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Comment by jfnixon | Hacker News Reader

I'm so old I can remember when people were encouraged to travel and buy experiences rather than goods, to meet different people and cultures, live outside one's comfort zone, and broaden one's horizons.

Now it is stay home, don't travel, don't eat meat, don't have kids, don't buy experiences or things. Ain't progress wonderful?

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Not everything scales. If you have 7 billion people that take two two week package holidays per year the planet will collapse. Now, we're not quite there yet but the strain is showing in many places and if we don't stop this then there won't be any tourist destinations left to visit.

Note that the number of people that make meaningful connections with the locals compared to the number of tourists is vanishingly small. You just can't do that when you fly in on Sunday evening and leave again a few days later. All you get to do is to rush from one photogenic site to another, maybe visit a museum and eat at the local versions of the chain stores from somewhere else.

I mostly agree but not with the last part. Eating local food made for locals is probably the most easily accessible genuine experience you can get when you travel for short periods of time.

>If you have 7 billion people that take two two week package holidays per year the planet will collapse

Slightly disagree with this. There's a lot of places where tourism should happen but doesn't. I've known a few people who raved about Syria, now obviously that's out of the question for tourists. Lots of African countries would make great tourist destinations but aren't safe enough to visit. In a world where every single person is able to take a two week holiday each year, we probably won't have as many poverty-stricken areas which aren't safe to visit.

Pollution caused by actually getting to places is another issue, but one that's slowly being solved.

Your second paragraph is on point. This is why when I travel I go to a new city for a month or more, and I live in exactly the type of places people are deriding in this thread (AirBnB) to live more like a local, not in a hotel. I am not there to be a tourist, although certainly my visa is a tourism visa and I'm counted in those numbers.

There's a huge difference in ecological impact and cultural impact of package tours where you have ~30 people following one guide with a flag sticking out of their back vs one person spending month+ in a place and minimizing their ecological impact. The one thing I haven't been able to do yet is stop flying, it's required both for work and for pleasure, but I do buy carbon offsets for air travel.

I just don't know how to clearly separate the types of activities I'm talking about without it automatically coming off as elitist when these types of discussions happen... it's not really fair, but the reality is that the Western world had enough various constraints that helped make tourism if not perfectly sustainable, relatively so. With Asia coming up we've added literally billions of potential new tourists to the pot and that's just not scalable. It's even very obvious to me, as I try to visit places which are not tourist destinations... and I visit off-season. I don't really care for tourism itself, I want to meet people and discover food. I go to these places to find not English dual-language, but Mandarin Chinese...

The impact can be more subtle. Personally I’m more worried about the individuals who don’t know anything about conservation going into these areas. Usually the tour groups follow a set route, limiting their impact. The grand canyon likely prefers you stay in the disneyland of the south rim where there are park rangers, trashcans, bathrooms, shuttles, and roads, rather than hike offtrail in the canyon and damage the more pristine ecology found there.

If you live in America, you can travel a ton and meet tons of different people and cultures and live outside one's comfort zome IMO. There are a ton of (unfortunately underserved) reservations to visit filled with peoples coming from a completely different history and culture. One can travel to a church of a religion one doesn't follow (jewish, sikh, buddhist, pagan, catholic, muslim...), go and worship with them in their sacred holidays. If you're from west, go east, and vice versa. If you're from the north, go south, and vice versa. There's BBQ competitions and dance competitions, buffalo wings and gumbo, rodeos and derbies, BDSM meets and city halls. Volunteer at an animal shelter. Volunteer at a planned parenthood. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Volunteer at a furry convention.

These will all broaden your horizons equally well as flying to another country. It's showing you your own country as an infinite fractal of human experience.

That's kind of a straw man. The type of tourism that would warrant congestion pricing isn't the one where people really get to "meet different people and cultures, live outside one's comfort zone, and broaden one's horizons" anyway.

Do you think a visit to the Louvre or del Prado doesn't expand horizons?

Both have opening times and entry tickets, they have very easy solutions. Venice doesn’t...

At a certain point people need to live in physical reality. The 'progress' of everyone going on vacation, eating meat, and building nuclear families was a momentary and unsustainable aberration fueled by willful ignorance of the damage we were causing.

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