Responsible travel needs to be more responsible. With all the talk about responsible travel, carbon neutral trips, and eco-tours in the adventure travel world these days, you’d think companies are really operating in a fundamentally different way. Not so.
Tom Driggs Trying Not to Destroy Luri Gompa, Upper Mustang, Nepal, 1996
When it comes to adventure travel, while platitudes of responsible travel rule the surface message, profit tends to trump social responsibility. Most adventure travel companies would vehemently deny this. Why? They’ve come to believe their own hype.
I used to be part of the problem. I’ve run my own adventure travel company, and then a large division of a global adventure travel company. I first realized how much of an impact tour groups could have on a sensitive culture when I guided my first group on a trip to Upper Mustang, at the time a semi-autonomous kingdom in central Nepal, in 1996.
At the time we visited, fewer than 500 westerners had ever visited Mustang’s capital, Lo Manthang. Perhaps 30 westerners at that point had visited Luri Gompa, a long-abandoned ancient cave monastery East of Lo Manthang. As we arrived after a long hike, we marveled at the ancient structure’s surreal beauty.
Within minutes, however, we realized that the monastery was literally crumbling under our feet. Just being there, standing on the mud-and-stick-daubed platform roof, walking on the rickety elevated platform walkway entrance, it was disintegrating before our eyes. I realized then, that I was in a business, adventure travel, that was inherently destructive.
At one level or another, adventure travel companies have each made peace with the idea that there are destructive elements to bringing a tour group to a foreign culture. That destruction is wide ranging, from the environment, to cultures, to local people’s health. They rationalize by saying that despite the negative effects, facilitating travel experiences brings the world closer together, or spurs action to save the environment. Cynically, some just rationalize that if they don’t bring people there, someone else will. I know because I’ve done it.
Here are five inconsistencies that exist between the hype adventure travel companies would like you to believe and reality:
1. A Tour Operator That Bills Itself as Carbon Neutral, is Never Truly Carbon Neutral. Several forward-thinking adventure travel companies have gone to great lengths to make their operations carbon neutral. This is a great gesture, and worth doing. When they say carbon neutral, though, what they really mean is that they’re offsetting the carbon footprint of their operations on the ground. What about the carbon generated by all those intercontinental flights travelers take to get to their destination? No operator in the world insists that their travelers offset their flights. Why not? The fact is, operators know they would lose massive business, in a competitive marketplace, if they required their passengers to offset their flights.
2. Offsetting your Carbon Footprint, Won’t Directly Affect The Area You’re Traveling To. Ok, so even if your operator is “carbon neutral” and even if You “offset” the miles of your own flight, the real world impact of adventure travel is more than what a few carbon offsets can fix. Buying a few wind generation credits in North Dakota isn’t going to do much to stop the acrid black smoke belching out of that old truck your group uses in China or keep that Nepalese hillside from being deforested for wood to burn to heat lodges.
3. Commercialized Adventure Travel Leaves A Lasting Public Health Impact. While adventure travel brings western tourists face-to-face with some of the most primitive cultures on earth, adventure travel companies have done little to “offset” the damage done. For example, well-meaning tour group members give sweets to children, leading to massive tooth decay problems in areas where there previously was none. Companies have done nothing to help fix sewage systems that can’t keep up with the increasing numbers of tourists they themselves bring to Sri Lanka, Thailand, or Indonesia.
4. Adventure Travel Companies Pollute With Impunity, Whether They Mean to Or Not. The 50,000 trekkers adventure travel companies take to Everest Base Camp and the Annapurna Circuit each year collectively leave large landfills full of garbage in villages along the way. 150,000 people come to the Galapagos Islands each year in planes that bring in foreign species that threaten wildlife diversity and in boats that leak fuel that kills fish. Sensitive areas like Nepal and the Galapagos are being “loved” to death by companies that seem to refuse to regulate themselves.
5. Adventure Travel Accelerates The Decline of Indigenous Cultures. By simply taking travelers to remote places and cultures, adventure travel companies expose those cultures to Ex-Officio-wearing, ipod-listening, Nikon-toting travelers. If you don’t think that over a few years, exposure like that is going to cause Phuba in a Tibetan village to want to leave home and family and head to Lhasa to “get rich,” you’re delusional. If a company does a good job of educating their travelers on being sensitive to indigenous cultures, then limited visits to an area that’s seen little western influence is not going to have a lasting impact. When tour operators repeatedly visit a sensitive area and only pay lip service to education, that’s when cultures are changed forever.
Is there a solution? Adventure travel companies that are run like a traditional business are not in a position to make changes that would run counter to their ultimate goal – profit. To require carbon offsets, to make substantive changes to how trips are operated, to really educate travelers, to require them to suffer a bit for the sake of the environment and cultures, to give back to the specific locations they operate in, and most radically, to never repeat a trip, would be a radically different, but much needed approach. That wouldn’t be a particularly profitable company, but it would be a worthy goal.
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March 2, 2010 @ 9:12 am
I totally agree, but what’s the alternative? Do adventure traveling on your own without a group? Is that feasible for people without experience traveling in the sort of regions that require knowledge of the terrain and culture?
I am not sure what the answers are, but I appreciate you broaching the subject.
Jeremy
March 2, 2010 @ 11:33 am
Jeremy, that’s a good question.
Yes, I think independent travel is the better way to go for those parts of the world that are open for independent travel, because it leaves a much smaller footprint. Certainly independent travel is not for everyone, and that’s where the problem is, because there just isn’t an outfitter right now that I’d be comfortable with recommending.
It’s ironic that many of the most sensitive parts of the world, the areas we most need to protect, the Tibetan plateau, the polar regions, much of the Himalaya, can only be accessed in organized groups, guided by companies using a business model that is wholly incompatible with truly responsible travel.
The solution? Building a company from the ground up with its main goal being sustainability, and building that into the financials and the company’s DNA from the get go, not just as a marketing ploy.
March 3, 2010 @ 10:38 am
It’s a difficult situation to be sure, & one with no easy or simple answer. But it’s the problems that are the most complicated that most need discussion, & you do an admirable job of broaching the topic.
I agree with you – a solution will most easily be found not by attempting to restructure existing companies, but by building a completely new type of company. Im not gonna flatter myself by suggesting I know how to do such a thing, but my first inclination would be to court profitable – & ideally well known – companies with which to partner. As everyone knows, as good as an organization’s intentions may be, money is still needed – even non-profits have to build grants into their financial models – & so long as there’s a free market out there someone will always be willing to take advantage to provide lower costs.
On the plus side, I do think (most) people are inherently well-meaning, & with the continued rise of social media, blogging, twittering, etc, getting the majority of people even morally supporting cause – if not financially – is increasingly powerful! Ultimately (imo), the new model would first & foremost have to be responsible, but also have to garner & great deal of support, both moral & financial, & it would have to point out what others are doing wrong, how it overcomes those problems, & willing to accept all manner of challenges to keep itself on top of the game.
Of course, I may very well think about it for another day & completely change my mind
Thanks for beginning the discussion!
May 10, 2010 @ 8:42 pm
Excellent points of discussion.
With respect to #5, I’d like to point out that the decline of indigenous cultures is happening even without adventure travel. When I visited Lo Manthang with a small group of friends in April 1993, the local children were already being taught by a non-Loba. The teacher was instructing them to read and write Nepali. We saw it would only be a matter of time before the younger generation would likely lose their traditions. When we had an audience with King Jigme Palbar Bista, we recommended he create a museum to preserve artifacts of historical and cultural importance for posterity. This was also important because artifacts, artwork, and furniture was being stolen and sold to international collectors and antique dealers.
Another problem is that Mustang is poor. Being in the rainshadow of the Himalaya, it is difficult for the population to get by, relying on the land to provide them with a living. They supplemented it by trade. But when the traditional trade route died off because of the construction of the Friendship Highway, it forced Lobas to seek work in towns and the city, exposing them to the seductions of modern culture. This phenomenon is happening all over. I even saw it in the New Territories in Hong Kong where I came across abandoned Hakka hamlets.
So in this case, receipts from adventure travel have the potential to maintain traditional cultures because their value to others can generate an income to maintain their ways. I believe this was the idea behind the relatively expensive fee charged for the Mustang trekking permit. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Lobas see very much of that. I had heard most of it is siphoned off before reaching them.
The other problem I’ve encountered with traditional cultures and tourism is how they become commodified and turned into uni-dimensional caricatures of themselves — when the people no longer engage in traditional practices and just dress up for the tourists. Is that a natural consequence of commercial success from tourism? That people will then be able to afford modern conveniences and abandon the old ways? Are we then to expect that these people cannot be too prosperous in order for them to maintain their traditions? Why should we expect them to do that merely for our curiosity?
In the bigger picture, I’m led to think about what communications and transportation technology is doing to the world’s cultures. In a corporate-driven economic landscape, is our diversity being whittled into a global monoculture just as agribusiness is engineering monocultures to reap the highest profits by achieving the highest economies of scale? Can we only maintain diversity by having some degree of separation?
June 28, 2010 @ 1:13 pm