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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of travel and tourism industry in climate change and to consider the implications of climate change for the travel and tourism industry.

The paper outlines why the Caribbean is currently the most tourism‐dependent region in the world and profiles the reasons why the island economies of the Caribbean are so vulnerable to climate change.

The paper advocates action based on the available evidence and the fact that most of the essential infrastructure for tourism is located at or near the shoreline, in areas that will be vulnerable to sea‐level rise and storm surge. This combination of dependency and vulnerability makes the Caribbean a particularly pertinent and poignant example of how countries can come to rely on an industry that might prove to contain the seed of not only its own destruction, but also that of some vulnerable host economies.

This paper provides a comprehensive summary of the key evidence relating to the growing threat of climate change to the Caribbean.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the climate change implications for both rainfall and saline intrusion in ground water, which could directly threaten both the tourism industry and other local livelihoods in the Caribbean. Water shortages will be particularly critical in the locations that are already water‐stressed; at or near the limits of their available supplies.

The paper focuses on Barbados as the island exhibits four critical factors that make it particularly sensitive and potentially vulnerable to water shortages. Barbados is relatively small and flat, and has limited water flow. Second, it is the most densely populated country in the Caribbean. Third, the economy is primarily driven by tourism, and has prospered as a result; Fourth, Barbados is characterized as “absolute water scarce” on the Falkenmark scale because of a per capita availability of freshwater per year of less than 500 cubic meters.

The paper observes that Barbados has a water availability of just 306 cubic metres per capita per year, which makes Barbados the 15th most water‐scarce nation in the world. Thus, Barbados is critically dependent on a water‐intensive industry, has limited options to expand the supply of the key resource, and now finds that the availability of this key resource might decline in future as a result of climate change.

The paper provides data, case studies and analysis to demonstrate the significant threat to tourism from water shortages relating to climate change.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a range of different travel and tourism options, and quantifies the carbon‐dioxide emissions resulting from international vacations, breaking down emissions categories into those resulting from transport, accommodation and recreation.

The paper uses summary data to review a range of possible vacation scenarios and examines their relative carbon‐dioxide emissions in order to compare the relative climatic impact of different forms of tourism and vacation options.

The paper concludes that intercontinental flights and cruise ship travel are particularly carbon‐intensive, which suggests that these two forms of tourism will be particularly vulnerable to any policy initiative to curb or price carbon emissions. Ends by considering whether climatically responsible international tourism is possible, and outlines some low‐carbon options.

The paper relates data on carbon emissions to the implications for tourism arising from climate change.

This essay demonstrates how information systems — collections of documents, data, or other information-bearing objects — function internally as sites for creative manipulation of genre resources. In the information systems context, these textual activities are not clearly traced to the purposeful actions of specific writers.

Genre development for information systems can result from actions that may appear individually to be rote, repetitive, passive, and uninteresting. But as these actions are aggregated at increasing scales, genre components interact and shift, even if change is limited to one element of the larger assemblage. Although these changes may not be initiated by writers in accordance with targeted work activities and associated rhetorical goals, the composite texts thus produced are nonetheless powerful documents that come to partially constitute the broader activities they appear to merely support.

In demonstrating “writerless” phenomena of genre change in distributed, regulated systems, this essay complements and extends the strong body of existing work in genre studies that emphasizes the writer’s perspective and agency in its accounts of genre development. By showing how continually evolving compound documents such as digital libraries constitute such sites of unacknowledged genre change, this essay demonstrates how the social actions that these composite documents facilitate for their users also change.

In 1985, I was moving along a more or less definable disciplinary path, writing qualitative sociology guided by my understanding of leading symbolic interactionist texts, productively disturbed by affection for Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. Although there were prior lines of influence, my writing then was focused especially on various “social constructionist” projects, first with Peter Conrad (Conrad & Schneider, 1992 [1980]; Schneider & Conrad, 1983) and then with Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse (Kitsuse & Schneider, 1984, 1989). I also read closely and had many conversations with Anselm Strauss about how to do what he and Barney Glaser called “grounded theory” and with Howard Becker about “doing sociology.” Not only did I feel that I was getting better at doing ethnography or field work and “writing it up,” as we put it in Sociology, I felt I was engaged in an epistemologically superior practice relative to the more quantitative and structurally oriented work that was then and still is defined as “mainstream” (a land from which I had emigrated, gradually, after the Ph.D.).

The 2003 Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Trends (WHATT) roundtable discussion, held at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, focused on the issues affecting the development of tourism in the Caribbean. Fourteen industry practitioners and academics from the hospitality and tourism sector discussed the definitions of “sustainable tourism development” and debated the key development issues in Caribbean tourism and related education and research needs. The meeting agreed that there was a lack of research and intellectual focus on Caribbean tourism, although many Caribbean governments are in clear need of policy guidance. The meeting therefore identified a few achievable action points with the aim of addressing this problem.

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.