See it before it's gone

There is a particular kind of travel advertisement that has become common over the past two decades. It shows a glacier breaking apart into a turquoise sea, or a coral reef glowing beneath a speedboat, and it carries an unspoken message: hurry, because this will not be here for much longer. The message is rarely spelled out in words, but it hardly needs to be. Researchers have a name for the trend, 'last-chance tourism', and it has grown into a sizeable industry, drawing visitors to the Great Barrier Reef, the ice fields of Patagonia and the shrinking glaciers of the Alps.

The appeal is easy to understand. Scarcity has always added value, and few experiences feel as urgent as witnessing something that future generations may know only from photographs. Many travellers insist that seeing a threatened place with their own eyes makes them care more about protecting it, and there is some evidence that good guides can turn a holiday into a lesson that lingers long after the suntan has faded. Local communities, moreover, often depend heavily on these visitors, and in remote regions tourism may be one of the few sources of income that does not involve digging something out of the ground.

And yet the paradox at the heart of the trend is hard to ignore. The long-haul flights needed to reach most of these places are among the most carbon-intensive things an individual can do; a single return trip from Europe to Antarctica can generate more emissions than the average person in many countries produces in a year. The visitors who come to mourn a disappearing glacier, in other words, are contributing in a small but real way to its disappearance. It is not hard to see why critics describe the whole enterprise as disaster tourism with better photographs.

Defenders of last-chance tourism have a ready answer: the emissions of any one traveller are a drop in the ocean, and cancelling a trip will not save a single reef. Strictly speaking, this is true. But it is equally true of almost every individual contribution to a collective problem, which is precisely why such problems are so hard to solve. If everyone reasons in the same way, the sum of countless tiny choices turns out to be anything but tiny. The argument, in short, proves too much: taken to its logical conclusion, it would excuse nearly every form of environmental harm, from leaving the lights on to burning rubbish in the garden.

It does not follow that the only ethical response is to stay at home. Travel can broaden minds and support livelihoods, and a world in which only scientists and the very rich ever saw a glacier would hardly be a fairer one. A more honest approach might involve travelling less often but for longer, choosing destinations that can be reached by land where possible, and treating the full cost of a journey, including its carbon cost, as part of the decision rather than an afterthought. Some operators have begun to cap visitor numbers and fund local conservation, steps that, while modest, at least acknowledge the problem instead of selling it.

What last-chance tourism ultimately reveals is a habit of mind that extends well beyond travel. We are remarkably good at feeling sorrow for what we are losing and remarkably poor at changing the behaviour that causes the loss. Standing on a viewing platform as a slab of ancient ice crashes into the water, many visitors describe a sense of awe tinged with grief. The question worth asking, on the flight home, is whether that grief will translate into anything more lasting than a photograph.