2022, climate, book promo

Hello subscribers!

Last Thursday I uploaded a new full-length blog post, the first of this year, and it’s simply entitled “into 2022”. The arrival of this year reminded me of the dark Sci-Fi movie “Soylent Green”, because that is set in 2022 and I watched the German version for the first time in ca. 1978 as a teenager. In German, the title even states this year: “... Jahr 2022 … die überleben wollen ...” – as you can see in the film poster image above (taken from this source). That title would translate as “... Year 2022 … those who want to survive ...”. Back in the 1970s it was still rather common in Germany to give foreign movies dubbed into German new titles rather than translate the original title, and this is a (rather feeble) example. Big movies are still dubbed into German, but these days the original title is more often than not retained.

But anyway, the memory of that eco-dystopian movie, which was partly inspired by the projections of climate change and the “Limits to Growth” study by the Club of Rome in 1972, brought me to the question: in what ways does this topic play a role, if any at all, in Dark Tourism. The answer is: so far not much, as DT is mostly concerned with dark pasts rather than the future. But there are exceptions, most notably shrinking glaciers, where the topic is commodified for visiting tourists. The post gives a few examples from Norway, Austria and Switzerland and also mentions the unique climate exhibition that is part of the Norsk Bremuseum in Fjaerland, Norway. Take a look.
  

The same day I also uploaded a second blog post, a short one, with two functions, firstly to mark the anniversary of the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol in Washington D.C., and secondly to alert readers to this:
  

Good news on the book promo front! On Wednesday, a rather long feature about my book appeared on the Mail Online website in its travel section. The site is the digital counterpart to the Daily Mail tabloid newspaper in Britain. I know that for many a Brit this will be cause for raised eyebrows, to say the least, because that paper’s reputation isn’t the best. But for all its flaws, when it comes to the topic of dark tourism, it actually has a track record of comparatively good coverage. So I wasn’t too surprised when I found that it’s the Mail that is the first major media outlet to publish a full feature about my book. The text of the article may be a bit shoddily patched together, consisting mostly of quotes from the book stitched together a bit clumsily in places, but it features two dozen photos from the book too, and so it must be good publicity.
  

Furthermore I have at least two interviews coming up, with smaller, more specialist platforms, but these are to also lead to features about the book. And I also have two TV interviews coming up (both done remotely, of course). So the promo work continues. I will provide links as and when these pieces appear.
  

Finally I have to apologize for the wrong date given in last week’s newsletter. A classic error, I changed the year but forgot to change the month, so it said “2 December 2022”. Please excuse that involuntary bit of time travel. The joke is that I noticed the error after I had composed the newsletter and changed it, but that change did not feed through to the auto-generated header in the actual newsletters sent out. So, oddly, it is correct on my computer in the back-end, but you got the newsletters with the wrong date. I’ll try to be more thorough in my proofreading before I upload and send Newsletters in the future.
  

But so much for this time.

Have a good week – and stay safe!

Best,

Peter