The Arctic Is Melting, Venice Is Sinking: Does That Mean We Shouldn't Visit Them?
The last-chance tourism trend has travelers racing against climate change to tick off boxes on their bucket lists. But the ethics around the these trips are still up for debate
Over the summer of 2024, I worked as a glacier cruise guide in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. During my time there, I met plenty of tourists eager to visit Alaska because they thought it might be their last chance to see glaciers. There were eco-conscious retirees on bucket-list trips. There was the mom who brought along her two young kids and told them that one day they could brag to their future coworkers that they saw Alaskan glaciers, as if they were a dodo or the last white rhino. One young couple confided in me that they booked plane tickets at the last minute to escape a heat wave and noted that “the clock is against us, in more ways than one.”
I too was one of these “last-chance tourists” when I first came to Alaska. I had planned to stay only for a summer and check off the box of seeing a landscape that might not exist in a couple decades. The first time I went out on the water and saw how climate change is ravaging Alaska, I was speechless. I stood on the prow of the ship and watched as a giant chunk of ice began to break away from a glacier. The sound of the extending crack was like a timpani rumbling, crescendoing until the cymbal crash of the ice falling hundreds of feet into the water. My fellow passengers screamed—and filmed videos to share with their friends. We were witnessing something amazing and horrible at the same time.
In her 2024 book, The New Tourist, journalist and author Paige McClanahan described this phenomenon of last-chance tourism: “Through the eyes of a last-chance tourist,” she wrote, “the ephemeral nature of a melting, sinking, or otherwise disappearing place makes the site significantly more alluring.” We’re bombarded with headlines about how the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching, Venice is sinking, and the Arctic is melting, and, for some, that is precisely the reason to visit. These tourists, she writes, “want to get one last glimpse of the moribund patient—quick before he dies on the table.”
Haley Jurena knew she was running out of time to visit the Great Barrier Reef. She worked as a conservation intern on Palmyra, a small island in the Pacific, where she conducted snorkel and vegetation surveys for invasive species and worked to educate visitors on the conservation projects. There, she got an up-close look at the spectacular reefs that are likely to lose the race against climate change. The idea of a “last-chance” trip weighed on her, so in 2023, she planned a vacation through Southeast Asia and Australia to check the Great Barrier Reef off her bucket list. “With Australia being so far away and the reef experiencing so many bleaching events in the last 10 years, I wanted to make sure I saw it before any more damage was done,” Jurena told me. In the end, it was worth it. She saw technicolor coral, clams as big as people, and swam among a shiver of sharks. “It was the best day of my life, hands down,” she said.
The hope, of course, is that people who visit last-chance destinations will be so deeply moved that they’ll be moved to action.
Oregonian Keri S., meanwhile, is on a mission to make it to all seven continents. She prioritized Antarctica, spending 12 days on an Antarctic cruise along with her 91-year-old grandpa, because, she said, “I don’t know what it will look like in 20 to 30 years.” For Keri, the scenery, wildlife, and the thousands of penguins was like “something straight out of a movie.” But as much as she enjoyed the experience, she also felt guilty. “It’s something I wish everyone could experience,” she said, “but if tourism quadruples, it will increase the speed of deterioration. I wish there was a better way to balance it.”
That, of course, is the inherent irony of last-chance tourism: The increased foot traffic of tourists rushing to visit an already fragile place only makes the destination decline faster. There’s also the environmental impact of the trip itself: flights, cars, and boats all emit carbon. According to the UN World Tourism Organization, transport-related emissions will account for 5.3 percent of all man-made emissions by 2030. Then there’s the impact of people—hundreds of thousands of them, walking on these endangered sites and generating over four pounds of waste every day that they’re on vacation. Most tourists are unaware of how much their travels affect a place; to accommodate an influx of travelers, hotels, bars, and restaurants offer more single-use items such as napkins, straws, and miniature toiletries. And oftentimes, even the most respectful and educated travelers have no idea how much litter they are unintentionally leaving behind. Hence why one of the most remote places in the world, Mount Everest, has been called the “world’s highest garbage dump.”
And yet at the same time, the average tourist has good reason to feel rushed. In Alaska, outfitters are already coping with the impacts of glaciers becoming more unstable, less accessible, and more dangerous. Certain areas are now off-limits to guides and visitors because of landslide potential from retreating glaciers. At Seward’s Exit Glacier, tour groups must hike an extra thirty minutes to reach the toe of the glacier; every year that time increases. On the other side of the globe, the Great Barrier Reef’s inner reefs have seen widespread bleaching. Now, touring companies must take visitors farther and farther from the coast to find the luscious underwater paradise that visitors travel across the world to see.
As tourism increases, these “last-chance” destinations have had to quickly adapt. Venice enacted a 5 euros daytripper tourist tax last year, and doubled it this past February. Though the city raised more than 2 million euros last year, many deemed the tax a failure because it didn’t deter visitors. Last year Galapagos Islands doubled its long-time entry fee to $200 over concerns of rising tourist numbers. But tourists may wonder, what’s a few more dollars on top of the trip of a lifetime?
Two years ago Molly Cavanaugh traveled with her family to the Galapagos for “a trip of a lifetime”—and one that she felt wouldn’t be possible for long. “The icecaps are melting, seas acidifying, and forests shrinking, how long will it be until the Galapagos are the next victim of climate change and human expansion?” Cavanaugh asked. She and her family spent much of their time discussing whether their future generations would get to have this experience. Though she doesn’t regret going, the experience changed her. The trip “made me much more aware of my travels and the impact they are having on climate change,” she says. “In recent years, I have reduced flying and driving to try and curb some of my own carbon footprint.”
The voyeurism of last-chance tourism, McClanahan wrote in The New Tourist, could “deliver some tangible benefits—to the tourist herself and to the world at large.” The hope, of course, is that people who visit last-chance destinations will be so deeply moved that they’ll be moved to action. That’s what turned me from a last-chance tourist into a glacier guide. I saw what an incredible privilege it is to bear witness to a place that’s changing, and it imbued me with a sense of responsibility. If people were going to come take pictures of this disappearing landscape, the least I could do was tell them how to take steps to protect it.