Tourism: GREEN TRAGEDY [View All]

Tourism: GREEN TRAGEDY

David Nicholson-Lord

Tourism is by some estimates the world’s biggest industry; it’s certainly among the fastest-growing, and few believe the events of 11th September 2001 will cause anything more than a downward blip on a steep upward curve. In 1950 there were around 25 million international tourist visits. Currently there are around 700 million. By 2020 there will be around 1.6 billion.

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Which leads on neatly to the third paradox, the idea that tourism confers vast but intangible social benefits. This notion takes many forms, from the adage that travel ‘broadens the mind’ to the principle of ‘world peace through travel’ — the motto, remarkably, of the Hilton hotel chain. Most people perceive the reality to be otherwise. Indeed, it would be hard to conceive of an industry with more potential for misunderstanding and conflict, particularly in the developing world. Throughout much of Asia, Africa and South America, tourism cruelly exposes the fault lines of global economic inequality. Most interactions between tourists and local people revolve round ‘the cash nexus’ — they are only about money.

THE FEUDAL NORTH–SOUTH relationships characteristic of tourism are hardly likely to increase international understanding. And there are two further distinctive features that seem almost guaranteed to increase resentment. First, unlike most other industries, which keep their raw material decently out of harm’s way inside factories or offices, tourists get everywhere, often in large numbers; people who gain no benefit from tourism must thus suffer its consequences. And second, in its drive to ‘broaden the mind’, tourism seeks out the richness and strangeness of other cultures, and routinely, inexorably, destroys them. There is the phenomenon labelled ‘staged authenticity’, in which a local cultural tradition, once celebrated for its own sake and out of a belief in its intrinsic value, turns into a tourist spectacle and thus, insidiously, into a performance.

In Thailand, for example, under the impact of dollar-driven tourism strategies and with the collaboration of local hoteliers and chambers of commerce, old festivals have expanded beyond recognition, and new ones have been conjured up spuriously from history or simply transplanted from abroad — Chiang Mai, bizarrely, now celebrates Mardi Gras. The city’s flower festival in February — "rooted in history", the brochures would have you believe — didn’t exist twenty years ago. Buddhist ceremonies have become such a tourist draw that the most important local temple, Doi Suthep, last year announced plans to charge foreign nationals $3 for entrance. In one sense, you could argue, it’s harmless enough — like the hill tribe women donning their indigenous finery to sell baubles or the local administration instructing staff to wear regional costume in the office. What’s wrong with dressing up and pretending? Isn’t that what they do in Disneyland? Equally, it’s not what it purports to be. It has undergone a subtle interior change, into a branch of commercial culture, of marketing.

http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/lord212.htm