In this letter, addressed to the collective of geographers, the EARTH is begging them to quickly rise up to the unprecedented and urgent challenges that 'the EARTH' and 'them humans' face in this extraordinary grave planetary moment of the climate emergency. With the help of a human ghostwriter, the EARTH accuses geographers for having committed a series of mis-translations, notably by having reduced the EARTH to an extensive 'earth surface' in wait for other agencies like 'Nature', 'Space', 'the Social', 'Culture', 'the Environment', to provide the action. According to the EARTH, this is one of the worst cartographic crimes ever committed in the discipline of geography. Consequently, the EARTH asks geographers to fundamentally reconsider an un-earthly and de-geographized onto-epistemological direction that their discipline generally has taken. Given that the Earth now has evolved into a new kind of geo-being in the Anthropocene, and because the planetary climate emergency means that Terra Oikos is on fire, geographers need to update and revitalize their obsolete geo-ontological conceptual apparatus They must try and save as much, and as fast, as they possibly can, including an EARTH who is in a dire condition and about to leave the Holocene.

In a lifelong journey of self-conscious reevaluations the Swedish geographer Gunnar Olsson has pursued his core theme of human interaction in search of its geographical essences. Marked by a refusal to limit his geography to the study of visible things, Olsson has developed an original yet consistent cartography of how humans find their way into the unknown by relying on cultural maps which treats the invisible as if it were visible. What unfolds in his geography is an understanding of modern reason as a form of cartographical reason founded on a taken-for-granted geometric coordinate net of lines, points, and planes. Preceding a critique also of his own approach, he recognizes that this is also a reason which is becoming increasingly outdated, although it is likely to continue to haunt us as well as human geography.

The Anthropocene originates from natural science, but the concept has during a relatively short period of time managed to spread into other domains. As this volume shows, the time has now also come to the field of tourism studies. In my understanding, this evolving ‘Anthropocene turn’ across the sciences and the humanities is a set of mapping expeditions which have in common that they explore assumptions and consequences of earthly life and existence under the spell of geological forces, earthly boundaries and planetary limits. The quest for the map-maker is thus to decipher what the Anthropocene means, to which phenomena and state of affairs it refers, and to identify potential implications. The particular query to be addressed here is how tourism could enter and find a place in the grand Anthropocene and planetary scheme of things. Consequently, the exploratory aim of this chapter is to tentatively map out some of the issues and challenges that the concept of the Anthropocene poses for the theorization of tourism.

Enligt både vetenskapen och världssamfundet (FN) befinner vi oss i ett planetärt klimat- och ekologiskt nödläge. I skuggan av smältande glaciärer och otillräckliga klimatåtgärder står vi inför en ny människa och en ny Jord. I det följande skall jag ta upp några aspekter av hur denna planetära utveckling utmanar grundläggande föreställningar och utgångspunkter i geografiämnet.

Tre exempel som visar på att rymdfarten utgör ett väsentligt område även för samhällsvetenskap.

Denna bok har formen av en antologi och är en dokumentation av vad som skett sedan 1990 inom kulturgeografisk utbildning och forskning vid högskolan och sedermera universitetet i Karlstad, men framförallt är den också en fyllig provkarta på den forskning som idag bedrivs vid ämnet. Boken omfattar nitton artiklar i vilka sammantaget sjutton författare medverkar. De inledande artiklarna har karaktären av krönikor över ämnets utveckling, över framlagda doktorsavhandlingar, över det internationella forskningssamarbetet inom det s.k. PIMA-nätverket och över den regionala utvecklingen i Värmland. De därpå följande artiklarna behandlar ett brett spektrum av kulturgeografiska forskningsfält och ämnesvetenskapliga reflektioner och speglar därmed den mångfald av forskningsinriktningar och forskningsansatser som finns representerade bland kulturgeograferna i Karlstad. I den avslutande artikeln riktas blickarna och tankarna framåt mot det som kan komma ut av nuet.

Denna bok har formen av en antologi och är en dokumentation av vad som skett sedan 1990 inom kulturgeografisk utbildning och forskning vid högskolan och sedermera universitetet i Karlstad, men framförallt är den också en fyllig provkarta på den forskning som idag bedrivs vid ämnet. Boken omfattar nitton artiklar i vilka sammantaget sjutton författare medverkar. De inledande artiklarna har karaktären av krönikor över ämnets utveckling, över framlagda doktorsavhandlingar, över det internationella forskningssamarbetet inom det s.k. PIMA-nätverket och över den regionala utvecklingen i Värmland. De därpå följande artiklarna behandlar ett brett spektrum av kulturgeografiska forskningsfält och ämnesvetenskapliga reflektioner och speglar därmed den mångfald av forskningsinriktningar och forskningsansatser som finns representerade bland kulturgeograferna i Karlstad. I den avslutande artikeln riktas blickarna och tankarna framåt mot det som kan komma ut av nuet.

Time-geography is a descriptive and analytical geographical framework initially developed in the late 1960s and the early 1970s by the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand (1916–2004). Time-geography consists of a conceptual apparatus and a graphic notation system by which the time-spatial embeddedness and couplings of human and nonhuman geographical beings and their corporeal (material) geographical conditions for existence can be mapped and investigated.

Time-geography is founded on a matter-realistic ontology that explicitly recognizes the material, corporeal nature of geographical beings and their geographical settings as demarcated somewhere on the Earth's surface. Reflected in its notation system, the methodology of time-geography is guided by the principle of always simultaneously keeping track of both spatial and temporal features of material geographical events.

Time-geography has been applied in numerous areas in human geography, as well as in a large number of studies in a variety of different disciplinary settings. As a research program on its own, time-geography has increased the conceptual and empirical knowledge of time-space conditions of and for geographical beings and their geographical existences.

Denna bok har formen av en antologi och är en dokumentation av vad som skett sedan 1990 inom kulturgeografisk utbildning och forskning vid högskolan och sedermera universitetet i Karlstad, men framförallt är den också en fyllig provkarta på den forskning som idag bedrivs vid ämnet. Boken omfattar nitton artiklar i vilka sammantaget sjutton författare medverkar. De inledande artiklarna har karaktären av krönikor över ämnets utveckling, över framlagda doktorsavhandlingar, över det internationella forskningssamarbetet inom det s.k. PIMA-nätverket och över den regionala utvecklingen i Värmland. De därpå följande artiklarna behandlar ett brett spektrum av kulturgeografiska forskningsfält och ämnesvetenskapliga reflektioner och speglar därmed den mångfald av forskningsinriktningar och forskningsansatser som finns representerade bland kulturgeograferna i Karlstad. I den avslutande artikeln riktas blickarna och tankarna framåt mot det som kan komma ut av nuet.

The concept of the Anthropocene includes the spontaneous minima moralia of the current age. It implies concern regarding the cohabitation of the citizens of the Earth in human and non-human form. It calls upon us to cooperate in the network of simple and higher-level life circles, in which the actors of today’s world generate their being in the modes of co-immunity.

Abstract The Anthropocene is a proposed term for a new phase in the history of both humanity and the Earth - a geological epoch in which their respective forces intertwine on a planetary scale. As a concept, the Anthropocene has recently gained momentum also in the humanities and the social sciences, but not yet in Tourism Studies. The aim of this paper is to introduce the concept of the Anthropocene to Tourism Studies and to explore and outline scientific, political, and ethical challenges. In the context of the Anthropocene, tourism becomes a geophysical force censoriously interrelated with the capacity of the Earth to sustain the human species.

This book brings the field of tourism into dialogue with what is captured under the varied notions of the Anthropocene. It explores issues and challenges which the Anthropocene may pose for tourism, and it offers significant insights into how it might reframe conceptual and empirical undertakings in tourism research. Furthermore, through the lens of the Anthropocene this book also spurs thinking of the role of tourism in relation to sustainable development, planetary boundaries, ethics (and what is framed as geo-ethics) and refocused tourism theory to make sense of tourism’s earthly entanglements and thinking tourism beyond Nature-Society. The multidisciplinary nature of the material will appeal to a broad academic audience, such as those working in tourism, geography, anthropology and sociology.

Tourism is inherently an earthly business, whether it is conceptualized in terms of the spatial movement of people to and from destinations or as an all-embracing ubiquitous part of contemporary social life; tourism always takes place on Earth. As self-evident as this premise is, its implications have nevertheless so far rarely been explicitly considered. Merely to place tourism and the tourist squarely on the Earth offers nothing more than traditional tourism geography. In this chaptera tourism geography research agenda is outlined around tourism as an earthly endeavour, premised upon a recognition that humans are all co-extensive with the planet Earth in a new geological era called the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene entails the prospect of facing profound changes in the global political, economic, environmental and social order, along with a widerange of possible consequences for individuals, includingin the domain of tourism. The research agenda outlined entails a need for developing alternative ways of assembling for example Nature, Society, the tourist and tourism. Building on the on-going theorization of the Anthropocene, the agenda is to develop a science and a politics for re-assembling those collectives of humans and non-humans. This assembling is about developing responsibilities and attuning to more than human rhythms of life as afforded to those travelling. These affordances and tourism encounters inform storytelling which allows for a minimal geo-ethics for the Anthropocene. One of the absolutely most central, and difficult, of issues for that political and scientific assembling and composing of collectives is about tourism in relation to our common future on the Earth.

Given that tourism is an “earthly business”, why is it that the Earth rarely explicitly appears in tourism studies and tourismtheory? In an attempt to grapple with this paradox, this paper seeks to contribute to a conceptual re-cognition of the Earth in tourismtheory by probing some theoretical obstacles and possibilities. The paper demonstrates how the Earth has been conceptually erased in tourismtheory by a privileging of the mapping of tourism and tourists onto the reference plane of the social. As an alternative the paper seeks to provide a geo-philosophically informed conceptualisation of the Earth as a primary plane of reference of which tourism is a particular form of de/re-territorialisation.

Hotel Anthropocene is a new hotel advertised as a luxury all-inclusive resort. It was until recently operated under the name of ´Hotel Holocene´, but due to the widespread attention the Anthropocene has received the new owners decided to change its name. The day at the Hotel Anthropocene, written in the form of fiction, renders different ways of knowing, feeling, sensing, conceptualizing, and practising real time ecological mutation. The guests are increasingly dissatisfied and they gradually realise that something is terribly wrong with the hotel. The dialogues and heated discussions take place in the hotel lobby, corridors, rooms, the pool-bar, the restaurant, the common room, and they disclose cognitive and emotional dissonances in relation to the future.

The chapter invites the reader to critically reflect upon tourism futures in relation to contemporary climate change and planetary ethics. It disrupts the idea of touristic bubbles without entanglements and responsibility with the ongoing crisis. The chapter also draws attention to a fundamental paradox of tourism, where search for wellbeing and hedonistic joy simultaneously contribute to accelerating climate change. The story at the hotel problematizes the conceptualization and practices of a ‘common future’, especially the future as a utopian time that lies ahead. Consequently, towards the end, the guests begin to realise that there is, unfortunately, no check-out from this hotel.

The story of Hotel Anthropocene also raises questions about our responsibilities as researchers and teachers when using fiction as method for producing and sharing knowledge of our current and future planetary situation in the Anthropocene. How do different kinds of stories tune us in, or out? What kinds of storytelling and story listening should we engage in if we wish to contribute to a more caring, sustainable, hospitable and peaceful co-existence in our one and only common “hotel” when cast in dire predictions of its planetary future?