Writing Travel in the Anthropocene:Disastrous Life at the End of the Arctic

• Published in: Studies in Travel Writing
• Main Author: Graulund, Rune
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: arctic; anthropocene; travel; travel writing; disaster; globalisation; Arctic; Pacific; Faraway
• Online Access: https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/da/publications/956cd117-1baa-4d2e-a497-e0f3af2d7c03; https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2016.1216248; http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13645145.2016.1216248?journalCode=rstw20

Travel writing critics have proclaimed the end of travel since at least the beginning of the 20th Century. Yet the global age of the 21st century presents us with a range a problems that challenge the notion of travel in manners that neither travellers, travel writers, nor travel writing critics could have imagined just a century ago. Globalisation and increased mobility, whether it is that of the privileged few who can travel on holiday on jet airplanes, or that of the immigrant labourer seeking employment by crossing borders on foot, have meant millions (if not indeed billions) are constantly on the move. Similarly, an increase in communication technologies and digital media has made the availability of the exotic and the faraway increasingly accessible, to the degree that such terms have been hollowed out almost entirely. Last but not least, we seem now to be living in what has been called the Anthropocene - which is to say an age in which nowhere, not the furthest reachest of the stratosphere nor the lowest point in the marine abyss, are untouched by the activities and detritus of humankind. The essay will give a short overview of the manner in which the notion of 'travel' has been contested by a rapid increase in the mobility of people, goods and information, but primarily examine the impact of the Anthropocene on the notion of travel. For in a world in which the peak of Mount Everest is littered with toilet paper and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is potentially twice the size of the US, where do we locate travel? Specifically, the essay will examine the polar region as an indicator region of the impact of the Anthropocene by looking at a range of early 20th Century arctic travel writing texts and hold them in comparison to late 20th and early 21st Century versions.