For every good piece of news there is an underside. With global wealth rising, countries becoming freer and travel costs declining, the world is experiencing a boom in tourism. By all accounts this is a good thing. Traveling and interacting with other cultures, religions and seeing for oneself how others live is essential to understanding and communication that helps to bridge conflict. At the very least, we can hope so.
The bad thing is that all the troops of tourism are leading to the decline of wondrous places. Not the interest in them, but their very survival as Newsweek points out this week. What a sad development. The great interest of world travelers for places such as Luxor, Maccu Picchu and the Great Wall of China is leading to their destruction.
As the world gets more and more interconnected and Cosmopolitanism seems to be finally getting its chance to thrive, we find that our actions are leading to the demise of historic and splendorous things. It would seem that the only hope is the pull of capital. Those who live by the tourist trade (and it’s no small number of individuals or countries) will be forced to spend money to keep the things that make them money in the first place. By all economic accounts, this seems like a wise thing to do. For the rest of us such investments are truly gratifying so that we, and future generations, can see what amazing things those before us have created.
