Today I’m celebrating the lovely new cover on my travel memoir, Foreign Correspondences: A Traveller’s Tales—and reflecting on the increasingly fraught idea of travel in a climate-changed world. 

I’ve got a new novel out this fall. Far Creek Road is set in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and will be marketed as historical fiction. Apparently the cut-off line for the genre is a book set 60 or more years in the past. It will be a long while before my travels in Foreign Correspondences are that far gone, but these days there’s an asterisk beside the type of travelling I write about here, arriving home from a Cuban holiday one day and flying out to Portugal two days later, off to research a book.

We’re increasingly aware these days that flying is environmentally suspect, and I can’t help thinking about the time the book will become a memoir of what we used to do, a piece of fond nostalgia as we change our travelling habits to reduce our carbon footprints.

That’s probably not a bad thing in global terms. But what about the cost to ourselves? What will we lose? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself as I reissue the book, which you can get here.  

Stories about trips I’ve made populate Foreign Correspondences: visits to the Amazon and Labrador, to the Badlands of Alberta and the towers of Tokyo, where I was mesmerized by a very stubborn crow. There was the time I moved to Mexico City a few days before a major earthquake, and lived through the aftermath of a disaster in which at least 10,000 people were killed. Then there was the week some friends and I rode a freak bus through Nepal with a group of Tibetan monks, and one of the monks cured me.

These are separate trips starting from when I was very young, yet all of them are linked by my exploration of the idea of foreignness, of being foreign, as I searched for what my immigrant grandmothers might have felt when they first arrived in Canada. 

I took all these trips before Greta Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic in a solar-powered boat, and flight shame, flygskam, became a thing in Sweden, leading to the spread of environmental protests across Europe. It was well before the pandemic, too. Now, friends of mine are declaring the pandemic over–maybe–and bashing off to all sorts of places with pent-up wanderlust. The ones in England are doing more of their travelling by rail, which is less of a sacrifice when two hours and 16 minutes on the Eurostar gets you from London to Paris, while the same amount of time on Via Rail will get you from Toronto to Kingston, barring delays. (Not that I have anything against Kingston.) Canadian friends have been flying further afield to go hiking in the Cotswolds, visit religious sites in Israel, climb Etna in Italy and gorge on Gaudi’s architecture in Barcelona. A Brazilian friend is flying up from Rio to drive across B.C.—and good on them all.

But. We all know that wildfires are sweeping across Alberta, Nova Scotia and Quebec. The air quality across much of the country is so dodgy we’re back to wearing masks, and the pollution levels will likely remain dangerously high for much of the summer. Meanwhile an article in the newspapers recently advised Canadians to say goodbye to cheap California lettuce because of the droughts down south.

Climate change has come upon us much more rapidly than expected, with the 1.5 degree rise in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels now expected in the 2030s, along with all the increasingly-powerful typhoons, droughts and wildfires this will spawn. I follow the mantra of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, even while knowing that my carefully separated-out plastics usually end up in landfills, and that it doesn’t matter too much of a damn what one climate-anxious individual does. It’s almost entirely corporate short-sightedness and greed that’s ruining the climate. Yet carbon pollution from air travel is a significant factor, and one that raises questions about the choices we make, none of them simple. 

When tourism to Mexican coastal resorts dried up during the pandemic, many of the unemployed hotel workers moved inland and started cutting down trees. They did major damage to forests–the lungs of our planet–to get fuel for their cooking fires. How can you blame them? Cut off tourism too suddenly and the developing world suffers. The rich don’t, of course, but the poor always do.

I hope there’s some hope. The Biden administration in the U.S. has been pointing out quite effectively to the America business community that building a new environmental infrastructure—everything from electric cars to wind turbines to revamped rail lines—opens up many new opportunities for obscene corporate profit. It’s possible that greed, which has nearly destroyed our planet, might play a role in saving it.

Yet I think we’re going to be travelling less in the future, for economic reasons if nothing else. I set out to write my travel memoir to explore the concept of foreignness. But the way the world is going, it ends up implicitly posing that other question: If we stop travelling as much, what are we going to lose?

I travelled in search of adventure, it’s true. But also connection and understanding. We’ve recently learned how much harder it is to connect on zoom calls than it is when we work in an office or classroom. The unexpected is tamped down., the eccentric discouraged. And when they’re gone, I think we’ve lost an opportunity to grow.

Maybe I’m wrong. Read the book and tell me if you think so. I’ve commissioned new covers for several of my backlist books to roll out over the coming months. I thought I’d get all my books looking glossy before my new novel, Far Creek Road, is published this fall, and to rethink what they say.

Here’s another link to Foreign Correspondences. Enjoy.