Al Gore, Are You Out to Destroy Travel Literature?

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 07.17.07 | 10:46 AM ET

We know you’re out to save the planet, but have you given any thought to how your campaign to reduce emissions will affect travel literature? What’s that? You haven’t really considered it? Well writer Steve Coronella has. “[L]ately I’ve been wondering whether Al Gore has signaled the end of travel writing as we have come to know it,” Coronella writes in the Cape Cod Times. “Will the long-haul literary excursion become an indefensible extravagance in the face of global warming and the accompanying public outcry that we all need to reduce our ‘carbon footprint’ to combat it?”

Coronella cites two of his favorite road-trip books—“McCarthy’s Bar” and “Stolen Season: A Journey Through America and Baseball’s Minor Leagues”—as examples of the kind of books he fears might not be written in an all-green future.

“These two tomes depend, respectively, on an old Volvo with a dodgy exhaust and a reconditioned RV with a dubious MPG ratio,” he writes. “In the current climate, authors Pete McCarthy and David Lamb might even be discouraged from embarking on such irresponsible journeys in the first place. At the very least, they’d be chastised for their recklessness in any reviews that might appear.”

Would they really be chastised? I can’t imagine most critics these days taking them to task for a road trip. But some travel writers are reconsidering the way they travel, as we noted earlier this year.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea from our headline, by the way, Coronella doesn’t accuse Gore of setting out to destroy travel literature. And Coronella points to examples of travel books that wouldn’t likely come under scrutiny for their authors’ environmental impact, such as Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods.”

Meanwhile, when Gore visited San Diego recently for a speaking engagement, local media reported on the details of his contract, which included his travel concerns. How does Gore like to roll when he’s picked up at the airport? Suffice to say, he doesn’t request old Volvos or reconditioned RVs.

“The car will be a sedan, NOT an SUV,” the contract reportedly stated. “In addition, sponsor will make best effort to use [a] hybrid car for Vice-President Gore’s transportation in the city of engagement.”

Photo by World Resources Institute Staff via Flickr, (Creative Commons).