Mobilities scholarship has paid considerable attention to the forms of presence enabled by air travel in hypermobile organisations (Elliott & Urry 2010, Strengers 2015, Storme et al. 2016). However, there has been less focus on the absences these presences simultaneously generate. This paper aims to explore the ‘absent presences’ enabled through the practices and policies of academic hypermobility. The paper draws on qualitative interviews with 24 Australian based academics, alongside a review of university policies. We use these data to develop the concept of 'absent presence' in air travel. First, we suggest academia often requires one to be present amongst certain groups of academic peers, at conferences and meetings, often accessed by means of air travel. Yet this type of presence abroad requires that one is absent from home for extended periods. Second, we suggest that an absent presence exists in academic policies concerning air travel. In university sustainability policies, air travel's environmental impacts are often absent from consideration. However in university strategic plans, air travel is present as a means and measure of academic success. We conclude by discussing the implications of absent presence in the academic work life ecology, as well as university policy and practice more broadly.

As climate change thunders ahead, it is increasingly argued that the world needs to not just decelerate the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but draw more carbon back into the e/Earth and hold it tight. The associated turn to land, soil and burial enrolls new agents onto the frontline of climate change action. Among these agents are not only the vital more-than-human microbes that enliven the soil, or the myriad consultants, policy makers, lawyers, auditors and investors that construct carbon markets, but a diversity of rural land managers required to actually, continuously cultivate and secure the new terrestrial carbon stores. More accustomed to being addressed as victims or villains of climate change, these land managers (namely farmers and pastoralists) are being newly interpolated as climate change saviours in the guise of “carbon farmers”. Charged with interpolating them into this new role is another new cohort of climate change agents: agricultural extension workers. This paper presents an initial exploration of the active work involved in cultivating carbon. It examines the challenges faced by both land managers and those meant to mobilise them as new custodians of not only the land but of carbon, the atmosphere and our climate.

Since 1950 tourism has undergone such spectacular exponential growth that it is one of many phenomena comprising the ‘Great Acceleration’ and a marker of the Anthropocene conversion. One of the most conspicuous contributions of tourism to its status as a geophysical force has been the immense consumption of fossil fuels required by tourism mobility. The global tourism industry is responsible for around 5% of global carbon emissions and is thus implicated in the termination of the Holocene. As the effects of climate change drastically transform tourism destinations and make carbon-intensive forms of mobility untenable, tourism in its current form will be highly disrupted. While regular leisure travel is currently commonplace at least for affluent people, it has been argued the Anthropocene will be a time of rapid and unpredictable transformations on a global scale. How might tourism mobilities be altered so that a safe operating space for humanity is maintained? What types of tourism mobilities are possible for a low carbon society undergoing erratic planetary changes? This presentation will seek to answer these questions.