Tourism is not the harmless middle-class pastime we’ve all been brainwashed into believing, thanks to a never-ending diet of slick, over-produced adverts that invade our personal space like an irritating passenger reading your newspaper.
In fact, it is time to amend the dictionary:
tourism noun /ˈtʊə.rɪ.zəm/
Definition: The desecration, defilement and casual ruin of a destination by the conscious act of conspicuous consumerism, narcissism, and greed.
Usage: “They called it an adventure, but it looked more like tourism to me—just noise, neon and spicy wings.”
Origin: From the modern plague of over-consumption, influencer culture, and the compulsive need to post your entire life online.
See also: Instagram, selfie, FOMO, bucket list, carbon footprint.
The Scavenger at the Gate
Tourism is an insidious scavenger. It devours everything in its path. So, while you tramp through some chapel searching for enlightenment and culture, your sweat and breath are busy devouring the frescos. And it gets worse. Much worse.
Trailblazers and Takers
If you’re on the so-called cutting edge of travel — a trailblazer searching for new frontiers — the first to boldly go to that unspoilt beach in wherever — guess what? After a few trips, too many bloody tourists. So, time to trash the next unspoilt utopia on the list. You don’t mean to destroy it, but you do. And that’s before you factor in vanity.
Not Benidorm, Darling
Oh no, it’s never enough to go to Benidorm and put your feet up on the beach with a nice book. You simply must go to the next happening destination. Some Instagrammable Shangri-la on the verge of collapse. But who cares — so long as you’re keeping up with the Kardashians. Or Katy Perry. Space tourism is worse than all that combined.
Hot Air and Hypocrisy
If you thought the ChatGPT make-me-an-action-figure craze was bad, it pales into insignificance compared to space tourism. Each ChatGPT query and action figure created about 1.16 grams CO₂e per image — the same carbon as driving about 8 metres in a petrol car.
The 75 tonnes of CO₂e created per person on the Blue Origin flight had around the same carbon footprint as driving 40,000 miles — or one and a half times around the globe.
“Earth’s celestial crash helmet that sits over our heads and keeps us safe”
For a family who has kept the same car going for the last 25 years in an effort to be green, that’s more than a little annoying and a tad hypocritical, to say the least. Given the astronomical amounts of hot air and bullshit surrounding space tourism, it was obvious it was concealing something horrible — but the figures speak for themselves.
No Planet B
The final frontier might just well be that — final. The trouble is that we are not talking about some quaint Greek taverna bulldozed to make way for a megahotel. We are talking about space, Earth’s celestial crash helmet that sits over our heads and keeps us safe.
We all know that pretty soon, space will be like that litter-strewn beach that no one visits. Yet, for those with their feet planted on the ground, no convenient new destination is waiting to be discovered. There is no planet b.
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