I’m Just Here for the Keychains…
Hello Travellers!
In our last Sustainable Saturday series, we got down to the most basic definition of what “sustainable tourism” really means- (Maintainable for-fun travel, for you Sparknotes folks) -and we left wondering… if there are tourism resources that we have to manage, what are they, and how do we do it?
I think the simplest way to figure out what our tourism resources are, is to think about, what are the things we need for there to be a tourism industry? Again, we’re talking the most basic building blocks… let’s think….
You might be thinking, okay, Hannah, you just described… like… EVERYTHING. How can everything be what is required for tourism!?
Not to get too philosophical on you, friends, but what is travel if it’s not our purest form of reaching out and experiencing the world -be it culturally or in nature?
How can it not include, well… everything?
I think we can all agree that there are some forms of travel that are more insular than others (and I might be roused to say that the more insulated travel experience the less sustainable it is, as none of us are meant to live in a vacuum -it goes against the very laws of nature) but whether you’re lounging poolside at a resort with a personal butler attending to your every whim, or camping totally off-grid in the backcountry, you’re relying on a number of the resources I just mentioned.
If the foundation of sustainable tourism is that we manage these resources so that we can continue to travel for fun, what does it mean then to maintain people, places and things? Can how we travel today really burn out these resources?
Let’s take a look at some specific examples of where, yes, these travel resources hit a point where changes HAD to be made, or we would lose them.
There are some great examples when it comes to places. One that comes to mind is the city of Venice.
Wait, we were gonna “lose” Venice?!
A little Venetian refresher: Venice, Italy has been around since the early 400’s (yes, FOUR hundreds, we’re talking 1600 years of history!) and is built across 100 and some islands in the Venice lagoon, which are linked together by bridges and those iconic canals. However, the size of Venice’s city center, the old city, is estimated to be only about twice the size of Central Park in New York City.
Venice’s lagoon is relatively shallow, but channels have been dug to accommodate ships entering and docking at the heart of the old city.
For a long time this has included massive cruise ships, carrying anywhere between 2,000 to over 6,000 passengers at one time. When all of these travellers disembark and flood the relatively small city center, the overcrowding becomes a real problem for residents. And because cruise passengers generally only spend a few hours in a city, these thousands of people contribute relatively little to the local economy. In fact, the city center has seen more and more regular shops and services close in favor of souvenir shops aimed to appeal to short-term tourists.
While other Italian cities continue to grow, Venice has seen a steady decline in population since 1980. Many argue that to live in Venice is just too expensive, and that the city’s catering to tourists has contributed to its decline in being a place where real people actually live.
It makes you wonder, at what point does a place cease to be an authentic cultural center, and become a spot where we buy keychains commemorating the sort of place it used to be?
Overtourism aside, evidence has been mounting for years that the entrance of massive cruise ships into Venice’s port is contributing to the erosion of the city’s very foundations, putting the city in danger of some very real physical damage.
2020’s peak pandemic period gave Venice a moment of reprieve from the constant tourism churn and gave city officials a new perspective. During this quiet period, it became clear that this type of short-term tourism was doing more harm than good for the city, and that if a solution wasn’t found, Venice’s cultural identity and even its very structure, would be lost.
This type and level of tourism was no longer sustainable.
So what was the solution? Well, it’s not that Venice wants to do away with all tourism, or even all visitors entering by cruise ships. But what could be done to lessen the impact on the city, while encouraging a longer visit, with a slower travel style?
In August of last year, 2021, the city officially banned all but the smallest boutique cruise ships from entering the lagoon and docking in Venice. Instead of thousands of passengers disembarking at once, we’re talking maybe a few hundred now. Not only do these boats carry fewer travellers, they typically stay in ports for a lot longer, because the focus is less on what passengers are doing on the ship and more on where they’re visiting. Plus, these ships are obviously having a much smaller impact on the lagoon and the city foundations as well.
The city has also adopted some guidelines that they wish to pass on to visiting tourists in hopes that all travellers will experience the city more like a local -encouraging getting off the beaten path, checking out local artisan shops and trying Venetian cuisine, visiting local festivals, and even sharing some basic information that tourists may not know, like, what side of the street to walk on, that one shouldn’t stop to stand on the bridges, etc., so that life may flow like normal on the streets and in the squares of Venice.
Venice is not the only place to have seen the threat of overtourism and decided to deal with it during the pandemic’s tourism lull. Key West, Florida, the southernmost island of the Florida Keys is also a cruise port for some of these major cruise ships.
A little context, Key West is about 4 miles long and 1 mile wide. They have three piers -two city-owned and one privately owned. Imagine several thousand people pouring onto the island at once, as many as 21 times per week!
Residents didn’t have to imagine it, they’d lived it and they didn’t like it. In November 2020, residents voted overwhelmingly to limit the number of cruise ships allowed to dock at the island per week, restrict the number of passengers able to disembark at 1,300, and only allow cruise lines with strong environmentally responsible track-records to dock. This ordinance was challenged and overrode by Florida’s governor and state legislature, and the last year and a half has seen the Key West City Council struggling to find a compromise.
Currently, the privately-owned (by a nearly million dollar donor to the Florida state governor’s political committee -just pointing that out!) Pier B has gone back to business as usual, and perhaps unsurprisingly many of the first cruise ships to return to the island were met by protestors. While the city commissioners uphold their end of the voters decision for the city’s piers, Pier B continues to host a cruise ship a day and has already seen as many as 3000 passengers unload on the tiny island at once.
That battle wages on…
On the other side of the States, Hawaii has been quietly undergoing a significant shift in tourism policy the past two years towards what they are calling “community-based” tourism.
Community-based tourism seeks to put the local community in the driver’s seat, instead of a third-party tourism operation that has no local ties to the environment or culture of Hawaii, except for turning a profit. Instead, Hawaiians are shifting the focus to tourism experiences created, owned and operated by locals, ensuring that the people who actually live in Hawaii are those benefiting from tourism dollars, and ensuring visitors are getting the sorts of experiences and insights into Hawaiian culture and history that are authentic, and not just created to entertain.
Locals also have a more vested interest in preserving the environment that they live in than, say, most large chain resorts looking to capitalize on some beachfront property.
Anyone who has visited Hawaii knows it is a special place -and not just because of the sunshine and that the air smells like flowers! Hawaiians recognized that large-scale tourism was cutting locals out of the decision making process and turning the islands into places that catered to tourists, without focusing on what actually MAKES Hawaii special. The solution? Go small, go local, let the community lead.
Our very last example of “place” as a resource in need of responsible management is our National Park System. Where Venice, Key West, and Hawaii saw a decline in tourism during the peak pandemic period, our National Parks saw a major upsurge, as folks looked to ways they could travel, be outdoors, and be socially-distanced. This flight to nature suddenly put a huge strain on our parks system -from staffing to waste management to the very infrastructure of our parks.
Many national parks are protecting fragile ecosystems, and often visitors are asked to stay on designated paths to protect these ecosystems. A lot of visitors to the parks in the past two years were new visitors to the parks system, and not familiar with Leave No Trace principles or the importance of why parks ask visitors to follow certain rules. The parks quickly realized that they would need to step it up in terms of signage, presence of park rangers to provide guidance and explanation, and general education and outreach, to help first-time visitors and those with little outdoor experience visit the parks safely -not just for the environment and wild residents of the parks, but for the visitors too!
The increase in visitors also meant major overcrowding in some of the most popular parks. Miles long traffic jams on park roads and full to capacity parking lots with no end of cars searching for a space, makes for an unusable park and an unenjoyable visit. In an effort to manage this, some of the parks have implemented a reservation system for the high season, and require visitors to pre-register their visit, so that the parks can be kept at a manageable capacity.
We keep seeing that some of the main themes when it comes to managing the tourism resource of “place” is the idea that both a place’s unique identity or it’s actual, physical structure can be threatened when too many people are visiting at once, and that the sustainable solution is to maintain that flow so that it can be a smaller, steady stream instead of a massive deluge.
We’ve also seen that local people are more positively impacted and visitors are better able to enjoy a place when this flow is managed. Everyone benefits!
Lastly, we see a common thread of educating visitors about a place, so that it can be preserved. You don’t know, what you don’t know!
If you find yourself saying, “Hannah, I don’t feel like I’m benefiting if I can’t drive up to Yosemite National Park this summer and go right in!” That’s true. You would find yourself limited there... To that I would say, “But the world is wide and beautiful. There’s much to see and do still in that part of California! You’re suddenly open to all sorts of new adventures!”
We have just have to remember, limits don’t mean we’re not allowed, we’re not welcome. It just means we’re not all allowed at the same time. I think everyone can appreciate and understand that idea.
(And maybe your trip just requires some advance planning, and I think I know where you can find that -WINK WINK). ;D
Alright, that’s enough for one day. Next Sustainable Saturday, let’s tackle people! Well, not tackle people, but you know what I mean. We have to get through talking about these resources, friends, because I am so eager to tell you about Tapestry Travel’s 2022 Sustainable Travel Initiatives, which is the dessert at the end of this multi-course meal!
Save room, you’re going to need it.
Happy Trails, Travellers!
Hannah <3