 - 05:58

Nobody lives on Henderson Island in the South Pacific. An isolated and uninhabited coral atoll, it was designated an Unesco heritage site in 1988 in recognition of its unique ecological character. It is the kind of remote ecological island Eden that has enthused the imagination of travellers for centuries. Remote, inaccessible, different, alluring.

Henderson Island also has the unenviable distinction of having the highest density of human-made debris on the planet. Almost 38 million pieces of plastic have been found on its coastline. Each day that passes brings 13,000 new pieces ashore. In the North Pacific, Midway Island, one of the most remote islands in the world, lies at the centre of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge concentration of plastic litter covering a surface that is almost three times the size of France. Islands that formerly offered visions of unexampled environmental plenty are now witnesses to unparalleled ecological devastation. Travelling there now is less about establishing of inventory of delight than drawing up a catalogue of loss.

On January 25th, 2020, in this newspaper, the travel writer and author Manchán Magan, opened his travel column with a dramatic declaration of intent: “I could never have predicted a year ago that I would be writing this article proclaiming my intention to give up flying abroad on holidays.” Living on an island on the edge of Europe, deriving his main income from a weekly travel column, he was not making an easy decision, but Magan confessed: “It had to stop. I’m responsible for coaxing too many people to fly already. Have I the soot of their carbon emissions on my hands? Either way, I cannot continue to promote the further pollution of this planet, poisoning it for future generations just so I can take free holidays and get paid to report on them.”

A view of the inside of a train carriage at the RER C Paris Train Museum during its inauguration at the Austerlitz train station in Paris. Photograph: Stephane De Sakutin/AFP via Getty

Magan was drawing the logical conclusion from what climate science had been telling him. Since 1990, carbon dioxide emissions from international aviation have increased by 83 per cent. One of the special characteristics of aircraft emissions is that most of them are produced at cruising altitudes high in the atmosphere. These high-altitude emissions have a more harmful climate impact as they trigger a series of chemical reactions which increases the net warming effect.

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Emissions from flying

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that the climate impact of aircraft is two to four times greater than the effect of their carbon dioxide emissions alone. Emissions from flying stand to triple by 2050 if demand for air travel continues to grow. As Andrew Murphy, an aviation manager at Transport & Environment, a think tank based in Brussels, has pointed out, “Euro for euro, hour for hour, flying is the quickest and cheapest way to warm the planet.”

If the Swedish term flygskam (flight-shaming) was to become part of the vocabulary of the international environmental movement, the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 would provide a graphic illustration of what the end-of-travel might look like. The combination of lockdowns and quarantine regulations meant that all forms of mobility were affected, but the consequences for air travel were dramatic. Passenger air transport dropped by 90 per cent between April 2019 and April 2020. The pandemic was, of course, a reflection of the wider environmental crisis, more symptom than outlier. As the noted historian of epidemics, Frank M Snowden, pointed out, each age gets the pandemic it deserves: “Covid-19 flared up and spread because it is suited to the society we have made. A world with nearly eight billion people, the majority of whom live in densely crowded cities and all linked by rapid air travel, creates innumerable opportunities for pulmonary viruses. At the same time, demographic increase and frenetic urbanisation lead to the invasion and destruction of animal habitat, altering the relationship of humans to the animal world.”

The ecological disruption (zoonotic transmission) that was the necessary context for the pandemic was magnified in its effects on human societies by continuous air travel. The end-of-travel in the age of the Anthropocene is no longer a dystopian fiction but a lived reality.

The sense of the end becomes more real than imagined when travel writers imagine the soot of their readers’ carbon emissions on their hands and when, during lockdown in Taiwan, Taipei International Airport sold tours in which members of the public went through security and cleared immigration before taking their seats on flights that never took off.

Travel is now keyed to present, existential threat rather than sepia-tinged disenchantment. It is no longer a question of mass travel making everywhere look the same or of tourism contributing to localised environmental pollution. It is the very act of travelling that becomes problematic. The era of global space-time convergence ushered in by mass air travel has made the world not so much a smaller place as an infinitely more dangerous one.

Do we need not so much to end travel as to rethink it? Changed circumstances can bring new distinctions, and we can begin by distinguishing between vertical and horizontal travel. Horizontal travel is the more common understanding of travel, the linear journey from one place to the next, removed in distance and in time, the trip from Dublin to Paris.

Vertical travel involves remaining close to the point of departure, travelling down into the particulars of a place, either in space (eg close botanical descriptions of our surroundings) or time (local history, archaeology), the trip around our neighbourhood. Horizontal travel implies leaving familiar surroundings for a place which is generally situated at some remove from the routine world of the traveller. Vertical travel, on the other hand, is an exercise in staying close by, not leaving the seemingly familiar, and travelling differently through a world previously assumed to be known.

Ecological and ethical necessity

If the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century have witnessed a marked increase in attention to vertical travel, this is, in part, shadowed by an ecological and ethical necessity, the need to engage in more sustainable, locally based patterns of production and consumption.

The practices of vertical travel are extremely various. In his Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, the French author Georges Perec engages in exploring what he dubs the “infra-ordinary”. He compulsively lists all the goings-on in and around the Café de la Mairie adjacent to the Saint Sulpice church in Paris. The aim of Perec’s method is to make evident the sheer scale of the infra-ordinary, the encyclopedic density of things literally taking place in our immediate surrounding which generally pass unnoticed. A context for Perec’s vertical travel writing is a broader concern with challenging people’s alienation from their surroundings, a retrieval of purpose in and power over the everyday world.

François Maspero in his Roissy Express: A Journey through the Paris Suburbs accompanies the photographer Anaïk Frantz on a trip from Roissy airport to the end of the RER B railway line, a trip that normally takes little over an hour. Their journey, instead, lasts two months. Why? They stop off at each of the stations on the way to central Paris and beyond, revealing whole other worlds normally invisible to the traveller who hurtles through seemingly featureless spaces on the way from the airport to the city. One of the most striking features of Maspero’s decelerated odyssey is coming into contact with migrants speaking a plurality of languages and bringing with them a variety of spoken and unspoken cultures and histories. The interstices, the stops along the way, reveal worlds of infinitely receding fractal complexity.

In New York, Alexandra Horowitz travels through the Manhattan neighbourhood she has lived in all her adult life. Each time she does this with a different companion – a child, a dog, an urban sociologist, an artist, a physician, a sound designer – all the while schooling herself in attention, walking with people “who have distinctive, individual, expert ways of seeing all the unattended, perceived ordinary elements I was missing”.

Common to all forms of vertical travel are strategies of defamiliarisation. They compel the traveller to look afresh, to call into question the taken for granted, to take on board the infinitely receding complexity of the supposedly routine or prosaic. They suggest that shrinkage is a matter not of scale but of vision. A narrowing of focus, a reduction in reach can in fact lead to an expansion of insight, an unleashing of interpretive and imaginative possibilities often smothered by an undue emphasis on the benefits of horizontal mobility.

So where are our vertical travel agencies? How do we school our children in the potential of vertical travel as much as in the excitement of horizontal travel? Is the only way to avoid the Great Garbage Patch to scrupulously explore our own local patch, to look not up but down and around and make our travels the beginnings of worlds not their end?

Michael Cronin is director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. His Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene is published by Cambridge University Press