How has tourism and writing about travel contributed to the ecological degradation of the planet?How does language influence perception and our relationship to the more-than-human world?
Michael Cronin is an Irish academic specialist in culture, travel literature, translation studies, and the Irish language. He has taught in universities in France and Ireland and has held visiting research fellowships to universities in Canada, Belgium, Peru, France, and Egypt. He's a fellow of Trinity College Dublin, an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a senior researcher in the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. He is the current holder of the Chair of French (est. 1776) at TCD. He is the author of Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene, Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene, and other books.
In the North Pacific, Midway Island, one of the most remote islands in the world, lies at the centre of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge concentration of plastic litter covering a surface that is almost three times the size of France. Islands that formerly offered visions of unexampled environmental plenty are now witness to unparalleled ecological devastation. Travelling there now is less about establishing an inventory of delight than drawing up a catalogue of loss. More specifically, is there a sense in which the inventories of delight have prefigured the catalogues of loss? How have travel and writing about travel contributed to the ecological degradation of the planet? Conversely, what role has travel writing played in making readers aware of the climate emergency and the need to promote sustainable forms of engagement with a planet in crisis? To begin to answer these questions we need to reflect on how travellers’ perceptions of the environment have changed over the centuries.
–Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Can you elaborate on how the concept of the Anthropocene, how that impacts our relationship to travel, and our understanding of translation?
MICHAEL CRONIN
The Judeo-Christian idea is of Adam in the Garden of Eden, where he's given dominion over all things on the Earth, including plants and animals, and he is in a superior position, and the living world is subordinate to him. And you have this idea of a kind of divine approval for this hierarchy. Then, in the 17th century, Descartes comes along, and he takes the idea from Aristotle that what humans have is the capacity to reason, and they have the capacity to speak. And that is what fundamentally distinguishes humans from other animals is they have the capacity to speak, and they have capacity to speak a particular kind of language that allows us to express the results of a rational thinking, and all of that's very much concentrated in the mind.
So, what's happening, of course, is that alongside this, we find that the idea of a kind of inert world that is simply there for our pleasure, enjoyment, and exploitation has proved to be catastrophically mistaken because we see it with flooding, we see it with forest fires. We see it with acidification of the oceans. We see it with the continuing rise in temperatures that the world itself, the more-than-human world is fighting back. It has taken on its own agency. And therefore, the idea of a pyramid, a hierarchy, is no longer operative.
One of the things that translators have had to think about for centuries is how do you communicate across radical forms of difference? For me, one of the challenges in a lot of various post-humanist philosophies was that you could not take relationality for granted. It's not going to happen magically. That, if we're going to rethink how we relate in a more horizontal way to the more-than-human world, then we have to think very, very hard about how we're going to do that communication, how we're going to cope with radical difference.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
You’ve said you’ve found French to be an extremely powerful language insofar as it allows you to access new bodies of thought and literature and gave you a new way of thinking and then opened up conceptual terms.
CRONIN
The French language did two things. One, it provided me with access to a philosophical and intellectual tradition that was very different from the ones in English or Irish. Secondly, the more I immersed myself in the language, the easier it was for me to think more conceptually about the world and develop a particular kind of analytic or intellectual skill that would not have been available to someone else in English.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Could you share some of your personal memories from childhood of the beauty and wonder of the natural world?
CRONIN
I grew up in the South of the city. I grew up near what I call the Dublin Mountains, the Dublin Wicklow Mountains. And so I spent a great deal of my teenage years, in particular, cycling through these mountains, and they're quite deserted. You get these remarkable kind of skies, cloud formations, and then what happens after the rain, when the sun comes out. So it was intensely dramatic; it was an intensely theatrical landscape. So that's what I remember vividly. It was the kind of drama of this landscape and this world. And I think that sense of wonder and just fascination and awe at the possibilities of this world, this seems to me the most valuable thing of all that any educational system can communicate.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
As you reflect on the future and education, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?
CRONIN
And I think this is what students should be demanding, rather than this kind of contemporary obsession with skills, which is always a doomed project because the world is changing so rapidly that the kinds of skill sets are almost invariably obsolete. What I think will stay with you for an entire lifetime is to be equipped with the capacity and the tools to find wonder in the world.
And that is to find a language for that world, which is supplied through a folk tale, mythology, literature, poetry, and song. And then to also to have the kind of knowledge basis. I still think we suffer from this terrible division between the humanities and the sciences. These two worlds are sundered. I think we need to bring them together. Anybody who has for a moment studied the operations of photosynthesis in a plan or capillary action in trees is just astonished by the miracle of these operations. So I think we need to infuse a kind of a syncretic knowledge, but that would have as its central or its core point of value a rediscovery of wonder in the world. And of course, a world that you wonder at is a world that you cherish and a world that you cherish is a world that you want to preserve. And that, I think, is our only hope.
