College Voices
Breaking Down Complexities Between Tourism Industry and Conservation
Travel has always been a way in which people, who can afford it, can educate themselves of areas of the world previously unknown to them, embrace new cultures, and return home with new perspectives.
However, as nature is destructed and greenhouse gases rise due to the wealthier side of the world using more than their fair share of energy, tourism becomes ever more complicated.
This is especially true for areas of the world with no native people who have no right to the land, so scientists and environmentalists advocate for conservation while others seek economic benefit.
For example, the freezing landscapes of Antarctica have almost entirely been reserved for scientists and the occasional group of explorers, like Ernest Shackleton’s failed expedition to cross the continent through the South Pole.
But now, tourism by gas guzzling sea vessels in Antarctica is on the rise. This tourism boom is met with the recent iceberg the size of Delaware breaking off of the continent, climate change’s “new poster child.”
“Increasing tourism in Antarctica is something we need to be mindful of, with all these ships burning fossil fuels,” John Durban told CNN.
Durban is a killer whale researcher from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who is conducting research in Antarctica as a guest of Lindblad Expeditions.
“There are a number of threats down here, ranging from the small-scale disturbance from tour ships to large-scale climate change,” he continued.
Emma Lammers, a rising junior at Bates College majoring in biology and English, discusses the effects of tourism combined with having a large carbon footprint in general.
“Hurting the environment comes with having a lot of money to hurt the environment,” she said.
The people who can afford tourist excursions like those to Antarctica (Lindbald Expeditions’ costs a minimum of $13,760 per person, with prices ranging to nearly $50,000) have a carbon footprint that is already disproportionately larger than people who don’t have that kind of money.
In May, Lammers went on a school trip to the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador, which, like Antarctica, is not home to any native people who have claims or rights to the land, and experienced a tourism boom in the early 2000s.
Today, 97 percent of the islands is a part of the Galápagos National Park, while the rest is divided among residents who make a living off of the tourism industry, tourists, and scientists, like Lammers, who come to study one of the most biologically rich and unique places on the planet.
Questions in these areas of the world arise: what rights do people have to land that is not home to natives? The scientists who want to conserve? Or people who are seeking opportunities through the tourism industry?
Do tourists have the right to even visit, due to the unsustainable nature of the tourism industry?
“If people from the United States had a significantly lower carbon footprint altogether then the United States citizens traveling to places like Antarctica, like the Galápagos wouldn’t seem as horrible,” Lammers said.
Especially in places like the Galápagos and Antarctica, where there are limited natural resources, so nearly everything–food, clothes, fuel, etc.–needs to be shipped in, increasing the energy consumption of visitors.
However, on the flip side, tourism is a benefit to not only the tourist but to the people benefitting from tourism, such as residents of the Galápagos who moved there for the opportunities tourism provides.
“I’m someone who cares about preserving beauty in the world but also who’s to say that the way I, as a white, Western-educated scientist, that the way I view the Galápagos Islands as this mecca of biological diversity that is nowhere else in the world, who’s to say that [my] view is more important than the view that the families that live there have [of the Islands],” she explains.
“It’s one thing to sit in a classroom and read about how important is to be an environmentalist and how important is to conserve things that are unique in the world but then it’s just a completely new understanding when you see it.”