ABSTRACT
The chapter explores a new trend in the cultural registers of travel, one that refashions local and/or regional environments as imaginaries of identity. This refashioning commences with the creation of imaginaria of natural environments, themed locations pleasing to the prospective visitor’s gaze, which are increasingly more mediated on digital and audio-visual platforms. The chapter “maps” three key competing arguments concerning the role of these imaginaria in contemporary contexts of global crisis, especially those induced by climate change: as money-making enterprises; as ways to turn visitors into pilgrims of sites at risk of extinction due to impending planetary disaster; and as opportunities for the production of new blended forms of activism, which question anthropocentric philosophies of travel and agency. As an aggregate of competing approaches to environmental imaginaria advocated by publics, scholars and scientists, these arguments form a “critical zone”. In this zone, travel, tourism and multi-platform mediation are not taken-for-granted socio-cultural institutions, but ways in which different groups articulate useful and valuable activities for planetary citizens in the Anthropocene.
