Title after all
Amtrak Tourism: Trains, Cities, and Sustainability
What prompted the concept for the course?
As a geographer, I wished to supply a summer time examine overseas program on sustainability. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t make sense to design a sustainability program that features flying overseas because of planes’ extreme carbon footprint. Alternatively, Amtrak’s diesel-powered trains reduce per person carbon dioxide emissions by 40% in contrast with flying.
Apart from an environmental lens, I additionally wished college students to study sustainability from financial and social views. Throughout this system, college students use solely public transit, keep in domestically owned lodgings, and eat at domestically sourced eating places.
Mix my love of Amtrak with a need to get college students out of the classroom, and we discovered ourselves driving throughout the nation to study sustainable tourism, landscapes, and concrete and regional planning.
What does the course discover?
Over the course of three weeks, college students go to six areas, with in a single day prepare rides between every starting from 16 to 24 hours. The times are damaged up into classes on observing panorama and land use, sustainable tourism, and concrete deindustrialization, with at the least an hour of sophistication time on every prepare journey.
Locations function dwelling laboratories for our college students. Lessons in some cities, akin to Galesburg, Illinois, or Sacramento, California, lean extra closely on exploring the cities’ industrial histories, often known as industrial heritage. In cities akin to Portland, Oregon, or Glenwood Springs, Colorado, which expertise giant influxes of tourists yearly, we focus extra on tourism and planning.
Why is that this course related now?
The federal authorities is investing billions of {dollars} to create a “new era of rail” in the USA.
The course appeals to millennial and Gen Z college students who’re increasingly concerned about the climate crisis and continued carbon emissions. The expertise offers college students real-world examples of how they’ll make a distinction, akin to via participating with public officers and altering small habits in how they journey.
What’s a important lesson from the course?
Tourism is not going to save a neighborhood.
Whereas staying in Glenwood Springs in Colorado, college students full an task about “vacation spot tourism”—when tourism turns into the first driver or financial base of a area. College students journey the nation’s solely fast rural bus transit techniques “up valley” to Aspen. On the bus, they arrive to grasp what they’ve learn within the The Slums of Aspen, a guide about how the elite ski city handed a decision that pushed out their immigrant employees, who reside farther and farther “down valley” because of gentrification however nonetheless work in Aspen.
As soon as college students arrive in Aspen—through the offseason, in Could—they discover a polished ghost city stuffed with Prada, Dior, and different high-end style shops and extremely manicured metropolis parks. After returning to Glenwood Springs, they replicate on the variations between the cities when it comes to housing prices, sustainability, and tourism labor. Additionally they stroll away with a extra important eye towards water entry, the seasonality of labor, public transportation availability, and Indigenous rights in our school’s personal space—the Keweenaw Peninsula.
What supplies does the course function?
College students learn journalist James McCommons’s Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service, which offers each historic and fascinating context organized by route and vacation spot.
With about 100 hours aboard Amtrak trains, I additionally assign college students podcasts akin to 99% Invisible and Working Class History. I typically see college students on the prepare listening to podcasts with their headphones and writing journal entries which are due each time we arrive at a brand new resort.
What is going to the course put together college students to do?
After ending this course, the scholars—who’re predominantly from rural areas in Michigan—have a greater understanding of how and why they’ll use public transportation of their every day lives and travels. Additionally they have a higher understanding of the optimistic and detrimental impacts of tourism on a spot, significantly in postindustrial communities, and the way they are often extra intentional vacationers themselves. In the end, they find out how they, as vacationers and neighborhood members, can contribute to a extra sustainable and equitable future.
Mark Alan Rhodes II is an assistant professor of geography at Michigan Technological University.
This text is republished from The Conversation beneath a Artistic Commons license. Learn the original article.
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