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Elite Environmental Aesthetics: Placing Nature in a Changing Climate

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. We use the term “liberal elite” throughout the paper to refer broadly to high status, highly educated individuals whose worldview affirms notions like diversity, equity, and especially environmentalism.

  2. Prior to training this model, we cleaned the text using standard pre-processing procedures including tokenizing each article and converting it to lower case. We then compiled a “term co-occurrence” matrix and trained our model using the “GloVe” algorithm as implemented by the R package {text2vec}.

  3. We accessed the articles for this corpus using the Common Crawl web archive.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Sociological Association’s 2021 annual meeting. The authors would like to thank Clayton Childress, Caleb Scoville, Dana Kornberg, Dustin Stoltz, Marshall Taylor, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback.

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Author notes

  1. Andrew McCumber and Adam Davis have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University, 685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Andrew McCumber

  2. Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, 1605 Tilia Street, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Adam Davis

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Correspondence to Andrew McCumber.

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Appendices

Appendix A

See Tables 6 and 7.

Table 6 Correlation Table for CMD Sensitivity Analysis
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Table 7 Word vectors with the closest cosine similarity to our composite concept for "nature."
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Appendix B

See Figs. 9 and 10.

Fig. 9
figure 9

Correlations of model coefficients at different bandwidths

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Fig. 10
figure 10

Cross-validation scores for both models at different bandwidths

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McCumber, A., Davis, A. Elite Environmental Aesthetics: Placing Nature in a Changing Climate. Am J Cult Sociol 12, 53–84 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-022-00179-w

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