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There’s a romanticized idea in movies that travel editors only luxuriate in fancy resorts in faraway archipelagos. But I prefer exploring salt marshes.
Since I was a child, my favorite vacation has involved spending hours each day swimming and kayaking in an estuary in southeastern Massachusetts, where my family owns a home. But during my annual summer visits, particularly in the past 15 years, I’ve witnessed disturbing changes: There are now few signs of once-plentiful local species, like periwinkles and hermit crabs, and too much algae in the brackish water. Most worrisome, there are the disappearing marshes and eroding coastline, brought on by an encroaching sea.
I’m not alone in seeing these differences in the natural world and reading the alarming reports of our warming planet. Back in the New York Times office, my fellow journalists in the Travel department and I discuss climate change on an almost daily basis.
We have to. Not only are our favorite destinations changing, the travel industry itself is warming the planet, contributing between 8 and 11 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions, according to estimates from the World Travel and Tourism Council. Food waste and road transportation are culprits, but the biggest, of course, is air travel and transport — it contributes nearly 4 percent of the emissions changing our world.
But travel is also a global economic driver, making up 10 percent of the world’s G.D.P. One in 10 jobs worldwide is in the travel and hospitality sector. From Iceland to Kenya, the Falkland Islands to the Faroe, tour guides, bartenders and cruise pursers feed their families on tourism dollars.
And travel is an opportunity. Travel is study abroad. Car camping. Beach days. Ski trips. Adventures. Marriages. Transformation. It’s unsurprising that many a coming-of-age story is one on the road (“Y Tu Mamá También”) or at the seashore (“Luca”) or in the wilderness (“Stand by Me”). For those lucky enough to partake, travel is a beloved pastime, one that I’ve enjoyed sharing with Times readers.
Grappling with how to address the moral dilemma of travel’s impact on the climate led me to spend a year at Harvard University, studying as a 2023 fellow with the Nieman Foundation. My course load had classes on climate change fundamentals and sustainable travel practices, but it also included a course on “Coloniality, Catastrophe and Climate Change” at the Harvard Divinity School; an earth science seminar on climate dynamics and crop yields; an environmental writing workshop with the author Kerri Arsenault; and a humanities seminar on the sea and the people who love it.
Going back to college as a midcareer journalist was a dream experience, and expanding my study into the impact climate change has had, and will have, on religious beliefs, food sources, infrastructure and social movements was crucial to my understanding of the obligation all journalists have to describe how climate change affects everyday life.
So The Times Travel desk will continue to adapt our journalism and cover a beloved and important pastime, but with increased attention on the natural environments, tourist destinations and local communities most affected by climate change.
This has included publishing more service items, most recently about North Carolina and Florida, both of which have faced and are facing devastating hurricanes. In addition to providing readers with information about emergency policies, Travel journalists are contributing to live coverage of these extreme weather events.
Our desk’s service coverage also includes more explanatory articles, examining the effects that wildfires and heat waves have on international tourist destinations like Greece and Hawaii. Additionally, we’re looking at the amount of snow at ski resorts and the impact of extreme water levels in U.S. destinations like Mississippi and Vermont. And in feature stories, we’re looking at whether the summer vacation and other longstanding travel rituals will continue.
I’m seeking to include more science in our stories, and I’m writing a few myself. I reported on how Curaçao and other Caribbean islands are promoting tourism based on coastline-critical mangroves forests, and I interviewed a marine biologist who left academia to work as a sustainability director for a resort company.
We want to better acknowledge the cost of travel to the climate, as well as share insights on ways travelers can help mitigate that cost. I am assigning and editing stories about the places, people and new practices that give back. (Sustainable or regenerative tourism is common nomenclature, but so is greenwashing.) Because the big takeaway is not a surprising one.
Everyone deserves to travel. And climate change is terrifying. But while scientists figure out the phenomenon of global warming, as the oft-repeated thought goes, everyone will need to figure out how to adapt to a new climate.
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