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Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

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Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#221

Post by starpilot »

dantheman wrote: post #211
qwerty456127 wrote: post #199

Why is "overtourism" even considered a problem? Just start advertising new destinations somewhere else in the country, raise the prices at the original overwhelmed destination and take profit.

There are many places that: 1. Can only accommodate a certain number of people with the available infrastructure 2. Certain places lose their magic when too crowded, they become unenjoyable Many of these places are where you can't charge an admission or limit attendance easily.

They could go the way of Bhutan and charge each tourist $250 per day. Would clear things up nicely.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#222

Post by raverbashing »

DennisP wrote: post #200
munificent wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. I don't think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them. The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them: http://shirky.com/writings…

Maybe people should stop making fun of hipsters, who consciously try to avoid the peaks of power law distributions.

And while avoiding it, they create an opposite peak of their own

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#223

Post by SolaceQuantum »

cromwellian wrote: post #201

Travel tends to decrease xenophobia and increase empathy and cultural understanding among those who do it. I worry that some of the use of environmental impact is a "concern troll" cover to call for restrictions is the result of more deeply seated xenophobic feelings. Tourism is increasing because billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, especially Chinese, and now they want to experience what those in the…

I always find it really strange because chances are that by the time you get to the most touristy places you’ve utterly failed at expanding your mind to any real extent. Furthermore, it isn’t even necessary to travel-

If you’re a city person, vacation on a farm where you pay to try and help out with the farm chores. If you’re a rural dweller live in a city like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago. If you live in the north, travel to the south, vice versa. Swing by Buffalo or Rochester. Entertain Ithaca. Explore philly.

It might not even need to require travel. Volunteer for refugee crisis centers. Volunteer for elder care. Volunteer for child care. Volunteer for wildlife care. Raise a baby bird. Go to a reptile exhibit. Go fishing. Go to an anime convention. Go to a furry convention.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#224

Post by lhorie »

schoen wrote: post #187
munificent wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. I don't think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them. The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them: http://shirky.com/writings…

This is a great point! I've noticed a similar thing with Muir Woods in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are other amazing ancient redwood forests in several other places nearby (e.g. Samuel P. Taylor State Park, Redwood Regional Park, Joaquin Miller Park, the north side of Mount Tamalpais facing Fairfax, and several places along both sides of Skyline Drive along the peninsula -- probably among others that I don't kn…

I took advantage of the free redwood days last year and visited a bunch of state parks, and there's definitely a long list of hidden gems. Most just have the $10 parking fee and picnic tables are readily available.

The interesting observation is that choosing one of these parks consists of just going through a boring large list of parks in a boring old gov website and picking one at random. Whereas going to, say, Yosemite and finding sightseeing places largely involves going to google and/or local tourism guides and funnel the same way as everyone else (resulting in, as one might expect, arriving at spots crowded w/ tourists)

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#225

Post by cromwellian »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #223
cromwellian wrote: post #201

Travel tends to decrease xenophobia and increase empathy and cultural understanding among those who do it. I worry that some of the use of environmental impact is a "concern troll" cover to call for restrictions is the result of more deeply seated xenophobic feelings. Tourism is increasing because billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, especially Chinese, and now they want to experience what those in the…

I always find it really strange because chances are that by the time you get to the most touristy places you’ve utterly failed at expanding your mind to any real extent. Furthermore, it isn’t even necessary to travel- If you’re a city person, vacation on a farm where you pay to try and help out with the farm chores. If you’re a rural dweller live in a city like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago. If you live in the north, t…

It really depends on how you travel. Tour bus excursions are one thing, but when you're young, backpacking and biking through another country, or doing foreign exchange or student travel programs gives you much more exposure. Consider the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Programme in Europe for example.

However, even traveling to touristy places can expand your mind. I recently spent 3 weeks in Ecuador, it completely changed my mind about the country and burst all of my pre-conceived nations, and I say this as someone who has already been to Columbia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, et al.

For an American who thinks other countries are "shitholes" and that other people "live in huts", even a touristy tourbus experience can burst your bubble.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#226

Post by vkou »

homonculus1 wrote: post #164
mistermann wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You start passing bills on restricting tourism, then the natural next step is being hard on immigration, then Brexit. This is kind of an interesting comment if you overthink it, as I enjoy doing. By my reading, "then the natural next step is being hard on immigration" is a rather boldly axiomatic statement, as if being hard on immigration is _Wrong_, full stop. If others hold the opinion that ~open borders are a Go…

It's interesting that someone could recognize the harm caused by droves of temporary visitors to a desirable area, yet not make the simple extrapolation of those effects to unlimited permanent resettlement. I think that weird feeling OP is talking about is the cognitive dissonance from recognizing in person the need to keep from being overrun by outsiders, yet having a blind spot over the solution because its negatio…

I think it's weird to recognize the harm caused by unlimited permanent resettlement, without recognizing the harm caused by the existence of problematic current residents.

If we're going to start stack-ranking people based on how much harm they do where they live, quite a lot of locals in any particular area ought to be shown the boot.

This is why anti-immigration rhetoric tends to explicitly avoid trying to quantify the harm caused by immigrants. Much of the time, such a utilitarian calculus doesn't look great for the locals. Most immigrants tend to work harder, be more educated, do less crime, etc, etc...

(PS. If you tell me that it is morally wrong to let newcomers displace existing residents, I will point out that our society thinks it's perfectly reasonable for internal migrants to displace locals, when it comes to things like housing... Odd, that.)

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#228

Post by outside1234 »

bogomipz wrote: post #169
ptah wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they are looking at cutting down on oil https://www.worldoil.com/news/2019/9/10/voters-deliver-warni...

Well, the article states: "In March, the Norwegian government announced it will gradually divest its shares in companies engaged in the exploration and extraction of oil and gas. (But it will still invest in companies that refine and sell oil.)" I'm not really sure how you reconcile these two things - a policy of carbon footprint reduction while actively investing in companies whose business is predicated on oil cons…

Its green theater - they have no intention to actually do anything that will stop pumping the oil from Norway.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#229

Post by UnFleshedOne »

scarejunba wrote: post #130
mistermann wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You start passing bills on restricting tourism, then the natural next step is being hard on immigration, then Brexit. This is kind of an interesting comment if you overthink it, as I enjoy doing. By my reading, "then the natural next step is being hard on immigration" is a rather boldly axiomatic statement, as if being hard on immigration is _Wrong_, full stop. If others hold the opinion that ~open borders are a Go…

I think it’s just that people believe in the Veil of Ignorance. Why must I be given access and others excluded merely because of an accident of birth? Perhaps all citizenship should be tested into. You put everyone in an immigration queue, including people born in the country. Then you select the best according to a pre-existing rubric.

So that solution is to sort humanity and get best specimens to live in one place and send all the undesirables to somewhere already supposedly worse off?

I think if we go all the way into dystopian solutions, a fair one would be to run a lottery for every baby and send them to a random family in a random part of the world.

Wait...

(that's an honest "wait...", I set out to write a fair but very dystopian example and got to where we are now :))

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#230

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

magicalhippo wrote: post #59
ohduran wrote: post #24

Currently living in Barcelona, where 'overtourism' is a much bigger problem than in Norway IMHO, it feels weird. You start passing bills on restricting tourism, then the natural next step is being hard on immigration, then Brexit. The ability to control who goes in and who goes out usually falls on the hand of those that shouldn't have that kind of power. Edit: Removed "At the risk of being downvoted" as some comment…

> [...] in Barcelona, where 'overtourism' is a much bigger problem than in Norway IMHO [...] We do have quite a lovely but challenging nature here. We have lots of tourists who come here unprepared and some would likely been severely hurt or even died had it not been for volunteers from red cross etc helping them. As the number of tourists increase, we're likely to see more of these unprepared tourists. So it's not j…

I did Trolltunga last year and I was amazed to see the amount of miserable people who thought it would be ok to walk up the thing in tennis shoes and shorts. This was in May when there was still knee deep snow in a lot of places. People were taking their dogs too which is an absolutely brutish thing to do to the dog. For those who don’t know, it’s a 10 hour hike, half of which is basically straight up a mountain. Saw at least two people get airlifted off the mountain during my hike.

Norway does a decent job of informing people at least on the hike. When you start walking there are signs that say something like “if you are at this point and it’s after 2 pm, turn back around”

It’s definitely one of those “Instagram destinations” that attract this sort of behavior. At the actual rock there were a few people flying drones around to get pictures, blatantly disregarding “No drones” signs.

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