It seems there's nowhere tourists can't or won't go, except space and the bottom of the sea, and Richard Branson is trying to take tourists into space. One company is even promising rides to the moon by 2030!
Part of the problem is the unique combination of human population growth (out of control right now as the world plunges headlong towards 10 billion in the next decade - the single greatest negative environmental factor on the planet, but something no politicians want to talk about), increasing levels of per capita income as we "grow our economies", and ease of access to fast travel. As a consequence people are saying "take a cruise and hang the consequences" as the vast ocean liners pollute the oceans or ruin Venice.
Two images I saw recently summed up tourist overcrowding to perfection.
1. In a photography magazine recently there was a picture of a landscape scene in New Zealand (the Wanaka Tree is one, but this was another site) where tourists with IPhones are queuing for hours to get "the shot". Anyone who has been to parts of the Grand Canyon or Yosemite will have seen similar things. One professional photographer turned his camera from the scene to take a picture of hundreds of tourists in a queue to walk to the edge of a narrow ledge and have their photo taken looking into the abyss. It might well have been a parable of what excessive tourism is doing to the world!
2. The other and much more famous image is the one below of a conga line of "tourist" climbers trying to tick off their bucket list climb of the world's highest mountain. There is a very good article in The Good Weekend on this very subject. It's well worth the read.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/moun ... 52gnz.html
It quote Australian mountaineer Greg Mortimer:
Do people have so much disposable cash that it drives them mad? I too dreamed of climbing Everest in my youth, but I didn't want to mortgage my future to do it. Some people today are doing just that. And it's not just the bodies that litter Everest. The place is a veritable trashcan now and an open air toilet. It's so disgusting that I'm inclined to believe they should follow the Uluru model and close the mountain to climbing. It is after all Chongolongma - the sacred mountain. This is one more example of how tourism started as a spiritual pilgrimage and ended in a disgusting grab for cash.But the picture of the conga line of climbers on the southern summit ridge depressed Mortimer. “This guided climbing thing has flipped into madness,” he says. At 8848 metres, the top of Everest is well into the so-called “death zone”, where the atmosphere holds at best only one-third as much oxygen as at sea level. Bottled oxygen partially compensates, but climbers who encounter long delays are at risk of emptying their canisters. “Above 8000 metres, anyone is hovering on a knife-edge between life and death,” Mortimer says. “If you’ve got to wait in a bloody queue, you’re knocking on heaven’s door.”
It will only be a matter of time before locals start to close off large tracts of the world to visitors - unless tourists begin to ask themselves whether all this incessant travel is doing any good for the world at all. Maybe we would be better off to stay and spend our money locally. That would make our businesses more sustainable and protect the earth as well.
