Global tourism today is not only a major industry — it’s
nothing short of a planet-threatening plague. It’s polluting land and sea,
destroying wildlife and natural habitat and depleting energy and natural
resources. From Asia to Africa , look-alike
resorts and spas are replacing and undermining local culture, and the
international quest for vacation houses is forcing local residents out of their
homes. It’s giving rise to official corruption, wealth inequities and heedless
competition. It’s even contributing to human rights violations, especially
through the scourge of sex tourism – Elizabeth Becker ‘Don’t go there’ Washington
Post
After reading about communication and how it has been
helped by technology, I started to think about travel and its role in
globalisation.
Everyone (with a passport) can go to an airport and book a
plane to anywhere. I think that’s an amazing thing. It’s allowed us to advance
our communications with other places in the world, actually visit them and see
how they live, and this is an even more potent boon when it comes to remote
places where technology is scarce. But as you can read above, unlike communication
technology (where I can’t think of any massive hindrance) the advancement of
travel and tourism can come at quite a cost. Although I feel that Becker is
rather biased in her statement above, she mentions nothing good about tourism
at all, she does make valid points towards the negatives of travel. I think the
most important is how we’re destroying the planet we live on with CO^2
emissions and contributing to that massive evil Global Warming. Although I am
interested in going into that, I’ll save it for another day.
I think it’s ironic that to bring our planet closer together
we’re simultaneously destroying it. Maybe planes aren’t the way forward and we
need to look into creating alternatively quick forms of travel without the price
of the globe, but for now it looks like we’re still stuck.
What are your thoughts on this? Are the benefits of travel and
tourism heavily outweighing the negatives?
I think that the benefits of travel and tourism is almost outweighing the negatives. Many countries rely on the income that tourism brings for them to thrive (if we look at London 2012 for example) and the money profited can then be put into looking for alternatives to transport and renewable energy etc, but is that counter productive?
ReplyDeleteI feel that the benefits of travel and tourism outweigh the negatives because the mixtures of a variety of cultures develop who people are and what they can bring, also the comment that Mollie made about the financial side is also a positive, even though it may be counter productive, until there is an alternative to transport emissions, we need the advantages that have been brought from travel and tourism.
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