Elite Environmental Aesthetics: Placing Nature in a Changing Climate

What does it mean to escape to nature in a changing climate? We investigate the properties that make a place resonant with ideas of “nature,” particularly for liberal elite vacationers consuming place through travel. By analyzing over 10,000 articles from the New York Times’s Travel section spanning 2000–2019 using a novel combination of computational text analysis and spatial analysis, we address two questions: (1) has the increased severity and prominence in public discourse of climate change during the past two decades affected how nature is discussed in travel journalism? And (2) how have the physical criteria that lead travel journalists to associate particular places with “nature” changed during this period? Our findings suggest that climate change is becoming a bigger factor in how travel writers imagine nature and also that the criteria of the “elite environmental aesthetics” that make for authentic nature tourism reflect an increasing predilection for physical extremes, especially cold climates. We interpret this change as appealing to broader trends in liberal elite consumption in two ways. First, these destinations’ remoteness lends them to narratives of moral accomplishment. Second, amid concern of a warming planet, colder places offer a more authentic nature tourism experience by virtue of their unique precarity to environmental destruction.