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Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

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Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

#71

Post by jogjayr »

torpfactory wrote: post #32
ahelwer wrote: post #6

Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without yo…

I am sadly very familiar with your second paragraph. Wilderness areas which were once quiet most of the year now hum with activity from even before the snow is completely melted to after the first fresh flakes of autumn arrive. These areas can be remarkably sensitive, and most lack the trail and human-waste infrastructure to handle the new crowds. These new users often lack training in leave-no-trace principles and r…

> These new users often lack training in leave-no-trace principles and result in blown-out trails and piles of used toilet paper behind every nearby tree. I suspect that our cash-strapped parks and forest services will impose visitor limits instead of expanding infrastructure.

Look at the upside though. More visitors means justification for more funding. And more voters who will raise a fuss if that funding isn't provided. You can always train newbs to get better. There's a thousand entertainment choices competing for people's attention today. Most of them are easier than packing a 20lb backpack and tramping off into the woods. On balance I'd say more people venturing outdoors is better than them staying home.

Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

#72

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ggm wrote: post #41

"hell is other people" I think most anti tourism pieces are elitist. I also find crowds and queues a drag but either it's a lottery or it's priced out to most people. Which is better?

I new this band before they were cool man. Now I can't afford tickets because of all the Johnny come latelies who can't truly appreciate their music like I can.

Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

#73

Post by NTDF9 »

blondie9x wrote: post #45
NTDF9 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Traveling is so overrated it's insane. No it is not. It is only overrated for folks who are trying to "gain" something from it. >> Okay let's be honest for a second what does most traveling boil down to? The whole point of traveling is to be in an environment foreign to you. Interacting with locals, eating local food, trying local shit. This was all more fun before globalization since you couldn't fly into Phillip…

The real question you have to ask yourself is why is it foreign to you? You are breathing air, eating food that boils down to the same components, you are experiencing gravity at the same rate, you are seeing one moon, you are seeing one sun, you are interacting with homo sapiens. The differences are mostly psychological perceptions where you are bored and want to feel something different.

>> The differences are mostly psychological perceptions where you are bored and want to feel something different.

Only if you have a shallow perception of differences. You need to engage.

This is what your idea of traveling looks like (minimal interaction with locals, going to familiar brands, looking at everything from a sheltered familiar lens): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdSppr-ltd0

This is what fun, engaging and interesting traveling looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PJ7670mV6E

You really have to enjoy getting out and meeting people for this to work. If you're only in it for social media or with a defeatist armchair philosophical perspective, it won't be fun.

Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

#74

Post by enraged_camel »

blondie9x wrote: post #33
wepple wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that it’s due to boredom, or that it is overrated. Learning about other cultures and other people’s way of life is incredibly important in an increasingly divided world. I strongly believe that if the average American spent time living with an Islamic family in the Middle East for a week, we might break down a lot of barriers between all the folks that share this rock we live on. It’s another question as t…

All of this can be done via the internet.

You remind me of an old lady I met while living in Southern California. This lady was extremely proud of the fact that she had never set foot outside of California her entire life (by choice, as she was quite wealthy). I asked her about it and she said “Honey, why bother? It’s paradise here. If I ever wonder about life elsewhere, I can read about it or watch a documentary!”

I mean, to each his own, but to me it’s the difference between reading documentation about code vs. writing code. The former may give you some good information, and may even be essential, but it’s not the same as experiencing the real thing.

Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

#76

Post by alkonaut »

blondie9x wrote: post #18

Traveling is overrated. Often times in modern life it feels as thought traveling is a competition rather than for leisure and pleasure. People are often competing to take pictures and say they have been to as many places as possible. Props to travel companies for propagating the travel craze and selling people on the allure of taking pictures and eating food in another spot on Earth. Count the number of people's prof…

It's literally one of the few things that I assign to "meaning" in my life. Seeing the world.

Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

#77

Post by plasticchris »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #17
ahelwer wrote: post #6

Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without yo…

"alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have" I find this hugely classist. (Edit: and I'm generally not someone to use that terminology) Most (even American) travellers are just trying to see some sights, have a normal and are not particularly rude or problematic. The issue is now that 'everyone' can afford to travel ... it's causing problems. This is a problem of prosperity.

Once on a hike I was passed by a man and his wife who commented they had to get somewhere further along to see it. This was along one of my favorite trails.

Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

#78

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

ryanianian wrote: post #63
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #36

I went with my wife to Hallstatt this year. It's a tiny picturesque town in Austria. I was there not that long ago, maybe something like 10 years and it was nice and memorable but for a local no big deal. This time we went on a wimp and jesus christ there were so many tourists. It was insane how utterly impossible life must be there for people. There are signs in Chinese and Japanese everywhere about local laws, not…

There is an interesting (but perhaps not very insighful) connection to gentrification in this. It sounds like that city is still having growing pains with tourism influx, but it also sounds like the local economy is probably doing pretty well, so I don't know if "ruined" is the right term (in absolute terms). Put another way: the locals will have a much more annoying but (hopefully) much richer existence as a result…

> It sounds like that city is still having growing pains with tourism influx, but it also sounds like the local economy is probably doing pretty well, so I don't know if "ruined" is the right term (in absolute terms).

The actual local economy is suffering but is getting replaced with a new one: tourism.

Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

#79

Post by fullshark »

siruncledrew wrote: post #53

At a fundamental level, I think the mysticism and admiration of many of these tourist destinations in Europe has greatly eroded in our internet and social media age. It's not like how tourism was 50 years ago when people mostly relied on anecdotal and literary knowledge of places to get a glimpse of what they are like. It's much more of an experience to have to go see something for yourself to really get a substantia…

> modern times tourism really is more about "I just want to do predetermined cool stuff in a place for my 1 week vacation" rather than "I want to experience a place and immerse myself in the culture for 1 week".

They were always fundamentally the same, the former is just being more honest about what you are doing.

Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love

#80

Post by amw »

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #39
sonnyblarney wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have" I find this hugely classist. (Edit: and I'm generally not someone to use that terminology) Most (even American) travellers are just trying to see some sights, have a normal and are not particularly rude or problematic. The issue is now that 'everyone' can afford to travel ... it's causing problems. This is a problem of prosperity.

I really appreciate you using the term “classist”. I think that term, and not “racist”, needs to be much more widely applied these days. That being said, I really enjoyed the author’s post. If anything, the people who are going to these places are the social climbing, upwardly mobile middle class, determined to burnish their brand on Instagram. Also the free flow of tourists is a problem that parallels a lot of other…

While your point about racism is kind of tautologically true from a purely semantic standpoint (in the same way that "primate" is a more widely applicable term than "human"), race and class are inextricably linked in the US, and the problems caused by it deserve focus on their racial context.

If you're using "class" as a synonym for "concerned specifically with the divide between poverty and not-poverty", then this is especially relevant. Colorblindness in anti-poverty solutions has been historically a way to aggravate problems problems caused by systemic racism that is not addressed (like Federal housing loan guarantees to jump-start an American Middle Class that "just happen" to only be available to people who meet a particular set of characteristics that "just happen" to correlate strongly with whiteness).

If you're speaking specifically about objections to how loaded the term "racism" is when speaking to people, thanks to an inability of our broader society to produce a distinction between individually non-complicit, systemically racist outcomes and individually complicit, "racist intent", then I would suggest moving the burden of the term to "classist" is a form of euphemism, and will generally only serve to make the word "classist" take the same emotional connotations in the future rather than solve the terminology problem it is presented to solve. We are probably better just trying to find a way to grapple with why the term "racist" makes us so emotionally charged than avoiding the subject.

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