||| FROM COUNTERPUNCH |||
A crowd of 3,000 anti-tourism protesters descended on posh downtown Barcelona last July, their demeanor one of delighted malice. They cordoned off hotels and eateries with hazard tape, as if demarcating a crime scene. They sprayed with water guns the blithe holidaymakers seated in restaurants. Video footage showed unhappy couples and glowering young men chased from their seats by the mob, stunned at the indignity.
The protesters shouted “tourists go home.” They held signs that said “Barcelona is not for sale.” They spoke of “mass touristification” and inveighed against the greed of restaurateurs and hoteliers and Airbnb landlords profiting from the madding crowd while the average Catalan struggled to meet the skyrocketing costs of daily life. One of the protesters told an interviewer, “The city has turned completely for tourists. What we want is a city for citizens.”
The revolt in Spain — resident population 47 million; yearly visitation 85 million — is no outlier in the hypervisited destination countries of Europe. In Greece and Italy, for example, residents also rose up this year to say they will accept no more the invasion of their native ground, as mass visitation strains to the breaking point infrastructure, natural resources – especially water – and, at last, social sanity.
It’s the culmination of years of exploitation and maltreatment, said writer Chris Christou, who produces “The End of Tourism” podcast. “In the last decade, especially in southern Europe,” Christou told me in an email, “we’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize —typically from the grassroots Left — against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.” Christou has documented the industry’s long train of offenses: environmental degradation; cultural appropriation and what he calls petrification (“the stasis or congealing of culture’s flow or growth”); spiraling economic inequality; the Airbnbization of dwelling; gentrification and displacement; corporate and government nepotism; the revolving door of corruption between tourism bureaus and industry; the rise of an extremely precarious labor force; and, not least, “the spectacled surveillance of place that effectively turns home, for local residents, into a turnstile Disneyland.”
Mainstream media during the summer figured out there was a story here. In the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Reuters, the scourge of “overtourism” made headlines for the first time. The images of thronged locales published across the web and in newspapers had the quality of Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings of hell: people piling on one another, grasping, motioning, their forms indistinguishable, as the newly empowered consumers of the burgeoning global middle-class swarm across Earth in record numbers.
There is no end in sight to this growth, as it appears to be the norm of fossil-fueled footloose modernity. In 1950 there were 25 million international tourist arrivals. Twenty years later the number had jumped to 166 million, by 1990 it was 435 million, and by 2018 it hit an all-time pre-Covid high of 1.442 billion. By 2030, almost 2 billion tourist arrivals are projected.
In Barcelona, the big money is not in maintaining a city for citizens but in the flux of Boschian creatures. Some 26 million visitors crammed into Barcelona in 2023 and spent nearly $14 billion. The Barcelona city council and the Catalan government dedicate millions of tax-payer euros to ensure this continual flow through global marketing campaigns that sing the city’s praises.
The pressures from hyper-visitation and the greed of those who profit from it have become so great that residents have formed the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, whose purpose is to reverse the toxic touristification process. The group’s co-founder, 48-year-old Barcelonan Daniel Pardo, described touristification as “a transformation enacted on a territory and a population” by governments in collusion with commercial interests. He believes that degrowth of tourism means regulating it nearly out of existence.
“It means not only regulating tourism markets but promoting other activities in order to reduce the weight of tourism in the economy of the city,” Pardo told me. Most important is the recognition of the almost pathological dependence on tourism in Barcelona and the many places like it. The city has been shown to be painfully vulnerable to any unexpected crisis that upends travel patterns.
“It happened with Covid,” said Pardo, “happened before that with a terrorist attack, and before that with a volcanic explosion in Iceland.” And it will happen, sooner or later, because of the climate crisis and unleashed geopolitical chaos. “Better than keeping on the tourism wheel, which smashes lives, territory and environment, let’s plan a transition process for Barcelona which reduces this risky dependance,” Pardo told me. “How? Not easy to say, since nobody is trying that almost anywhere.”
One place to start is with the ideological error in how we think of leisure travel as a right rather than a privilege.
“The right to fly does not exist. The right to tourism does not exist,” said Pardo recently on the End of Tourism podcast. “You cannot extend a model of tourism everybody thinks about to all the population. It’s impossible.” Pardo added in an email to me that the central issue is “about the limits of the planet, something so many people absolutely do not want to hear about.”
The tourism explosion can reasonably be explained by the IPAT math formula used in the ecological sciences. Intended to measure how endless growth of modern industrial civilization strains a finite Earth, the formula states that impact equals population times affluence times technology.
With IPAT in mind, one could argue that too many would-be travelers with newly acquired affluence have access to new technologies. Easy online bookings and guides, smartphones in general for facilitating and smoothing the travel experience, high-quality digital photography and video equipment made available for use by amateurs on social media, with its influencers driving place-based envy and desire — all this combines in a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.
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“. . . a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.” Wow! Ouch! Well-put, though! (Retired 25-year innkeeper/kayak guide here!)
People are curious and will come no matter what.
One quiet morning wearing my birthday suit while on Waldron I was shaving when I hear noises outside below. Ipeeked out the window and there stood two couples at our door. Seeing me (my head) one called up,”Can we come in and look around?” I said it was an inconvenient time, and they drifted back down our path.
Jonathan Swiftian acid gets one nowhere. It put him in an asylum. Regulation of sorts, maybe. A booklet of island expectations would make more sense. Waldron has for new property owners . I recommend one for tourists. Because no matter what you do, they will come. Let’s be civilized, but be clear.
You miss the point. It’s not about one or two tourists trespassing where they don’t belong, (and you know this). It’s about a policy that continues to promote for more when we already have to many. Tourism is not a problem… overtouiism is, (did you not read the article).
As always Mr. Appel, the WISDOM of common sense.
(Brevity: I get a message that a minimum of 60 characters is needed to post this, so here we are)
Common sense tells us, just as the Aspen / Nantucket Report forewarned us decades ago, that if we don”t change the direction that we’re going that we’re going to turn out no different than the place where I moved here from, and from the places that were named in the article. We’re already there, it’s just that there are some who refuse to see it. “Willful ignorance” is the term that comes to mind.
If “People are curious and will come no matter what” is what you deem is common sense, then common sense might also say that we don’t need to spend so much effort, energy, and money on promoting for more.
Recommending “A booklet of island expectations would make more sense,” is something that the county already does in their stewardship plan. The mention of it is merely comparing apples to oranges, (Bill fully knows this but is trying to minimize and sideline the real issue).
If stating, “Because no matter what you do, they will come” is what you consider common sense, then again, common sense might also say that we don’t need to spend as much money and energy promoting for more as we do.
Did you read the article Phil? Do you not see the parallels between here, Madrid, and (if you read the whole article) Moab? Do you not believe that overtourism is unhealthy for small communities, or perhaps you make money off of it and just don’t care. Which is it?
Inquiring minds want to know… do you yourself have anything to say that would even come close to bordering common sense?
I’d like to promote the word “we” in these discussions. Use of the word “you” may be cathartic, but it draws people apart at the very time, and on the very issues, we need to discuss this together to arrive at a solution no one will say is perfect but all except extremists (for which there is no cure) will say provides a balance that brings us together, not apart.
You can promote whatever you want. I was talking to Phil.
Taking the “whatever happens will happen” approach that you champion Bill may sound like wisdom and common sense to the good old boys, the property rights advocates, the realtors, the visitors bureau, the vacation rental crowd, and the investment minded, but it reeks of the resignation of the status quo… hardly a solution seeking approach. It is just the opposite. It serves to minimize the issues that are relative to the debate, and is akin to burying one’s head in the sand.
Point well taken Mr. Appel, I’ll keep it in mind. But when there is no consensus and we are divided, meaningful discussion needs some means to recognize the division.
A micro economy, by its nature must reflect local assets and needs determined by entrepreneurs to form organic, progressively elaborated and viable enterprises. It is their interests, vision, dreams, enthusiasm, energy and commitment that create a local economy. It will not come from the top down.
Our elected leaders may deem production of widgets to be a swell idea, provide grant money, expertise, facilitate permits, solicit enthusiasm and employ personnel, but without sound management and most of all a market for widgets, the widget factory is doomed to failure. How many businesses have opened in Eastsound only to close six months later despite the wholehearted entrepreneurial dream of their owners? Nuff said.
I’m not concerned with Barcelona, or England with pitchforks and torches. I am concerned with scofflaws who disregard the 14th Amendment. In my generation it was the lodestone, the ideal – equal protection for all, some didn’t have it but we the people mobilized to ensure that we would have a level playing fields going forward and that we, each of us, would be secure in our lives, liberty and property.
Our American experiment in Capitalism created unparalleled prosperity to the benefit of all, yes all, where do we think taxes and donations come from? Not from a printing press, that’s just currency. Money, real money is more that paper it is value including stored value. Inflation reflects the intentional degradation of that value by printing more currency than value justifies. And who controls the printing press?
But I digress, we would all know this if our educational system didn’t rank 33rd in the world. “Give me a generation of your children…….”
“I’m not concerned with Barcelona, or England with pitchforks and torches.” In other words, you didn’t read the article.
“I am concerned with scofflaws who disregard the 14th Amendment.” I might remind you that civil disobedience IS civil defense. The U.S. Constitution itself, the basic premise of which was founded upon the principle of, and upholds the right enabling an educated public to resist policies created by state, corporate, or venture capitalist entrepreneurs, (but then, I repeat myself), policies which, in spite of what you claim, have lead to unparalleled prosperity for some, but do not serve the best interests of the majority. Doing so is as American as apple pie.
“How many businesses have opened in Eastsound only to close six months later despite the wholehearted entrepreneurial dream of their owners?” As the article states, and as we have witnessed over and over throughout time, a tourism based economy is a fragile economy. It’s one that is highly susceptible to downturns in either the economy or upheavals in social order… and during each of the, now predictable economic downswings, tourism-based economies are known to be hit harder and take longer to recover than other, more socially and environmentally sustainable business models. Our tourism dominant economic model has led our island communities hosting more restaurants, art galleries, massage therapists, vacation rentals, and cheesy tourist shops within only a few square blocks than many counties and cities have in their entirety. Promoting a business model in a limited-season economy with less competition and more year round businesses serving the local population would help overcome this. Though it does perhaps serve our dominant tourism-based economic policy well, lacking a method which could measure this in a wholistic manner does not serve SJC’s best long-term interests. “How many businesses have opened in Eastsound only to close six months later despite the wholehearted entrepreneurial dream of their owners?” You ask the wrong question. By doing so, and as we all know, “when you ask the right questions the answers don’t matter.”
If you don’t read you don’t know. It’s maddening trying to talk to people whose myopic viewpoints continue to justify the need for economy at the expense to our shared environment, (that which allows us to live). There’s voluminous information out there as well as anecdotal information all around us that confirms the fact that whenever consensus is reached in the debate between environment and economy… that piece by piece, the environment will always lose. We now live in an age proving that this ensures, in the long run… that eventually everybody will lose.
What would we all know if our education system didn’t rank 33rd in the world? We would realize that, in this world, there’s no such thing as a level playing field. We would learn that measuring success in a world of infinite growth on a finite planet by measuring GDP and accumulation of wealth, and heralding “the economy as the most important thing” serves as nothing more than a distraction from larger, more important issues, and in doing so simply enables and amplifies the gargantuan problems that we face as a society today. What would we all know if we were more educated? We would come to the realization that measuring societal progress and success within such a narrow framework is killing us.
There are those that read, and those that don’t. Instead of having to start the debate over and over and over again at the most basic level for those void of facts, I suggest that reading this article would be a good starting point. Likewise, this is 2024 and we have a computer at our very fingertips. It is the greatest source of accumulated knowledge that the world has ever known. In light of this, those suggesting to others that they are wrong when they are neither listening to the other side of the debate or educating themselves on the issue, as self-gratifying as their willful ignorance may be, represents the epitome of arrogance.
Phil, as you seemingly danced around the subject once before, I must ask you once again, “You are aware that we’re in the grips of climate change and ecological overshoot, what many deem to be the sixth great mass extinction… aren’t you?” Citing, as you already have, that this has happened to the earth before, (although as you also admitted, during non-human eras), and that cockroaches will survive and adapt, seems a bit off-target, and hit me as being a shallow and meaningless response. I meant it as an honest question, and felt that it deserved an honest reply. Speaking for myself, an aware human being who is trying hard to limit my own ecological footprint, and trying equally hard to influence others around me and lobby our county council to do the same… I truly believe that in doing so I’m acting within my constitutional rights, and that this is also in the best long-term interests of our island communities.
In the spirit of worldwide community, MJ
“Our American experiment in Capitalism created unparalleled prosperity to the benefit of all, yes all” — not “all” because it doesn’t include prosperity for the natural world. In fact, our American experiment has destroyed most of the old growth forest in this country; destroyed 99% of the tall and short grass prairies; destroyed all but a few thousand buffalo that used to roam the country by the millions; completely destroyed keystone species like the passenger pigeon that used to fly American skies by the billions (yes billions); all but destroyed beavers, prairie dogs, wolves, grizzlies, mountain lions, sage-grouse, ocelots, North Atlantic right whales, marbled murrelets, etc. (the list is LONG); and poisoned the entire Earth with the thousands of toxic chemicals invented and distributed by American companies.
The natural world isn’t afforded “due process and equal protection under the law” although corporations are. The natural world is considered “property” not living landscapes and sentient beings with their own thoughts and feelings about being treated as “resources” and “property” — much like slaves — for the prosperity of one species at the expense of every other species. Money is a stand in for energy and those “resources” we like to pretend are ours for the taking. And this American experiment is rapidly converting the living to the dead.
For all who might have forgotten, thanks to an education that completely ignores ecology and pretends that “the economy” is a closed-loop system, humans are animals who depend on a flourishing web of life. Converting the living to the dead is not an economy with a future. We might want to keep this in mind.
And yes, I’m happy to be an extremist for whom there is no cure. We live in extreme times, and the viable options for a future are rapidly closing as the sixth mass extinction continues apace and our human brains collect more and more plastic. Extreme times call for extreme measures. And if we aren’t willing to take them ourselves, they will be forced upon us.
And there we have it.
The topic of the article is local pushback against tourism.
My point is that our micro economic environment has been, and probably will continue to be, one of entrepreneurial supply to meet local demand, i.e. Econ. 101. The commentary responds in part to my opinions regarding legal constraints made on a different post, so it’s disingenuous to suggest that I am bound by this specific article when others are not.
The hard truths I provide are sufficient rebuttal to subsequent comments that appear to be emotional, pedantic, mind numbing, monotonous repetitions of tired “reasons” why the status quo must change. OK step beyond the utopian visions and step up with viable business plans that will employ the population. Visions of a perfect world won’t put food on the table or pay the bills. Hard times require hard choices and we’re entering hard times.
Just my observations and opinions as a counterbalance to the constant drumbeat, We should all celebrate the freedom that allows diverse opinions to be read and considered by the community at large, thank you Lin.
I too appreciate the freedom we have to express our opinions–and do not take that lightly. Thank you Lin!
I’m curious Phil why you think we are entering hard times since you’ve said that “Our American experiment in Capitalism created unparalleled prosperity to the benefit of all.” Capitalism is roaring along, so you’d think that would be creating ever more prosperity for all.
So, I’d like to hear more about these “hard times” during the time of “prosperity for all”. Thank you.
You can believe that if you want Phil… I don’t.
Capitalism, like unabated tourism, is like a cancer, it is designed to consume all. Balance would entail limits. That’s basic reality 101.
There’s a lot of heat here, but not a lot of light. As Phil points out, the details are missing. The result is a thesis entitled “How to Modify Capitalism to Save Community and the Planet.” But the pages are blank. I don’t say this for argument. I think everyone has known that there were problems with capitalism well before Charles Dickens.
Think a moment. In a fit of generosity, you sell your house at a substantial discount to a young and needy couple. They hug you and promptly flip the house to a speculator for full price. There are ways to stop this that I won’t go into, but they are the tools of distrust. Don’t blame capitalism. Capitalism exists even in the most rigid prison systems. Only the means of exchange and the penalties and rewards differ from the outside.
Nor are we about to look up into the sky, see the light, and be transformed. It has more to do with the creatures we are than the system as a system whose common sense was unbeatable described by Adam Smith in his 18th Century work “Wealth of Nations,” and possibly by others even earlier.
Limits are a good idea, but they can have unintended consequences. What, besides bucolic dreaming, would the economy of our county look like without tourism, or with a calculated amount? Tourism does have one facet that other economic efforts don’t: local industries can export products, art and ideas while complying with limitations on what gets extracted from these islands. In contrast, our county serves or seeks to serve the whole world by bringing people whose physical and social extractive habits are in no wise constrained. I salute the Visitors Bureau and county for their effort to educate our visitors most of whom are careful and friendly people. But if any further steps are contemplated, heat will not provide the answer. And blaming capitalism may be cathartic, but it’s a dead end.
Specifics anyone?
Why do you keep framing the narrative as if “tourism” is the problem… when it isn’t? I know why, it’s no different than pointing your finger and saying “You just don’t like tourism.” Over-tourism is a problem. Just like growth. Growth is not a problem, but overgrowth is. You, and people like you continue supporting this false narrative… that’s what gets us nowhere. I’ve given my suggestions (are you not reading?). It’s not up to the citizenry to find the solutions for problems created by and perpetuated by those who support and promote the status quo, (yourself being one of them). But it is dutiful for people, like myself, to let people know where this is going if we don’t change.
As you know, and are ignoring, is the fact that there are many examples of communities that have enacted limits on growth and tourism… some as close as Anacortes.
What pray tell, is going to happen if we don’t do anything? That is a better question. And there are many examples of that to look for as well.