Mass tourism: finding a balance between environmental conservation and personal liberty in the age of Instagram

Mass tourism: finding a balance between environmental conservation and personal liberty in the age of Instagram

Since becoming France’s tenth national park in 2012, the Calanques of Southern France have seen a roughly 50 per cent increase in the number of visitors. The Calanque de Sugiton, pictured above, is one of its most popular destinations.

(Benjamin Hourticq)
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White limestone cliffs rise majestically above water that is at times azure blue and at times emerald green. The sun’s rays fill the cloudless Mediterranean sky, changing colours over the course of the day. Only the sun, it seems, has the power to change the scenery here. But move deeper into the steep-walled inlet and this picture of untouched natural beauty begins to transform. Perched on the rocks at the water’s edge, like a colony of penguins, are hundreds of holidaymakers. The most far-sighted among them have arrived early to stake out a narrow space for their towels on the tiny pebble beach cove. Towel space is a precious commodity in the Calanques during the summer months.

The Calanques National Park, the most recent addition to France’s national park system, attracts roughly three million visitors every year. The park’s managers estimate that, since its creation in 2012, the number of visitors to the area has increased by 50 per cent. Within this context, preserving the natural environment, the park’s primary mission, while allowing people to fully enjoy it, has become a major challenge.

According to the Calanques National Park’s 2017-2021 Action Plan, “the growing number of visitors highlights the difficult balance between welcoming the public and protecting our heritage.”

During the hour-long walk from the car park to the Calanque de Sugiton, trampled fences installed to protect fragile areas provide visible evidence of this challenge. “Natural habitats along the busiest routes are being destroyed by too many visitors straying from the paths,” explains Didier Réault, the park’s director. Solving this problem requires “better managing of the park’s entrances, with park rangers on site and information available. We focus on education, which is certainly not the easiest strategy.” Other strategies explored by the park include developing alternatives to vehicle access and spreading out visitor traffic across the year to avoid summer peaks.

Nature should be free and open to all

But why not drastically restrict access? “Our job is not to limit the public’s access to its own property. Taxpayer money is what keeps the park running.” According to Vincent Vlès, urban planner and ecologist at Paul Sabatier University of Toulouse, “in France, people believe that nature should be open and free to all.” Vlès, who has conducted several studies on the preservation of natural spaces in France, believes that stricter regulation of access to nature may become necessary due to a growing population and the general state of biodiversity. He specifically points to the lack of resources available to managers of natural spaces in France. “Politicians promise to protect biodiversity and make these spaces available to citizens, but due to budgetary tensions, no one is willing to pay. The only way to solve the problem is to get visitors to participate by paying.”

Vlès points to the national park systems of several English-speaking countries, which charge entrance fees and manage access based on the “tourist load capacity” of a given area. As visitors to national parks in the United States began to significantly increase in number over the second half of the 20th century, the parks’ administrators attempted to establish acceptable visitation thresholds to prevent ecosystems from being altered.

Park rangers “evaluate load capacity on a scientific basis and depending on climatic and meteorological risks. When certain ecosystems are over-stressed, they can decide to close off access.”

English-speaking countries have a long-established tradition of protecting their natural spaces. Australia’s first national park, the Royal National Park, was created in 1879, making it the second oldest national park in the world after Yellowstone in the United States, established in 1872. New Zealand’s oldest national park, Tongariro National Park, was created in 1887. These countries have generally been able to preserve the ecosystems of their remarkable natural spaces.

Resisting the viral publicity of paradise

Other countries are struggling to catch up and have had to learn how to protect their environment in reaction to the damage caused by mass tourism. This is the case in Thailand. According to its Ministry of Tourism, the country hosted 38 million international visitors in 2018 and expects 40 million in 2019. Large numbers of these tourists flock to the paradisiacal beaches in the country’s south. Maya Bay, on the island of Koh Phi Phi, has suffered the consequences. Made famous by Danny Boyle’s film The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, this beach has become one of the most popular in Thailand.

Visited by some 4,000 tourists a day, the bay has suffered significant environmental damage. A large part of the corals have been destroyed and the sharks that once spawned here have deserted the area. But since 2018, the natural environment has slowly been reclaiming lost ground. Significantly, the sharks have begun to repopulate these turquoise waters. This is due to the government’s decision to prevent access to tourists. After seeing positive results, Thai authorities decide to extend the closure, originally scheduled for four months, through to 2021.

The case of Maya Bay, popularised in a film, is representative of the phenomenon of natural settings including many national parks that receive significant publicity followed by an increase in visitor numbers.

“We are being sold the idea that we have to go to a certain location, whereas there are amazing places at the edges of national parks where no one goes but which are even more abundant with wildlife during the high tourist season,” explains Raphaël Mathevet, a socio-ecologist at the Montpellier Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology.

To raise awareness of the issue, the World Wildlife Fund recently launched a campaign to encourage Instagram users not to geotag their photos in order to limit publicity for certain areas. According to Vlès, who has closely studied the dynamics of tourism, “the overcrowding of certain locations essentially depends on their level of fame and the image that individuals associate with them. There are lots of self-centred projections of the idea of where to be. Some people have to be able to say ‘I did this.’ It’s an ego projection that you also find on social media. For example, some people think that to be a good mountaineer you have to have climbed Mount Everest. A real mountaineer knows that this is not the case.”

Economic stakes and large-scale pollution

The example of Mount Everest is striking. This year, Nepal issued a record number of 381 permits. This record number of climbers has negative consequences ranging from massive queues along the summit ridge at 8,800 metres above sea level to the deaths of several amateur climbers who were ill-prepared for the cold and lack of oxygen. In addition to these human tragedies, overcrowding on the mountain has generated so much pollution that the world’s tallest mountain has acquired the moniker, “the world’s tallest rubbish bin.” In 2018, members of the Nepalese NGO Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee collected more than 32 tons of waste on the slopes of Everest. In Nepal, a country heavily dependent on tourism, mountaineering is an important source of income, which makes it difficult to raise barriers to this business.

To a lesser extent, developed countries like France face the same set of problems. In June 2018, a prefectural decree was issued limiting access to the overcrowded summit of Mont Blanc, where campers had left behind waste and excrement. “In glacial zones, everything you leave behind is still there 50 years later,” says Jean-Marc Peillex, mayor of the commune of Saint-Gervais, located next to the mountain. “Waste and excrement, that’s what you’re leaving behind for future generations.”

Peillex criticises “the culture of selfies and boasting of personal achievement,” that goes against the spirit of the place. People use the magical name of the mountain “to create publicity for various economic and humanitarian ends.” Indeed, many groups have used Mont Blanc in their advertising campaigns.

Whether it’s education, improved management of visitor flows, limitation or prohibition, every strategy originates from a different culture with its own set of priorities for finding the balance between the freedom to enjoy nature and the duty to preserve it. When it comes to managing natural spaces and the solution required, “we have to be wary of making generalisations,” warns Mathevet who, though resistant to the idea of paying for access to nature, believes that thinking will have to change everywhere. “There are more of us than ever and more of us are travelling, and highly sought after natural settings are increasingly restricted and protected. The paradox is that this is only going to attract more and more people. We can see that the most popular locations generate overcrowding, which has lasting impacts in terms of path erosion and wildlife disturbance. We can’t just continue on as before.”

This article has been translated from French.