Fifth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

The late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries have witnessed a rapid expansion of the global tourist industry. Annual travel is projected to reach 2 billion people by the year 2030, doubling world visitations since 2010 (UNWTO 2019). One of the fastest growing sectors of the global economy, travel and tourism accounts for $8 trillion (U.S. dollars) or 10% of global GDP (WTTC 2018). Simultaneous to this tourism growth are profound changes to the Earth’s climate, proverbially denoted as global warming or climate change (IPCC 2018). Human-induced effects on the planet’s geo-climate have become so pronounced that a new geological epoch has been posited to acknowledge this fact – the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002). This paper merges global tourism and anthropogenic climate change under the rubric of dark tourism. Dark or “thanatourism” signifies an emergent academic literature focused on tourism related to death, suffering, atrocity, or disaster (Foley and Lennon 1996; Lennon and Foley 2000). Heretofore, this relationship between travel and the desire to encounter death has focused primarily on human-to-human death-related historical events. This paper challenges the scope of dark tourism by expanding our understanding to include the consumption of human-driven environmental degradation. Using current and archival data from the UN World Tourist Organization, expeditionary brochures, and cruise-line web-marketing, the shifting patterns in tourist industry activity related with dark tourism – namely the opening-up of the Arctic and Antarctic regions – is demonstrated. In short, the arctic regions are open for business – just as they disappear.