Many accounts of climate change depict disasters striking faraway
places: melting ice caps, fearsome hurricanes, all-consuming fires. How
can seeing the consequences of human impacts up close help us grasp how
global warming affects us and our neighbors? This book is a travelogue
that spotlights what a changing climate looks like on the local
level-for wherever local happens to be.
Michael M. Gunter, Jr. takes readers around the United States to bear
witness to the many faces of the climate crisis. He argues that
conscientious travel broadens understanding of climate change and makes
its dangers concrete and immediate. Vivid vignettes explore the
consequences for people and communities: sea level rise in Virginia,
floods sweeping inland in Tennessee, Maine lobsters migrating away from
American territorial waters, and imperiled ecosystems in national parks,
from Alaskan permafrost to the Florida Keys. But Gunter finds inspiring
initiatives to mitigate and adapt to these threats, including wind
turbines in a tiny Texas town, green building construction in Kansas,
and walkable urbanism in Portland, Oregon. These projects are already
making a difference-and they underscore the importance of local action.
Drawing on interviews with government officials, industry leaders, and
alternative energy activists, Climate Travels emphasizes direct personal
experience and the centrality of environmental justice. Showing how
travel can help bring the reality of climate change home, it offers
readers a hopeful message about how to take action on the local level
themselves.
