Last Chance Travel: Seeing the World While You Can
Now. We need to do everything we can at home to reduce our own carbon footprints and those of our neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations.Secondly, there is a caveat in Dawson’s statement, and it hinges on a single word: “small.” Polar bear tours do not draw huge crowds, in part because of how remote the locations currently remain.
Still, the number of visitors is increasing. And other threatened destinations are much easier to reach and more sensitive to the pressure of over-tourism.Consider, for example, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which reportedly draws 2 million visitors a year.
A 2016 study published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism found that last chance tourists to the region were predominantly “older, more environmentally conscious females visiting the region for the first time.” Although these women were worried about coral bleaching from global climate change, they did not associate the fact that they had traveled great distances with threats to the reef itself. “That tourists do not associate their own travel to the reef with damage is part of the paradox of LCT,” the researchers wrote.Those visiting the Great Barrier Reef in Australia can also wreak havoc on the reef by standing on or knocking into the coral, using unsafe sunscreen, and simply exposing the region to millions of human bodies and all the toxic chemicals we carry along with us (in our clothes, our gear, our waste).In best-case scenarios, there are or will be laws, taxes, and best practices that reduce the impact of tourism on local environments, zero out an experience’s net carbon impact, limit the number of visitors, and make sure local communities see the economic benefits.Unfortunately, this isn’t always happening, especially in.
