This July, my family will fly to Spain to walk from the northern city of Santiago to the coastal town of Finisterre, considered – albeit inaccurately – the westernmost point of the Iberian Peninsula. Since around the ninth century, the 90-kilometre footpath to this remote cape has served as an extended postscript to the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrimage that has improbably regained its popularity a millennium later. The story goes that, after visiting the bones of the apostle James, pilgrims in the Middle Ages walked on to the beach, where they would pick up a shell as proof of having completed their journey.
Finisterre means “the end of the world,” which feels a bit too on the nose these days. We bought our tickets before Israel and the United States launched their war on Iran, and we certainly never expected to be travelling during a global oil shock. But more frightening than travel interruptions is the strong likelihood of a “Super El Niño summer” that’s now developing in the Pacific Ocean. As Europe bakes under record-breaking temperatures, a key part of our travel prep is mapping contingency plans for extreme heat at each leg of our journey.
In short, global heating is progressing faster than expected, fossil fuel economics are as nakedly violent as ever, and life goes on.
The seduction of doomerism
Doomsayers have always held an important voice in the climate movement, but defeatism and pessimism have gained even more prominence as the oil and gas industry fights gloves-off to retain its influence and revenues. There’s a reason that hope is in demand: things look bleak. Personally, I don’t see doomerism as wrong so much as one-dimensional. It’s true that most people alive today still seriously underestimate the harms that climate change will cause. Yet on the other, much of what’s happening is best expressed by that one key word: change. There’s bad and good and just different, but plenty that’s good.
For example, nature-based solutions are gaining prominence as an effective and cost-efficient countermeasure to carbon pollution and other environmental damages. A system is now being built that will make restoring ecosystems a much more central field of human endeavour. Leveraging nature’s power to heal the earth does mean accounting for it in financial terms – an exercise in commodification that many will balk at. But we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and people need to get paid to do it, so capital has to flow. We can be grateful when it goes to forests and wetlands.
Travelling across a changing landscape
To get to Europe and back, our round-trip carbon dioxide emissions – not including the baby, who’ll ride on our laps – is roughly two tonnes, which is about what we’d pollute on a drive from our home in Montreal to Vancouver and back. For that quantity of emissions, I can buy decent carbon offsets from tree-planting projects for as little as $20. I could even contribute to projects that support sustainable aviation fuels, though it’s hard to see a viable path for air travel to switch to lower-carbon fuels. Carbon reduction programs that involve biofuels have proven particularly problematic, such as in Brazil, where criminal networks of “carbon cowboys” are exploiting the state-run system. When greenwashing overlaps so closely with climate urgency, every path forward lies somewhere between skepticism and pragmatism.
The new edition of the magazine, out this week, is themed on travel and tourism. In it, our writers examine different ways that climate change is altering how we move around and explore. Some are visiting glaciers before they disappear; some are using their holidays to remove trash from the environment. Some are just picking different destinations: cooler climes instead of the traditional equatorial getaways. Humans aren’t the only ones changing our trajectories. Other species are shifting, too, often toward the poles, like trees, bacteria and even great white sharks.
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The most important climate migrations are not for pleasure or discovery. Tens of millions of people are already leaving their homes, and the rate of displacement could rise to hundreds of millions by mid-century. In more targeted – and certainly privileged – fashion, digital nomads are also leaving their mark on territories and exposing some of the contradictions that belie our times.
Finisterre in Spain is not the end of the world, though people in Europe used to think it was. Climate change is not the end of the world, either. Nor is it simply a physical description of how our planetary ecosystem is evolving in response to a massive, human-caused carbon explosion. Climate change is more like a calling to adjust, adapt and grow. Like a long walk across an unfamiliar landscape, we cannot predict exactly how it will unfold. But it will surely teach us resilience. To that end, we may permit ourselves a sense of humour, a good dose of curiosity, and maybe even a taste for adventure on the journey.
Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. He lives in Montreal.
