Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
This even affects Mount Everest where people are literally dying just to say they stood at the top of the world. And Everest simply can't support the number of climbers now.
You see this in US national parks where the obvious ones (eg Yosemite) are arguably oversubscribed while others you could probably go days without seeing anyone.
There's a certain lack of imagination here. Some of it is convenience. Take Everest. People climb it because it's the tallest and people know what it is. There are ~14 other peaks over 8000 meters. Are any of these qualitatively worse experiences? Probably not. But... bragging rights.
Solutions to this fall into a number of buckets:
1. Making it more expensive: some will complain only the rich can go and this is unfair.
2. Quotas: you have to book far, far in advance and no doubt this is unfair to some people.
3. Lottery system: this is really a variation of quotas but probably fairer.
So I've been to Paris like 4 times. I like it but my God the touristy places are a nightmare such that I basically never went to any. Honestly the best part for me was the bread. The sandwiches you'd buy on the street were unbelievably good.
Anyway, I honestly don't understand this need people have to jam in with 100,000 other people just to see some famous building. Maybe that's just me.
I was fortunate enough to spend a gap year traveling around the world, and one of the lessons I learned quickly was that I have little interest in "iconic" destinations. I can distinctly remember when I made this realization: I was in Oia Santorini at sunset, which I had decided to go to because I had seen amazing photos of this secluded town on a cliffside overlooking the sun go down over the Aegean. But while the view was beautiful, the reality of that moment was a thousand other tourists elbowing their way to a good vantage point to take the same picture which had been taken a million times before. There was even a newly married couple who was standing there dejected: they had apparently gone to that point to take wedding photos, but discovered it would obviously be impossible.
I still like to travel, but please keep me miles away from anything famous.
Even on Santorini, which is tiny, I was able to find nice places that weren't completely crowded.
I went in late October when weather in other parts of Europe was bad anyways, and there were many tourists, but still an OK amount, not what you’re describing.
It was amazing so actually I want to go back some time to show it to my parents.
Or as in this case, a cabal of people for the travel industry managing to capture public funds to direct massive subsidies towards their goals, either directly or indirectly though avoid pricing in massive externalities and even get massive tax benefits.
Everyone who wants to climb Everest pays in 100 bucks to register. Winner has to pony up another 900 for the permit, and fines for leaving material on the mountain. Spend the net profit on cleaning up after the people who already left shit on the mountain.
But here's another alternative that also fixes it:
To get a permit to climb Everest, you have to have spent some hundreds of hours volunteering for the crew doing cleanup. You'd see the lower 70% of the route multiple times before it was ever your turn. You'll get a hint of how you respond to altitude + cold. You'll understand what a flying pain in the ass it is to clean up after asshole climbers. You will also go farther up Everest than most people ever will, and you'll be reducing the human footprint in the process.
http://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2018/12/17/how-much-does-it-...
https://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/programs-and-services/... has a required number of hours per year to get - and retain - an allotment. It's meant to reduce entropy and keep the waiting list a bit shorter. A couple of things on this list https://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/programs-and-services/... can get you your hours in faster, which bumps you up a little bit in the queue. I'd like to see that ramp more aggressively but that would discriminate against blue collar workers.
Everest doesn't have that problem, though. Climbing it is, in many ways, a statement of privilege already. If you issued permits to the 100 people with the most volunteer hours in that year, you'd solve a whole host of problems.
All the while transport to the edge of the world is a real problem in terms of emissions - both for flight and by boat.
Less wealthy travelers go at odd times, they live in hostels and have "worse" experiences.
The only difference in this case is that the country is also directly profiting from this demand.
Ultimately, let's be honest: we want the most number of people to be able to experience these things (I fortunately went to most of these places before the recent boom and I think they're wonderful) while ensuring that the cost to the environment isn't catastrophic. That means some people can't go. We can pick some mechanism but it will necessarily exclude some people. The money is the best selection mechanism because we can use it at pretty high granularity on preserving the thing that is bearing the cost, but any substitute that serves the purpose does just as well.
The key magic is that with money we can undo some damage. That's what makes it a useful thing to auction on.
Maybe 400-500 people packed just to say they were there, or maybe wait in hopes of getting a clear shot. All of this just to brag in social media.
I think the problem would be better if people didn't brag on social media about every single place they go to.
The USSR tried to build the New Soviet Man for only what, 70 years...
Those 400-500 people were just staying there, with many blocking the street – you know, the thing people walk on?
Banning photos might be an unconventional but effective way to have people actually experience more of the place they visit and for places to be less overrun.
I don't think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them.
The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them:
http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
Instagram has caused these power law distributions to escape media onto the real world. While there are millions of delightful vacation destinations, most people never hear about most of them. Instead, a tiny minority of the most photogenic one (like Trolltunga, mentioned in the article), consume almost all of the attention and then net a huge, unmanageable number of visitors. For every Everest, there are a hundred mountains that are 90% as beautiful but only get 10% of the visitors.
I believe this is one of the fundamental, structural problems of the modern age. Most of the information we consume — literally the knowledge we base our worldview on — is now brought to our attention based on social media sharing and aggregation. The nature of those systems takes a linear range of "relevance" and distorts it into power law that no longer matches reality. But because this is our window into reality, we then take the result of that distortion at face value.
I would love to see more systems engineered to try to balance that. Perhaps a Twitter-like system that capped the number of followers you had. A recommendation engine that subtracted out the effect of popularity when ranking. But so far I don't see many. I'm not sure if it's because it's not what people want, not what advertisers want, or what.
(The great thing about knowing that this effect happens is that you can often easily acquire a better-than-average experience by deliberately stepping a little farther towards the long tail. The third best restaurant in a city is usually almost as good as #1 but noticeably cheaper. The second-most popular hike will give you 80% of the view with 20% of the crowds.)
OK, the redwood trees in them might be only 80% as old and tall, the United Nations might not have been founded inside them, and some of them might have only 6 km of trails through the forest rather than 10 km. But many of these places are often nearly deserted, have no entrance fee, are a quicker and less twisty drive from San Francisco, and are incredibly majestic, peaceful, and spectacular.
Meanwhile, Muir Woods had to introduce a rationing and permit system to visit by private car or public bus (https://gomuirwoods.com/), and along the main trail on the valley floor you are basically never out of sight of other visitors during a weekend or holiday.
I've reserved a picnic area inside an ancient redwood grove for an upcoming birthday picnic.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/lake-lagunitas-fairfax
OK, it's definitely no Muir Woods, but it's just 6 km north of Muir Woods and you can reserve the area for a small fee on a weekend during the summertime.
I think the power-law effects you describe have been true of tourism forever. Muir Woods has attracted dramatically more tourists than the MMWD or EBMUD redwood groves for decades. But I also think you're right that the Internet is accelerating them, because you can hear about where to go via discovery mechanisms that so drastically and rapidly reward pre-existing popularity.
(If you live in or visit the Bay Area, check out https://www.marinwater.org/175/Directions-Maps-to-Watershed-... and https://www.ebmud.com/recreation/east-bay/east-bay-trails/ for information about hiking in -- often -- redwood forests owned by municipal water districts in reservoir watersheds, or https://www.marinwater.org/DocumentCenter/View/156/Map_Marin... for a map of all public lands in Marin County.)
The interesting observation is that choosing one of these parks consists of just going through a boring large list of parks in a boring old gov website and picking one at random. Whereas going to, say, Yosemite and finding sightseeing places largely involves going to google and/or local tourism guides and funnel the same way as everyone else (resulting in, as one might expect, arriving at spots crowded w/ tourists)
Yes, they are an emergent property any time you have a communication network where people rebroadcast information based on their preference, but restricted to the set of choices they are aware of.
But I believe the exponent of the power curve increases as the amount of resharing goes up. Before social media, you were still limited by what travel books you saw in a store, or where your friends went on vacation, but there was less reverberation and resonance in the network and a relatively flatter power curve.
> http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
I really hope this post was self aware.
That's a pretty interesting idea. Get the stuff that's really particular to your interests, undiluted by what's just generally popular.
Is that really better? I think I like the current system. Sure, Everest is ruined, but there are a dozen places nearly as amazing that can be enjoyed with much less crowds. If you want bragging rights, then go to Everest. If you want serenity and beauty, go to the other mountains.
Given the number of people on earth, trying to distribute the people will just lead to everything being destroyed, albeit a little bit slower.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Cover-Story/Japan-gets-mor...
There's just too many tourists.
Reminds me of that scene from Into The Wild where our protagonist tries to kayak down the Colorado River and is told by a ranger that the next permit is available in 12 years.
Of course it feels absurd, but what do we do?
Edit: the clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4mWt2D_d6s
The ability to control who goes in and who goes out usually falls on the hand of those that shouldn't have that kind of power.
Edit: Removed "At the risk of being downvoted" as some comments suggested
It all comes down to the question "who do you think you are to block my path?" It's not a straightforward answer, though. We've been struggling to answer this as human beings since forever.
Hugh: Ah, yes well now you see, I have campaigned for years now to have tourists banned from Venice.
Stephen: Have you? Have you?
Hugh: I have, I have. It sounds very harsh, very cruel, very ...
Stephen: Deglante?
Hugh: Very deglante, thank you. But I'm sure it's the only way.
Leslie: Who was it, who was it, who said "He is a tourist, you are a holidaymaker, but I am a traveller?"
Hugh: Oh, was it Humbert Wolfe?
Stephen: It was Cocteau, surely?
... etc., etc...
Where before you had to hire your home travel agent to hire a local guide overseas (and know who), you can now do it all yourself via SM.
That massively improves accessibility.
As it is everywhere. If two people don't pay taxes, society functions just normally. If everybody doesn't pay taxes, there is no funding for even the most basic programs. When the argument is "a bit is fine, just not too much", the second part of the argument should always be "and here's how we determine who gets to enjoy it and who is forbidden from enjoying it".
At least for me, I feel a difference between tourism, and over-tourism.
One doubts that the restaurant staff are tourists? You seem to be saying that they aren't Icelandic, however.
I don't see this as a wholly bad thing, but the negative impact is that the people you interact with in the service industry, are not able to converse with you easily.
Imagine living in mexico, walking into a mexican restaraunt, and having to order in english because the wait staff and kitchen can't understand spanish.
It's not the worst thing that's ever happened, but I do miss being able to speak my native language outside of close circles.
That doesn't help.
My criticism is that this problem is hard. Should we do nothing instead? No. Just think harder.
It's a weird issue.
Every country makes a distinction between temporary and permanent entry.
I agree with your general premise, that restricting freedom of movement has not historically been a good thing, but I do also think it's a tragic when a beautiful and interesting place gets absolutely overrun by tourists and as a result gets less beautiful and less interesting, and far less livable for the people who stay there year round and don't leave after a couple days.
I think tourism can be seen as a problem of negative externalities, much the same way as pollution can: for a few businesses in the community, it's a huge net positive. Hotels and restaurants, for example, make big profits off of tourists in popular destinations, but everyone else has to deal with more litter, crowded streets and higher prices, but doesn't see any of the benefit. Just like we regulate pollution, I think it's possible to find ways to regulate tourism to maximize the collective good.
I also think there are ways to regulate tourism without beckoning the "slippery slope" you worry about. For instance, I have been on an island in Thailand which can only be accessed between 8AM and 8PM, does not allow outside plastics of any kind, and charges a modest fee to enter. Measures like that, or increased taxes on accommodation for example, can make it just a little bit harder to visit a popular destination and will probably result in less visitors on average without imposing a quota.
Not necessarily. For example, a hotel tax could be redistributive: you can take some of the excess value which would only be enjoyed by the business owner and use it to increase the standard of living for the rest of the population in any number of ways (better schools, better roads etc). Also you're making it a bit more expensive to operate that business, so you're putting a thumb on the scale in favor of non-touristic businesses.
I live in a part of Oslo with a vibrant restaurant scene, and one of the reasons is the extra business tourists drum up
I’m thankful that one of my favourite French dishes (aligot), while looking like a pile of whipped vomit, is presented in an entertaining manner.
There's definitive trends on making food 'instagrammable', but the overall quality and competition between all the restaurants is undeniably good.
Although now that I think about it, you take somewhere like Lygon street famous for its Italian, and the local advice would be to never eat there if you want good Italian (with maybe one or two notable exceptions).
The worst thing about overtourism is it makes travel boring. Everything tries to repackage itself as something accessible for 30-something middle class people who don’t want to go to Disney Land but also don’t want to worry about a stomachache or a weird smell.
We do have quite a lovely but challenging nature here. We have lots of tourists who come here unprepared and some would likely been severely hurt or even died had it not been for volunteers from red cross etc helping them.
As the number of tourists increase, we're likely to see more of these unprepared tourists. So it's not just about the numbers, but what they do when they're here.
A recent news article (in Norwegian, Google Translate does a decent enough job): https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/gar-hardt-ut-mot-uvitende-t...
Norway does a decent job of informing people at least on the hike. When you start walking there are signs that say something like “if you are at this point and it’s after 2 pm, turn back around”
It’s definitely one of those “Instagram destinations” that attract this sort of behavior. At the actual rock there were a few people flying drones around to get pictures, blatantly disregarding “No drones” signs.
But maybe I am a bit biased because I like to visit obscure places anyway.
Travel imposes heavy costs on the world, in its current carbon based form. It's only affordable because we pass these costs on to the future.
I think if you want to experience what a country is really like you need to learn the local language, or find a guide who understands that you want a "real" experience and that you are OK with going out of your comfort zone. Otherwise you are going to end up in one of the tourist containment zones around the world where every local speaks sales-oriented English, is hawking some trinket with the country's name on it, and the available food is pizza, fries, McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks and if you're lucky, an inoffensive variation of a local dish.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Please don't comment about your own comment ('unpopular opinion here', etc). It's noise and it's boring.
Normal chattiness in comments is totally fine. What's tedious is "I, the noble freethinker against the hideous masses" posturing. It's also common, because of the biases in how people perceive the community; basically, anything you dislike shapes that perception 10x more than anything you like, so most people's image of the community becomes an inverse image of themselves. This leads to a lot of noise and pre-emptive defensiveness, a sense of being surrounded by enemies in a hostile place, when the reality is we're all just wandering in a big statistical cloud.
It's such a fundamental dynamic at work here, that I'd love a way to distill it into a new guideline.
How about something like:
Don't try to preempt reactions by starting "At the risk of being downvoted..." or "Unpopular opinion here..." State your case clearly and let your ideas stand or fall on their own.
It's natural to guideline out people (1) working the metaphorical refs with asides about voting and (2) posturing and, at the same time, implicitly disrespecting even the notion that some people might disagree with them. The former invites horrible meta conversations, the latter is uncivil and toxic.
But you don't want to go so far that people have to alter totally normal speech patterns in order to avoid some conversation tripwire that the guidelines set. If you do that, you get more pointless meta threads.
What I think you want is a guideline that says "no matter what, don't talk about how your comments are being voted, and if you must mention the feeling you have that what you're about to say is probably unpopular, do it in a nice way, and quickly". I don't know how to say that with any kind of concision.
(A lot of things would work as guidelines if they could capture the nuance of "this way of writing is fine if you assume the burden of being extra gracious about it, but not fine to do casually and thoughtlessly". But it's super hard to distill that sentiment into a guideline!)
Are you one of those people that claims eating a candybar leads to intravenous heroin use?
It feels like a slippery slope argument.
Many relationships naturally follow along a curve so pointing out this relationship should be remarkable for being wrong if you pass along some other info like maybe you think this rarely occurs, or is not logical.
This is kind of an interesting comment if you overthink it, as I enjoy doing.
By my reading, "then the natural next step is being hard on immigration" is a rather boldly axiomatic statement, as if being hard on immigration is _Wrong_, full stop. If others hold the opinion that ~open borders are a Good Thing, that's fine with me because it's an opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own. But when reading forums and the news I constantly get a strong sense that in the last 5 years this subject has rapidly progressed from "matter of opinion" status and deeply into "matter of fact".
> The ability to control who goes in and who goes out usually falls on the hand of those that shouldn't have that kind of power.
Like democratically elected politicians? Or is there someone else who should decide who gets to hold what power?
Is that what it "boils down to"? Nothing more and nothing less than "borders are artificially constructed"? It happens to be a technically true statement, but are you saying something along the lines of because borders are artificially constructed then therefore it logically follows that they should be removed? If not, what are you saying, exactly?
That's a wonderful thought, but do you truly believe that's how most people think? I see few signs of it even on relatively intelligent forums.
> Why must I be given access and others excluded merely because of an accident of birth?
Framing it as "must" is a big part of my complaint. Immigration and similar issues are extremely complex, the idea that there is a knowable "correct" answer seems absurd to me. Taking your theoretical approach for example, to where shall we export the domestic people who fail the test? We can't even remotely agree on how to handle the existing system that has essentially been in place for generations, getting other countries to agree to accept people from other countries who've failed a test is just one of many complications in that approach.
I think if we go all the way into dystopian solutions, a fair one would be to run a lottery for every baby and send them to a random family in a random part of the world.
Wait...
(that's an honest "wait...", I set out to write a fair but very dystopian example and got to where we are now :))
I think that weird feeling OP is talking about is the cognitive dissonance from recognizing in person the need to keep from being overrun by outsiders, yet having a blind spot over the solution because its negation has already been accepted as a given due to social conformity.
I agree, it seems to have become a fundamental axiomatic belief. My impression is that this change in thinking has spread very broadly (at least among vocal social media users) in a very short period of time, and it seems to be held in a very non-negotiable way, not subject to logical discussion.
If we're going to start stack-ranking people based on how much harm they do where they live, quite a lot of locals in any particular area ought to be shown the boot.
This is why anti-immigration rhetoric tends to explicitly avoid trying to quantify the harm caused by immigrants. Much of the time, such a utilitarian calculus doesn't look great for the locals. Most immigrants tend to work harder, be more educated, do less crime, etc, etc...
(PS. If you tell me that it is morally wrong to let newcomers displace existing residents, I will point out that our society thinks it's perfectly reasonable for internal migrants to displace locals, when it comes to things like housing... Odd, that.)
> without recognizing the harm caused by the existence of problematic current residents
To be fair, this is a presumption though isn't it, whereas the matter of the harm caused by immigrants/visitors already exists within the context of this discussion.
> quite a lot of locals in any particular area ought to be shown the boot
If you have the option of booting people out, but how might that be done in the real world? It would be a violation of UN conventions would it not?
> This is why anti-immigration rhetoric tends to explicitly avoid trying to quantify the harm caused by immigrants
This seems a bit presumptuous as well. Speaking for myself, I hold the exact opposite view, what bothers me is a lack of quantification of the full effects of immigration. In my experience, anything that is quantified by governments or advocates is heavily slanted towards a pro-immigration conclusion.
> Most immigrants tend to work harder, be more educated, do less crime, etc, etc...
Indeed they do. As a result, if you live in a laid back country where people typically have a certain balance between leisure and work, and you have high immigration from cultures that optimize more towards the work end of the spectrum, it could have significant negative impacts on your quality of life and ability to afford your prior standard of living.
> If you tell me that it is morally wrong to let newcomers displace existing residents, I will point out that our society thinks it's perfectly reasonable for internal migrants to displace locals, when it comes to things like housing... Odd, that.
Again, it's presumptuous to assume that an individual holds the same belief as overall society, if overall society even holds that belief (how would we even know such a thing with any certainty?). There is certainly widespread negative sentiment of internal migrants displacing locals throughout the world, and I'd wager the people who hold this belief would also tend to be the ones who are most opposed to immigration, if so it would actually be logically consistent, so not really that odd after all. But once again, we have no way of knowing that with any certainty, as long as we continue to refuse to seriously study such things. If one looks closely, you might notice that all such arguments, on both sides, are largely based on people's imaginations, not facts.
That said, some steps are taken to provide for more visitors - but the work takes time.
> For 2019, the Norwegian Environmental Agency has a budget of $1.2 million to award grants to local areas to fortify existing trails or build new ones to accommodate increased visitor numbers.
> Svalbard has taken a number of measures to manage its tourism, including banning cruise ships carrying heavy oil from national-park perimeters, avoiding worldwide marketing, developing wilderness experiences closer to Longyearbyen to reduce carbon-emitting snowmobile tours, and working on ways to extend the average visitor stay to increase per-capita spending and decrease transportation carbon emissions to the islands.
I lived in Amsterdam for a year and you can't walk in the city center without drunk/high people around you
I was completely fine with it, but I know that many people who live in the heart of amsterdam that their life changed once they tourist raised
What people should realize is that when the tourist is high in a city/country it doesn't mean that all the people of the country benefit from it.
Only the owners of shops and services around the tourist industry and in many cases it's a pretty centralised industry
1) Rent and all cafes/bars/restaurants are significantly more expensive.
2) Most of the consumption is taxed via VAT, which goes directly to national government.
3) Both local city government and national government are corrupt hellholes which are certain to misuse any funds that come their way.
Edit: To be clear, I mean financially beneficial from "live in this particular city" perspective. On national level, tourism is such a high percentage of GDP that it's the only thing keeping the country alive. And we're in for a hell of ride if we stop being a desirable destination.
But I have my doubts.
Are you implying that no tourists visit Amsterdam from such liberal places, or that the only reason people go to Amsterdam is for drug tourism? Or something else?
Point is, if a city has a reputation for having a high proportion of its tourists roaming around visibly high, they’re inexperienced (or got higher than they could at home ).
Experienced high-quality marijuana users blend in a lot better.
Ah I think your point was originally lost on me but now it has landed. Visibly high == inexperienced, more inexperienced points to the notion that people come to the place in order to experience it (possibly among other things). I can see that and agree in that light.
(when I say skyrocketed, I mean it. Per household wealth has more than doubled even as the population has increased)
At some point I need to accept that it’s really the primary way to get around the north.
Tourism is a luxury, not a right, and if there is a perceived negative externality to Norway from overtourism, it should be mitigated in the market. There will be fewer people who are willing to go to Trolltunga if they are not a Norwegian resident and the price of entry is $200.
Sidenote: I lived in Norway for a few years, gorgeous place but it does need to be preserved to keep its integrity.
- lottery (example: powerball)
- waiting list (case: Alcatraz, Coachella)
- application based on xx criteria (case: Antarctica?)
or... a combination of the five (price being #5). In most of these cases, money is still involved. Why? I think it's b/c it takes funding to administer, maintain, and improve the attractions. So maybe pricing isn't the only option.
These are at least fair relative to wealth / income.
And are frequently used for access to overutilised natural areas (e.g., lotteries, day-of-activity permits, waitlists).
Though the question about fairness of price-based rationing still hasn't been answered ;-)
This is not a whataboutism either, unless you can put that label on trying to focus on major showstoppers that bring whole system down before light cosmetic defects.
There's a difference between addressing greater wrongs, and questioning the creation of yet another instance.
There are, of course, alternatives to top tourism destinations. But allocating access to the top destinations on price alone, and where that price does not relate to underlying costs, strikes me as the essence of unfairness.
Many of these places are where you can't charge an admission or limit attendance easily.
All three of them not being particularly known for their respect of culture, tradition and delicate (eco)systems.
Blah.
Even in Soviet Union the running joke was that all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others.
The most beneficial way to limit the number of visitors for local communities is to increase prices.
If they want to reserve a number of places for people to be able to visit at a low(er) cost (e.g. through a lottery) then good for them, but there is no entitlement to go on holidays to others' countries or to unique places.
Can you expand on that, it doesn't seem self-evident to me.
If it does then it seems quite obvious that more money is better than less money.
It seems like communities can be ruined by richer tourists in ways that not so rich tourists won't. For example, in Pembrokeshire and areas of Devon some communities have been partially replaced by clusters of second-homes because rich people like to have their holidays there. Locals can no longer afford to live there because they lack the wealth to outbid incomers. Maybe that's not quite in scope for "tourism".
I can imagine other issues, like facilities being tailored to richer people (all your green spaces get turned into golf courses, or whatever, all the pubs cost a fortune); teachers, services workers and such can't afford to live locally.
Richer people maybe cause more environmental damage? 3 cars, private plane, large concreted property, ..., yes at a holiday home, as one goes further up-market?
Perhaps good if you want to work in service industries.
What? We are discussing visitors on holidays, not people moving in or buying second homes.
Do I as non-citizen have a right to vote in whatever country I want, just because I have an opinion on the matter being voted? Access to citizenship is also limited by descent, wealth, or your conscientiousness. It is also ‘unfair’ if you interpret this word as ‘not instantly accessible to anyone who expresses interest’.
So?
No one said life was fair. There is no human-right to vacation in a given destination. I have to apply for lottery hunts for various game animal in my state. It's just a means of controlling scarce resource.
> then you also causes losses when people change their minds but are already locked in by the lottery.
Good! Better be sure you wish to take part.
In the real world, market prices for this kind of thing simply select for rich people, not for who values the experience the most.
I do appreciate that people want to make something as important as value quantifiable, but like all measurements there are pitfalls, and I merely pointed out a rather important pitfall when attempting to measure value using money.
You could just have a return program. 30 days out it is free, 10 days out and you pay a small percentage but get your money back. You don't need to rely on selling tickets to others to get your money back
All because a tax on a luxury (which tourism certainly is), wasn't fair enough.
This is used for rides on the Yamanashi maglev test tracks, tours to the Kurobe gorge railway upper track and other places with inherently limtted capacity.
Norway is already too expensive for us (a German lower middleclass family).
This is not a new or unique problem, and hunters and fishers figured out the solution a long time ago. This could easily be applied to local, state, and national parks. Well, easily is perhaps not the correct word, but there is a known solution to the problem that _can_ be implemented.
EDIT: Hunters and fishers figured this out because they fucked up big time and nearly eradicated large populations of animals (see Bison). They (or the D of F & W's) realized they had to do things differently if they wanted to sustainably continue to hunt && fish.
It may make sense for your own citizens to visit irrespective of money, but I would want foreigners to have as much as is needed to keep the number of visitors under control.
I think we'll get there at very famous, very limited places like Venice.
Tourism is increasing because billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, especially Chinese, and now they want to experience what those in the West have experienced for decades with their disposable income. Now that the formerly poor have the money to travel, I expect more people complaining about the tourists, e.g. a big bus of Chinese pulls up in a small town, some kid vandalizes something or some people leave trash, and a stereotype that "these people" trash the town emerges.
(I'd also say Americans don't travel enough, less than 1/3rd have traveled abroad, and some of this ignorance bolsters American exceptionalism, because until you see how bad shape your infrastructure is in, or how good healthcare, health, and public safety is in other countries, you have no context to be skeptical of some of the crazy political assertions thrown around)
If you’re a city person, vacation on a farm where you pay to try and help out with the farm chores. If you’re a rural dweller live in a city like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago. If you live in the north, travel to the south, vice versa. Swing by Buffalo or Rochester. Entertain Ithaca. Explore philly.
It might not even need to require travel. Volunteer for refugee crisis centers. Volunteer for elder care. Volunteer for child care. Volunteer for wildlife care. Raise a baby bird. Go to a reptile exhibit. Go fishing. Go to an anime convention. Go to a furry convention.
However, even traveling to touristy places can expand your mind. I recently spent 3 weeks in Ecuador, it completely changed my mind about the country and burst all of my pre-conceived nations, and I say this as someone who has already been to Columbia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, et al.
For an American who thinks other countries are "shitholes" and that other people "live in huts", even a touristy tourbus experience can burst your bubble.
Does all the oil Norway extract count towards their carbon balance, or is that the consuming country's problem? Norway just collect the profit, to pay for all this green cleansing at home?
"In March, the Norwegian government announced it will gradually divest its shares in companies engaged in the exploration and extraction of oil and gas. (But it will still invest in companies that refine and sell oil.)"
I'm not really sure how you reconcile these two things - a policy of carbon footprint reduction while actively investing in companies whose business is predicated on oil consumption.
— sincerely, an Aussie who lived in Norway for 2 years, and protested against Statoil ('Equinor') trying to get oil off the southern coast of Australia.
But not helping with colonial/foreign exploits would mostly just be a change of funding/profit (eg BP would take over Equinor projects) - while a ban on fossil fuel extraction in Norway would seal up those resources.
Once the idea of humans flying was beyond fantasy, now we consider it beyond a right but a necessity. We believe nature is elsewhere, not where we live, and contribute to local degradation, dreaming that we'll experience it elsewhere, but flying or taking a cruise ship there.
Without tackling the beliefs and goals driving the system -- the unbridled sense of entitlement, irresponsibility for how one's actions hurt others, the disdain for reducing growth and maintaining wilderness where we live -- we're rearranging the deck chairs of a sinking ship. Humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years before flight and they weren't all miserable.
I propose promoting staycations, camping, biking, sailing, gardening, and other ways of experiencing diversity with less pollution and more empathy and compassion. But most of all promoting beliefs and goals other than you must fly to be happy. That a great life comes from appreciating where you are. That flying and cruises are dirty. Etc.
The world is too big and beautiful to see everything. When I got that, I realized my best strategy was to enjoy here, now, us wherever I am. Then I didn't need to travel so much despite getting more out of life.
Poor journalism and disdain for what's foreign, the ASCII way. Vae victis.
I've seen it used on URL's
.xn--6frz82g or .移动
Not sure how apt I would be to remember the English version or know which characters those are to type it in the native dialect.
The large numbers are of course part of the problem, but it would be minimized if tourists were behaving more properly.
Same effect. Made famous by a Hollywood movie. Now everybody has to say they have been there. It is (was) nice. But there are hundreds of other equally nice beaches and bays in the country.
All of this is a snowflake on top of an iceberg compared to the massive amount of carbon they are exporting every year.
Once they will solve this problem, they will try to chaise it again
>Surging visitor numbers are threatening Norway’s reigning principle of allemannsretten—the freedom to roam, a concept popular across all of Scandinavia. The thousand-year-old government policy states that individuals, as long as they are polite, can legally walk through any piece of undeveloped property and camp for one night without first obtaining the owner’s permission. This right has worked well for centuries, but in recent years, communities across the country are increasingly suffering from littering, human waste, and overzealous Instagrammers.
So allemannsretten is threatening to be extinguished because it's a concept that doesn't scale. This is the threat of tourism, experiences which cannot scale are extinguished or priced out of reach of the average person/family. I think if tourism actually was good in the sort of utilitarian sense you're endorsing you wouldn't see pushback.
While I agree with your main point, I think it’s important to note that this is about a handful of hotspots like Trolltunga and Pulpit Rock. I can’t see any Scandinavian politician seriously suggesting to abolish allemannsretten as such, and Norway has thousands and thousands of square kilometres where it is working just fine.
This seems more like it's a side effect of the rock climbing fad than a countries' tourism board balancing their national tourism.
The book "Collapse" by Jared Diamond covers this pretty well.
Population growth in most of the developed world is already below replacement once you exclude immigration. So we've already arrived at a successful formula that solves overpopulation without limiting personal freedom.