Photo courtesy of Robert Couse-Baker, Flickr.
As we head back towards normalcy, people are able to travel once again. As exciting as this news sounds, it also brings fear to the residents of these tourist-heavy destinations. The returning worry is that these destinations will be full of the remains left by tourists, whether that be trash on the beach or traffic on the roads disturbing the local wildlife.
This time away from travel has hopefully been a good opportunity for people to finally understand that their actions on vacations have consequences. Although these consequences may not affect the travelers, it affects the people who live in these places.
Hawaii is a good example of a tourist-heavy destination that financially benefits from tourism, but the locals are the ones who are affected the most.
In Hawaii, natives have been suffering for decades from tourism encroaching upon their homes. People have even been displaced in the name of tourism. The local wildlife and plant life also suffer. Tourists do not typically treat places with respect, because they won’t face the consequences.
Now that people have had a forced break from traveling, maybe they have gained a sense of respect for the places that they visit.
People have been deprived of seeing the beautiful places of the world. Hopefully, this means that they gained more of an appreciation for these places. Travelers need to recognize that the beautiful places that they love to visit cannot be taken for granted.
Covid has given people the opportunity to take a step back and miss the places where they want to vacation.
With this longing to travel again, people have been able to remember the beautiful wildlife and plant life that inhabit these destinations. These residents have been able to take a break from the constant interference from tourists that would usually cause major damage. They have had a chance to recharge and regenerate.
If people can make the changes needed to protect the ecosystems of the places we go, we can make the world a better place compared to how we left it as the pandemic began.
This is the time to make the world a better place, we got a chance to start over and treat the planet we all live on in a better way, especially the places that have been neglected by tourism for a long time.
Finding positives from this pandemic is extremely difficult to think about, but one can be that we treat this as the beginning of a new chapter in the book of our world. If we treat the world around us with a little more respect, we can fix the parts that we have damaged.
This could be the break that makes the lives of locals better and makes the world a better place.
Tourism can be both helpful and harmful to destinations that are the most popular vacation destinations. There is a way for tourism to just be advantageous, if visitors could simply treat the places they visit with respect, the same respect they would want their own homes treated with, the problems with tourism would begin to dissipate.
So, let’s view this as a fresh start for our world, and for our favorite places to visit.
agiampag@ramapo.edu
