There are many places in the world where the local economy is driven by tourism. Everyone would love to receive the benefits of tourism without the drawbacks, but that's not really possible. Consider your impact when you travel, but don't let that stop you from seeing the world.
It's a conundrum, isn't it? On one hand travel inspires people to learn about the world and, hopefully, become more open-minded. As the article said it's never been cheaper to travel, so people who otherwise would not have the opportunity to do so are now able to.
But as with anything we humans touch, if we aren't careful we inadvertently destroy it. So I wonder if there's a good solution here? The lazy one is to make everything incredibly expensive, but why should the world be limited to the rich (more than it already is, comparatively speaking)?
As a regular traveller for leisure and living in a major tourist destination (Amsterdam), I've been thinking and experiencing a lot the issue of over-tourism. However, I disagree with the article's idea that the only solution is to stop traveling voluntarily.
Personally, I think pre-approved tourist visas will be the most efficient way of controlling how many people can travel to a country and then regions of a country. So, the solution already exists in part. Understandably, a few cities and areas of a country receive most tourists. You could therefore regulate the amount of visitors in each area by issuing location-depdendent visas. For example: "On the chosen dates you can come to the United States, but cannot visit New York or Florida. You may visit California, Nevada, Georgia etc etc."
It's terrifying and limiting, but realistically it's the only pro-active solution I can think of to improve the sustainability of a place, especially for the locals. Flight prices are likely to continue to drop and more people will have means to travel internationally. You cannot count on people's consciousness to address this issue.
The issue with that, is that the US doesn’t have good ways of controlling internal movements. It can check your visa at the bodega, but once you are in, generally no one will check your visa again.
No country has that kind of control level, as far as I know. But you could enforce it for example by preventing hotels/Airbnbs from legally accepting tourists with no visas for their region.
You don't need 100% fool-proof internal movement tracking since it's just intended to reduce the volume of tourists in a particular area.
I would think just limiting the number of tourist visas a particular destination airport can accept would be fine. Sure, you can drive from an airport in Tampa to go to Disney World, but it would massively reduce the number of people.
(That being said, Disney is probably a bad example since it's not built on a world heritage site you need to limit foot traffic to, it replaced a bunch of orange groves in the middle of nowhere)
I think people are in general becoming a little disillusioned with using market dynamics to allocate leisure.
Nobody minds that only rich people can stay at fancy hotels. But if, hypothetically, only rich people can set foot in New Zealand? That offends people.
Yes, scarce resources need allocating. Market dynamics are not the only way, see lottery permits in the NPS.
I grew up in Alaska in a town of about 30,000. The cruise ships carried ~5000 passengers, and they kept building new docks, so that there would be several at a time docked and anchored, each of which was bigger then our 10 story federal building. Picture a floating sky scraper. The part of town around their piers turns into theme park in the summer. They used to make announcements on their megaphones that I could hear from my house 2 miles away. They dumped sewage and trash in the ocean close to nearby towns sometimes using legal loopholes, but sometimes illegally, and were occasionally fined for this. They also set up company stores downtown, and bussed hundreds of people into small local parks, trails, and beaches.
The cruise companies are incorporated in low tax foreign jurisdictions, outside the political reach of the citizens of places they visit. Sometimes the city pushes back a bit. The last time I went home they seemed to have eased off of the megaphones, and I heard a head tax was proposed at some point to help clean up after the tourists and maintain the public parks, but I don’t know if it passed. The city and state are both small enough that the cruise companies can out-lobby locals interests quite handily. They promise jobs, but import labor. They have PR campaigns that brag about their public service efforts, omitting that these are court ordered, etc. It seems to me that the ability to shop for jurisdiction creates great opportunity for legal arbitrage. I have no idea what to do about this, but I think it’s interesting. Maybe there’s a metaphor here… something something Panama papers. :)
How many of those people would not be living there if not for the revenue brought in by tourism?
Reading the article, my immediate thought was: of course the Balinese hate tourists, when the ill effects are so obvious, and the benefits more subtle; easy to take for granted. But where would they be economically if all the tourists just stopped coming? I would bet the resulting recession would make people yearn for what they once despised.
I would guess most of them. I don't think the population has grown proportionately with the tourist traffic. They used to only dock a couple of smaller ships at time, which had less impact on the town.
It's the state capital, and there are also various industries. Also, tourism jobs tend to be temporary/seasonal, and people often come from out of town to do them for a few months and then leave. We get a hundred inches of rain a year, and in the winter it's dark a lot so there is no tourism in the winter.
EDIT: Population has grown about 15% since 1990, but dock space has roughly trippled, and per ship passenger capacity has substantially increased.
I haven't heard anyone suggest that tourism should be banned, just that it would be nice for it occur at a scale similar to a few decades ago, and to externalize costs less; e.g. refrain from illegal dumping, contribute to the upkeep of public goods that are exploited, and only increase the population of the town by, let's say, %20 on a given day.
"So is it possible to travel anywhere and feel OK about it?"
"Ultimately, there’s only one surefire way to avoid contributing to the problems of tourism: don’t go."
Hello clickbait, my old friend... I've come to talk with you again... Can you please stop over-generalizing? About the cause and effect of everything? Like the sweat from my balls causing avalanches in Nepal? That's a little far. I think it's time.... to flag this.
While I dislike the suggestion of flagging this - just ignoring it is a much better choice, there is enough censorship as it is - I do commend you for this piece of poetry. It neatly fits the metrum and I can almost hear that bald 'Disturbed' singer mumble out these alternative lyrics to the sounds of silence.
Air travel is exceptionally affordable because the fuel is not taxed. [1] We can curb frivolous air travel by fixing this anomoly, which is long overdue considering the global climate situation we find ourselves in.
Automotive fuel is taxed to pay for roads. Aircraft pay fees to use airports but that's independent of distance travel as that does not impact the airports.
So, really if we want to tax CO2 we should tax all forms of CO2 equally in addition to current taxes.
You should tax what you want to prevent in the way that harms the least things you want to continue.
So for instance if you can show that car co2 use more drastically helps the most vulnerable amongst us while air co2 is largely a subsidy to rockstars then you can compellingly argue taxing air travel more on a per co2 basis is fine.
Aviation emissions at elevation "have a climate impact that is commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level" [1].
> The last thing you want to incentivize is a 737 worth of people all driving their own cars from LA to SF for the weekend instead of taking the flight.
This is totally bogus. The amount of time people spend traveling has been relatively constant since 1950 [1]. Generally speaking, people will simply travel shorter distances by slower methods (car, train) if travel by air is unavailable, having roughly the same available time budget to work with.
The introduction of commercial air travel has substantially amplified the impact of time spent traveling. People travel further and using more fuel in the same unit of time than before. The emergence of air travel has not conserved fuel, and to imply such a thing is to be a shill for the air industry. It created a new class of travel that is a bulk consumer of fossil fuels enabling travel to farther distances than ever with the time available, period.
Not in many countries. Some countries subsidise automatice fuel. In Europe it's taxed far more than transport budgets (to contribute to the externalities).
Pollution from 1kw of fuel in an ICE is far higher than that in a power station too.
Most of the world has been trying to capture the externalities of carbon emissions. It's not perfect, but we are admitting that our economy is reliant on spending our environmental resources. Effectively borrowing to be repaid later.
The US is pulling out of that agreement though because reasons.
> Pollution from 1kw in an ICE is far higher than that in a power plant too.
Not nessisarily automotive fuel contains both Carbon and Hydrogen. So you're producing both CO2 and H20. Coal power plants often have higher thermal efficiency, but that's not nessisarily enough to make up for the difference in fuel. Further, the highest car engine is 50% fuel efficient and in cold weather can boost a little further by using waste heat for passenger comfort. https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1115473_mercedes-created... The vast majority of automotive engines are far lower, but many coal power plants are sub 40% where many hybrids are over 40%.
Granted the extraction, refinement, and transportation of automotive fuel produces CO2. But those stages can and should be taxed separately.
When I was a kid I thought the greatest thing in life would be to travel around the world, see interesting things, meet interesting people, and go to interesting places. This in turn would make me a more interesting, worthwhile human being worthy of adoration. Somehow our generation was taught that our experiences define us. That by getting on a plane to London and taking some pictures somehow our lives would be more unique and amazing.
So I spent my early 20s traveling and doing just that. Seeing everything there was to see. Doing all the things I ever dreamed of as a 16 year old kid stuck in the midwest. Being a hobo, I guess you could say, and having all of these "experiences" that I was sure would add up to a life of meaning. The result was a profound lack of satisfaction, and a severe existential dread at perhaps never finding any actual purpose.
I was lucky to settle down, go back to school, and find a passion in programming and science which drives me toward working on bigger problems than myself, that might help humanity in some way. But I fear that the vast majority of people my age are still stuck in that mindset, having never got it out of their systems. Hoping and praying that this next trip to Bali will finally give them that satisfaction beyond filling 3 minutes in passing cocktail party conversation.
Interesting. We have had very different traveling experiences. Traveling and learning about other people and cultures has completely transformed the way that I think about myself and the world.
I recently spent a year living abroad, and while I'd agree that it transformed the way I think about myself, it did so in a way that made me critical about most forms of tourism.
Hopping from place to place and seeing tourist sites can be fun and relaxing, but it's ultimately also pretty meaningless. This was drawn in sharp contrast for me because I was living in a famous tourist area (Kyoto), and I routinely saw the vast differences between the way tourists experience the area, and the way locals do. There's a very established tourist route, and it has almost no overlap (other than commercial) with the authentic life of the city. Tourists arrive, see the station, visit a few of the "mass-market" temples and shrines, then they leave. Even the folks who have "authentic experiences" are more-or-less following well-trodden pathways.
It's hard, because I now find it difficult to travel to places where I don't have a deeper purpose for being there. Simply seeing something pretty is no longer enough. But I also recognize that this is, almost by definition, impossible for everyone to do. I like travel too, but I'm quite conflicted now.
Most forms of mass-market tourism are essentially no different from Disney World, but with worse environmental impact. They're cancerous, and unless tightly regulated, will destroy the very places they promote. At least Disney World was built in a swamp!
I read a travel writing essay once that argued basically that there is very little true original travel left in the world in a post National Geographic era. That everything accessible to visit has been seen before by someone.
I tend to think of "shallow" tourism the same way I think of watching movies. Of course I know it's all an artificial experience, but I'll still turn off my brain and watch cheesy action flicks or snap photos w/ Goofy at Disneyland all the same. If anything, having had the opportunity to live the difference between locals and tourists (I've been both for San Francisco), I adjust my expectations for how much cultural enrichment I'm supposed to be getting out of a trip vs how much braindead goofing off I'm doing. There are times for both.
As for environmental impact, I think there is certainly an unfortunate factor of social perception making people fly half way around the world to Bali and destroy the local ecology in the process because Bali is supposed to be this enviable getaway place. But there's such a thing as a place being overrated, and if you arrive with high expectations, there's surely going to be a disappointment (even if you don't want to admit it). At some point, a beach is a beach. Coronado beach - just a hop away for me - is just as relaxing to me as Frasier island in middle-of-nowhere Australia.
If you're looking for unusual travel experiences with minimal ecological footprint, something that I've found nice (at least for major hubs in north america) is the atlas obscura city guides. Many spots there aren't even on maps (let alone touristic ones), and can't possibly take your whole day, so they're a great excuse to really go off the beaten path.
I find this comment extremely frustrating. Just because you didn't find satisfaction in travel doesn't mean that others won't in the same way not everyone will with a passion in programming. Similarly, you give yourself a pass of having gained the life experience of having done it, which takes an extraordinary amount of resources to be able to travel the globe in it of itself, but want to disallow it to others? While I appreciate the sentiment that it's not some magic bullet to life fulfillment this whole comment to me feels like "rules for thee but not for me." Similarly the article and the articles that the article quotes seem to point at other travelers as the problem, but always are able to do the mental gymnastics to carve out exemptions for themselves.
> I was lucky to settle down, go back to school, and find a passion in programming and science which drives me toward working on bigger problems than myself, that might help humanity in some way
This is exactly why everyone should travel. The thing that you find out is that the rest of the world isn't so different from wherever you're from. Perhaps the colors and shapes of the architecture and food is different, but people are pretty much people. There are some cultural differences that are helpful to learn too, but learning that the world is big and also that it isn't is extremely valuable.
My lessons from traveling (I still like doing it though): You cannot run away from yourself, taking pictures of things doesn't make you more interesting, people like to party, people are mostly good, you get to decide what matters
> This is exactly why everyone should travel. The thing that you find out is that the rest of the world isn't so different...
Maybe some people could learn the lesson without having to personally experience it. A lacture plan that involves flying people around the globe seems environmentally problematic.
Unless you live on an island, traveling doesn't have to be by plane. Here in Europe many youths get an Interrail pass[1], and you can get to Africa with a short ferry crossing.
I think you have it somewhat backwards though. Europe is small. Unless you live in Europe, you are quite restricted in terms of how much variety you can experience without flying. For example, a trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles takes over 6 hours of driving (bus is even worse). And that's "just next door" as far as US metropolitan cities go. And no, this isn't americanism or defending car culture. Consider also that rail system coverage in South America or Africa is severely lacking if compared to Europe. And for better or for worse, a very large number of popular destinations are indeed insular.
Ironically, Europe is also effectively inaccessible without planes for tourists from elsewhere (either because of geography or sheer distance)
You don't need to fly around the world to see many of the benefits of traveling. Perhaps more Americans should drive down through Latin America - and I don't mean partying in Cabo. Perhaps more Americans should drive around the country.
I’ve had largely the opposite experience, almost all of my travel experiences have broadened me, especially India, Myanmar and Japan. I suppose I loved those countries the most because it makes you realise that Europe has a distinct culture (and for me interestingly Christianity has shaped the way people think here quite fundamentally). Maybe it’s easier to relate to a person from France or the US than it is a person from Japan. It helps you to understand more critically the positive and negative aspects of where your from which is a good thing as it’s so difficult to discern the water when you’re swimming in it.
I agree, traveling is overrated.
I'm sure it's nice for some people, but...
If you want to relax there is no place like home, or maybe drive to nearest lake/ocean/...
If you want to learn other cultures jump on Netflix, YouTube, the internet.
If you want to do something meaningful: study; get a job; volunteer; help people in your local community; donate to charity; build something; contribute to an open source project; join/do a start-up; get into politics or have kids.
I think what you're describing has its roots in the Grand Tour[1]. Touring Europe after college became a tradition of well-to-do Americans in the same spirit.
It used to be the best way to fulfill on the promise of education and become worldly. It was never meant to be how you found your purpose. It was supposed to create empathy and understanding of our culture.
I'm skipping over a lot of detail, of course, and Bali is far from a grand tour destination. I'm pretty sure people go to Bali because the beaches are nice and it offers a certain kind of experience. I don't think they're going there looking for the meaning of life.
From what I have seen, many travelers seek novelty, movement, and temporary escape. As in so many other activities, some merely seek the appearance of seeking. The appearance of experience and worldliness, as an expression of fashion, tribe, and belonging. You see this in natural settings too, with people more concerned with checking off a list of national parks and sign posts than with actually experiencing the natural world beyond the postcard framing.
Ironically, if everyone were an itinerant traveler, there would be no local cultures to visit. Everyone you meet would be another generic gap year traveler and every place would be a youth hostel. There would be no real locality to sample.
I think only a small percentage of pleasure travelers are really looking for the cultural enrichment romanticized in travel stories. Even then, this is shallow experience-seeking as compared to a field anthropologist who methodically studies and compares cultures. And, neither of these compare to the immigrant who transplants themself permanently into a new, adopted culture.
A peculiar kind of travel you see in immigrants, even multigenerationally, is heritage tourism. It's almost a reversal of escape and novelty-seeking. They seek some return to a faint memory or myth of the old country.
When I was a kid I thought the greatest thing in life would be to program computers, create interesting programs, meet interested people and programmers, and delve into interesting problems. This in turn would solve problems and make things easier. A generation has been indoctrinated into thinking that our devices define us. That by getting on a device and posting, programming and delivering products somehow our lives would be more unique and amazing.
So I spent my early 20s programming and doing just that. Programming everything there was to program. Doing all the things I ever dreamed of as a 16 year old kid stuck in generative meta-circular recursion. Being a hacker, I guess you could say, and having all of these "polymorphic insights" that I was sure would add up to a life of meaning. The result was a profound lack of satisfaction, and a severe existential dread at perhaps never delivering anything of practical use.
I was lucky to settle up, quit work, and find a passion in traveling and touring which drives me toward working on bigger problems than myself, that might help humanity in some way. But I fear that the vast majority of people my age are still stuck in that mindset, having never to unplug and leave their systems. Hoping and praying that this next version of a program will finally give them that satisfaction beyond filling 3 minutes in posting an update on a chat conversation.
I think your mistake was thinking that traveling was the goal. It just widens a bit the path you're following to your actual goal. I envy you for those experiences, though. They must be interesting.
The article is trying to make the traveler feel guilty when to me the burden falls on local governments of these tourist destinations. If there's an impending ecological disaster isn't it in their best interest to have more regulations, eg by increasing fines/citations, limiting visas, increasing prices, etc?
If AirBnB is displacing local residents then ban the service, many cities have started to do so.
If the mangroves are being destroyed then disallow tourism to that area.
Easier said than done of course since tourism is often driving the economy and everyone wants to make a quick buck.
Why can't it go both ways? Tourists can make a conscious effort to put their rubbish in the bin and learn how to say "please" and "thanks" locally.
I hike frequently, so simply by going to a national park I harm the environment there. But I also pay for park passes which help fund those parks, and I refrain from littering and wandering off the track.
I'm sure most people try to put their rubbish in the bin if there are empty bins available. I've found most places are dirty because they don't have the infrastructure built for disposing of trash/recyclables, not that people are trying to be evil.
"I've found most places are dirty because they don't have the infrastructure built for disposing of trash/recyclables, not that people are trying to be evil."
If the local culture is to carry your trash with you, the "right" thing to do is to adapt yourself to that culture, not the other way around. You're a guest. But yes, you're factually correct: if cities don't do this, far too many tourists will just toss their trash anywhere they please.
I find it really hard to believe that the majority of a garbage crisis is caused by tourists "tossing their trash wherever" -- after all, underdeveloped countries have problems with trash even in places where tourists are rare.
I'm certain a big part of the issue are the services that tourism creates a demand for, and their waste for which there are no easy solutions when the infrastructure is not there. Setting up proper infra in place is really the local administration's job.
"I find it really hard to believe that the majority of a garbage crisis is caused by tourists 'tossing their trash wherever'"
Nobody said anything about a "garbage crisis". The comment that started this thread was that if you're in a foreign country, you shouldn't litter and you should learn how to say please and thank you in the local tongue.
The fact that people are arguing about this subject is telling. Never in my life have I said "oh, there are no trash cans here. I guess I can just toss my litter anywhere because the local officials didn't plan properly for my presence."
That's quite the twist of my words. The only point I was trying to make is that places with large amounts of tourism should plan accordingly if they want to keep clean. Individuals are still at fault obviously, but there is plenty that can be done to make things better for everyone when dealing with trash at scale.
It's really only an issue for you once there's already an impending disaster, and even then the responsibility doesn't lie with those that did the damage?!
That's hard to swallow, for me. Do people have no moral obligations, in your view? Is life only about the power to push back against something one doesn't like, rather than some deeper commitment to what is right and good?
>and even then the responsibility doesn't lie with those that did the damage?!
Doesn't responsibility for a rising teen birthrate lie with the teens?
Doesn't responsibility for an opioid epidemic lie with users and traffickers?
Doesn't responsibility for gridlock lie with drivers?
In a sense, yes, but realistically, this kind of collective action problem can only be solved at scale by governments. Telling Americans "STOP TRAVELING" will be about as effective as telling drug lords "STOP TRAFFICKING".
I agree that the collective action problem is solved by government, and that these problems are of that sort. It's just that the language of "but... the burden falls on local governments" makes it sound as though that pragmatic reality replaces individual moral responsibility.
Especially if the problem would be even worse when we stop trying to reinforce each other's good actions, then throwing up your hands and saying "well, it's the government's problem" isn't good enough.
As a tourist it's very difficult to know what activities are damaging when it's long-term damage over decades.
The difference between harmful and safe activities often come down to the caretakers of the place you are visiting and what they've done to setup safe visits.
You can argue that the local population caused the damage by not cutting back on tourism since they control the area and should know it best. People will consume services that are provided to them. A lot of the problems described in the article are death by a thousand cuts and occur over a long period of time.
It seems like many people visit Bali as tourists because of geoarbitrage — dollar for dollar meals and housing are so much cheaper than in the states, and overall it's a nice place to work remotely (except internet) or vacation.
It does sound like tourism has the potential to be exploitative. Maybe they can find a way to charge more only to tourists borrowing tricks like "resort fees" from Las Vegas. Or doubling prices and giving only residents discounts somehow.
Haven't been there myself, but I've mostly heard speeds along the lines of "Internet: 8mbps" [1][2]. Maybe it's that we've gotten use to 100+ Mbps in the US, or perhaps Ubud is an outlier?
The world has gotten significantly richer since 1945, and a result of that is that more and more of the world's population has the ability to travel to the most beautiful and popular places in the world. However, this explosion in wealth hasn't been matched by an explosion in the number of truly beautiful and popular places in the world. The ones we do have just get more crowded.
It’s not only low prices that helped tourism gain traction. It’s one of the areas massively impacted by technology in recent years...3G/4G, online maps, AirBnb, aviation safety ...all these allow the average teenager to take a tour across Europe with ease.
It’s a trend now that young people take a year off between high school and university, just for travelling.
Sounds absurd but some years ago people would think twice about travelling just because of the fear of getting lost.
"It's time" to stop saying "it's time" for this or that. I've noticed it, which means being annoyed isn't far off. It's time to come up with a new way of titling your (usually) prescriptive and preachy shit.
Nonetheless I still agree with the idea that you really don't need to go. Going and seeing some amazing thing is usually not that amazing. Especially when everyone else on this crowded-ass planet has the same idea. But sometimes you have to go do it, just to figure that out.
Travel is the kind of thing where there's almost an inverse relationship between the amount you spend and the level of "meaning" you get out of it. At least in my experience. The trips I took "deluxe" style were pretty bland, while the ones where I had to problem-solve, use my wits, suffer a little, even dodge law enforcement (thinking of freight-hopping trips there) stand out more in memory.
As if Indonesia ever needed tourism to throw garbages out, even in untouristy areas in Asia it's moutains of garbages everwhere. About the tourists being too many, that's a country's authority to regulate tourism, by enforcing Visa laws for example, Balinese corruption is to blame for what the place has become, not the tourists.
“Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”
One interesting counterexample: Bhutan. Open to all visitors, but they need to pay $200 per day for the privilege. This includes basic/3-star accommodation and meals, you can opt to pay more if you wish and Aman has a string of resorts with $1000/night price tags if you do.
Couple this with an authoritarian monarchy that does things like enforce local dress code by law, and you get most of the benefits of tourism without many of the downsides.
Of course, it's debatable how well this model would adapt to tourist destinations that aren't obscure mountainous hermit kingdoms...
Depending on your brain structure and circumstances travel can have a different effect on different people. I have some form of 4D memory - I can go back to any place i’ve seen, including my dreams and spend time there any time I want. The sights, the smells, the sounds. As a result I don’t feel a need to travel to the same place twice, but I do miss the people and the food at every place I go. So in a way with every trip, I leave a piece of me behind and I miss it, until no place can ever be perfect for all the precious people it’s missing.
Others I know see travel as therapy, as an escape. They photoshop the people out of their photos to keep the place pure and go back to it by looking at albums. They enjoy the experience of being in the warm water of a favorite beach, and would do anything to go back there as often as possible.
Travel should not be limited, but there needs to be an international protocol of conservationist behavior that we all abide by whenever leave home. More people have the means to travel every year, and likely a safe thing to do would be to print a protocol brochure/terms of travel if you will, and request agreement from everyone as a part of the ticket purchasing or customs process.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] thread> Tourism can destroy environments and drive out local residents. It’s time to rethink the purpose of travel.
No. It may be time for author to rethink her travel and mind her own business.
But as with anything we humans touch, if we aren't careful we inadvertently destroy it. So I wonder if there's a good solution here? The lazy one is to make everything incredibly expensive, but why should the world be limited to the rich (more than it already is, comparatively speaking)?
Personally, I think pre-approved tourist visas will be the most efficient way of controlling how many people can travel to a country and then regions of a country. So, the solution already exists in part. Understandably, a few cities and areas of a country receive most tourists. You could therefore regulate the amount of visitors in each area by issuing location-depdendent visas. For example: "On the chosen dates you can come to the United States, but cannot visit New York or Florida. You may visit California, Nevada, Georgia etc etc."
It's terrifying and limiting, but realistically it's the only pro-active solution I can think of to improve the sustainability of a place, especially for the locals. Flight prices are likely to continue to drop and more people will have means to travel internationally. You cannot count on people's consciousness to address this issue.
I would think just limiting the number of tourist visas a particular destination airport can accept would be fine. Sure, you can drive from an airport in Tampa to go to Disney World, but it would massively reduce the number of people.
(That being said, Disney is probably a bad example since it's not built on a world heritage site you need to limit foot traffic to, it replaced a bunch of orange groves in the middle of nowhere)
That way, if a location is overwhelmed by tourists, it can raise a levy to discourage the flow.
The trick would be designing a good system.
Nobody minds that only rich people can stay at fancy hotels. But if, hypothetically, only rich people can set foot in New Zealand? That offends people.
Yes, scarce resources need allocating. Market dynamics are not the only way, see lottery permits in the NPS.
Of course there are many other parks that don't have this problem in Colorado.
The cruise companies are incorporated in low tax foreign jurisdictions, outside the political reach of the citizens of places they visit. Sometimes the city pushes back a bit. The last time I went home they seemed to have eased off of the megaphones, and I heard a head tax was proposed at some point to help clean up after the tourists and maintain the public parks, but I don’t know if it passed. The city and state are both small enough that the cruise companies can out-lobby locals interests quite handily. They promise jobs, but import labor. They have PR campaigns that brag about their public service efforts, omitting that these are court ordered, etc. It seems to me that the ability to shop for jurisdiction creates great opportunity for legal arbitrage. I have no idea what to do about this, but I think it’s interesting. Maybe there’s a metaphor here… something something Panama papers. :)
How many of those people would not be living there if not for the revenue brought in by tourism?
Reading the article, my immediate thought was: of course the Balinese hate tourists, when the ill effects are so obvious, and the benefits more subtle; easy to take for granted. But where would they be economically if all the tourists just stopped coming? I would bet the resulting recession would make people yearn for what they once despised.
It's the state capital, and there are also various industries. Also, tourism jobs tend to be temporary/seasonal, and people often come from out of town to do them for a few months and then leave. We get a hundred inches of rain a year, and in the winter it's dark a lot so there is no tourism in the winter.
EDIT: Population has grown about 15% since 1990, but dock space has roughly trippled, and per ship passenger capacity has substantially increased.
I haven't heard anyone suggest that tourism should be banned, just that it would be nice for it occur at a scale similar to a few decades ago, and to externalize costs less; e.g. refrain from illegal dumping, contribute to the upkeep of public goods that are exploited, and only increase the population of the town by, let's say, %20 on a given day.
"Ultimately, there’s only one surefire way to avoid contributing to the problems of tourism: don’t go."
Hello clickbait, my old friend... I've come to talk with you again... Can you please stop over-generalizing? About the cause and effect of everything? Like the sweat from my balls causing avalanches in Nepal? That's a little far. I think it's time.... to flag this.
[1] http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN00523.pdf
So, really if we want to tax CO2 we should tax all forms of CO2 equally in addition to current taxes.
So for instance if you can show that car co2 use more drastically helps the most vulnerable amongst us while air co2 is largely a subsidy to rockstars then you can compellingly argue taxing air travel more on a per co2 basis is fine.
Note: I don’t know enough to have an opinion.
Aviation emissions at elevation "have a climate impact that is commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(travel)
The last thing you want to incentivize is a 737 worth of people all driving their own cars from LA to SF for the weekend instead of taking the flight.
This is totally bogus. The amount of time people spend traveling has been relatively constant since 1950 [1]. Generally speaking, people will simply travel shorter distances by slower methods (car, train) if travel by air is unavailable, having roughly the same available time budget to work with.
The introduction of commercial air travel has substantially amplified the impact of time spent traveling. People travel further and using more fuel in the same unit of time than before. The emergence of air travel has not conserved fuel, and to imply such a thing is to be a shill for the air industry. It created a new class of travel that is a bulk consumer of fossil fuels enabling travel to farther distances than ever with the time available, period.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(travel)
Pollution from 1kw of fuel in an ICE is far higher than that in a power station too.
Most of the world has been trying to capture the externalities of carbon emissions. It's not perfect, but we are admitting that our economy is reliant on spending our environmental resources. Effectively borrowing to be repaid later.
The US is pulling out of that agreement though because reasons.
Not nessisarily automotive fuel contains both Carbon and Hydrogen. So you're producing both CO2 and H20. Coal power plants often have higher thermal efficiency, but that's not nessisarily enough to make up for the difference in fuel. Further, the highest car engine is 50% fuel efficient and in cold weather can boost a little further by using waste heat for passenger comfort. https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1115473_mercedes-created... The vast majority of automotive engines are far lower, but many coal power plants are sub 40% where many hybrids are over 40%.
Granted the extraction, refinement, and transportation of automotive fuel produces CO2. But those stages can and should be taxed separately.
So I spent my early 20s traveling and doing just that. Seeing everything there was to see. Doing all the things I ever dreamed of as a 16 year old kid stuck in the midwest. Being a hobo, I guess you could say, and having all of these "experiences" that I was sure would add up to a life of meaning. The result was a profound lack of satisfaction, and a severe existential dread at perhaps never finding any actual purpose.
I was lucky to settle down, go back to school, and find a passion in programming and science which drives me toward working on bigger problems than myself, that might help humanity in some way. But I fear that the vast majority of people my age are still stuck in that mindset, having never got it out of their systems. Hoping and praying that this next trip to Bali will finally give them that satisfaction beyond filling 3 minutes in passing cocktail party conversation.
Hopping from place to place and seeing tourist sites can be fun and relaxing, but it's ultimately also pretty meaningless. This was drawn in sharp contrast for me because I was living in a famous tourist area (Kyoto), and I routinely saw the vast differences between the way tourists experience the area, and the way locals do. There's a very established tourist route, and it has almost no overlap (other than commercial) with the authentic life of the city. Tourists arrive, see the station, visit a few of the "mass-market" temples and shrines, then they leave. Even the folks who have "authentic experiences" are more-or-less following well-trodden pathways.
It's hard, because I now find it difficult to travel to places where I don't have a deeper purpose for being there. Simply seeing something pretty is no longer enough. But I also recognize that this is, almost by definition, impossible for everyone to do. I like travel too, but I'm quite conflicted now.
Most forms of mass-market tourism are essentially no different from Disney World, but with worse environmental impact. They're cancerous, and unless tightly regulated, will destroy the very places they promote. At least Disney World was built in a swamp!
As for environmental impact, I think there is certainly an unfortunate factor of social perception making people fly half way around the world to Bali and destroy the local ecology in the process because Bali is supposed to be this enviable getaway place. But there's such a thing as a place being overrated, and if you arrive with high expectations, there's surely going to be a disappointment (even if you don't want to admit it). At some point, a beach is a beach. Coronado beach - just a hop away for me - is just as relaxing to me as Frasier island in middle-of-nowhere Australia.
If you're looking for unusual travel experiences with minimal ecological footprint, something that I've found nice (at least for major hubs in north america) is the atlas obscura city guides. Many spots there aren't even on maps (let alone touristic ones), and can't possibly take your whole day, so they're a great excuse to really go off the beaten path.
Sounds like you just weren’t adventurous and opened minded enough on your travels and didn’t find worthwhile experiences.
This is exactly why everyone should travel. The thing that you find out is that the rest of the world isn't so different from wherever you're from. Perhaps the colors and shapes of the architecture and food is different, but people are pretty much people. There are some cultural differences that are helpful to learn too, but learning that the world is big and also that it isn't is extremely valuable.
My lessons from traveling (I still like doing it though): You cannot run away from yourself, taking pictures of things doesn't make you more interesting, people like to party, people are mostly good, you get to decide what matters
Maybe some people could learn the lesson without having to personally experience it. A lacture plan that involves flying people around the globe seems environmentally problematic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrail
Ironically, Europe is also effectively inaccessible without planes for tourists from elsewhere (either because of geography or sheer distance)
If you want to relax there is no place like home, or maybe drive to nearest lake/ocean/...
If you want to learn other cultures jump on Netflix, YouTube, the internet.
If you want to do something meaningful: study; get a job; volunteer; help people in your local community; donate to charity; build something; contribute to an open source project; join/do a start-up; get into politics or have kids.
It used to be the best way to fulfill on the promise of education and become worldly. It was never meant to be how you found your purpose. It was supposed to create empathy and understanding of our culture.
I'm skipping over a lot of detail, of course, and Bali is far from a grand tour destination. I'm pretty sure people go to Bali because the beaches are nice and it offers a certain kind of experience. I don't think they're going there looking for the meaning of life.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour
Ironically, if everyone were an itinerant traveler, there would be no local cultures to visit. Everyone you meet would be another generic gap year traveler and every place would be a youth hostel. There would be no real locality to sample.
I think only a small percentage of pleasure travelers are really looking for the cultural enrichment romanticized in travel stories. Even then, this is shallow experience-seeking as compared to a field anthropologist who methodically studies and compares cultures. And, neither of these compare to the immigrant who transplants themself permanently into a new, adopted culture.
A peculiar kind of travel you see in immigrants, even multigenerationally, is heritage tourism. It's almost a reversal of escape and novelty-seeking. They seek some return to a faint memory or myth of the old country.
> ... would make me a more interesting, worthwhile human being worthy of adoration.
That is, you didn't seem to travel for your enlightenment, rather to look "better" before others, whatever this better could mean for you.
So I spent my early 20s programming and doing just that. Programming everything there was to program. Doing all the things I ever dreamed of as a 16 year old kid stuck in generative meta-circular recursion. Being a hacker, I guess you could say, and having all of these "polymorphic insights" that I was sure would add up to a life of meaning. The result was a profound lack of satisfaction, and a severe existential dread at perhaps never delivering anything of practical use.
I was lucky to settle up, quit work, and find a passion in traveling and touring which drives me toward working on bigger problems than myself, that might help humanity in some way. But I fear that the vast majority of people my age are still stuck in that mindset, having never to unplug and leave their systems. Hoping and praying that this next version of a program will finally give them that satisfaction beyond filling 3 minutes in posting an update on a chat conversation.
So I went travelling for some time, quit the IT industry and I've never felt that good.
We are all different, one's experience doesn't apply to others I guess.
If AirBnB is displacing local residents then ban the service, many cities have started to do so.
If the mangroves are being destroyed then disallow tourism to that area.
Easier said than done of course since tourism is often driving the economy and everyone wants to make a quick buck.
I hike frequently, so simply by going to a national park I harm the environment there. But I also pay for park passes which help fund those parks, and I refrain from littering and wandering off the track.
If the local culture is to carry your trash with you, the "right" thing to do is to adapt yourself to that culture, not the other way around. You're a guest. But yes, you're factually correct: if cities don't do this, far too many tourists will just toss their trash anywhere they please.
I'm certain a big part of the issue are the services that tourism creates a demand for, and their waste for which there are no easy solutions when the infrastructure is not there. Setting up proper infra in place is really the local administration's job.
Nobody said anything about a "garbage crisis". The comment that started this thread was that if you're in a foreign country, you shouldn't litter and you should learn how to say please and thank you in the local tongue.
The fact that people are arguing about this subject is telling. Never in my life have I said "oh, there are no trash cans here. I guess I can just toss my litter anywhere because the local officials didn't plan properly for my presence."
But if hotel prices, etc goes up too much and regulation becomes too strong there is a risk the travel agencies will send tourists somewhere cheaper.
Just saying the consumer is already traveling, they could travel somewhere else. That said, small efforts would probably go far.
That's hard to swallow, for me. Do people have no moral obligations, in your view? Is life only about the power to push back against something one doesn't like, rather than some deeper commitment to what is right and good?
Doesn't responsibility for a rising teen birthrate lie with the teens? Doesn't responsibility for an opioid epidemic lie with users and traffickers? Doesn't responsibility for gridlock lie with drivers?
In a sense, yes, but realistically, this kind of collective action problem can only be solved at scale by governments. Telling Americans "STOP TRAVELING" will be about as effective as telling drug lords "STOP TRAFFICKING".
Especially if the problem would be even worse when we stop trying to reinforce each other's good actions, then throwing up your hands and saying "well, it's the government's problem" isn't good enough.
As in the UK, those that don't travel correlate with low education and populism.
The difference between harmful and safe activities often come down to the caretakers of the place you are visiting and what they've done to setup safe visits.
It does sound like tourism has the potential to be exploitative. Maybe they can find a way to charge more only to tourists borrowing tricks like "resort fees" from Las Vegas. Or doubling prices and giving only residents discounts somehow.
[1]: https://nomadlist.com/ubud-bali-indonesia
[2]: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/50033/any-fast-in...
The world has gotten significantly richer since 1945, and a result of that is that more and more of the world's population has the ability to travel to the most beautiful and popular places in the world. However, this explosion in wealth hasn't been matched by an explosion in the number of truly beautiful and popular places in the world. The ones we do have just get more crowded.
Sounds absurd but some years ago people would think twice about travelling just because of the fear of getting lost.
Nonetheless I still agree with the idea that you really don't need to go. Going and seeing some amazing thing is usually not that amazing. Especially when everyone else on this crowded-ass planet has the same idea. But sometimes you have to go do it, just to figure that out.
Travel is the kind of thing where there's almost an inverse relationship between the amount you spend and the level of "meaning" you get out of it. At least in my experience. The trips I took "deluxe" style were pretty bland, while the ones where I had to problem-solve, use my wits, suffer a little, even dodge law enforcement (thinking of freight-hopping trips there) stand out more in memory.
Couple this with an authoritarian monarchy that does things like enforce local dress code by law, and you get most of the benefits of tourism without many of the downsides.
Of course, it's debatable how well this model would adapt to tourist destinations that aren't obscure mountainous hermit kingdoms...
Others I know see travel as therapy, as an escape. They photoshop the people out of their photos to keep the place pure and go back to it by looking at albums. They enjoy the experience of being in the warm water of a favorite beach, and would do anything to go back there as often as possible.
Travel should not be limited, but there needs to be an international protocol of conservationist behavior that we all abide by whenever leave home. More people have the means to travel every year, and likely a safe thing to do would be to print a protocol brochure/terms of travel if you will, and request agreement from everyone as a part of the ticket purchasing or customs process.