The global plague of tourism

last updated 8 January 2015

Elizabeth Becker

The Washington Post

“Did you manage to find someplace for your vacation this summer where you could get away from it all?” asked Elizabeth Becker. “I didn’t think so.” With 900 million people traveling the globe last year, tourists are ravaging the earth like a horde of locusts, ruining once-beautiful getaways here and abroad. Paris and Venice are now so crowded “you can barely move.” On seacoasts and islands, new hotels clutter “once pristine and empty beaches.” Cruise ships are an even greater menace, creating “three times more pollution per passenger mile than airplanes” while fouling the Caribbean with half of all the waste dumped in the world’s oceans. If all this makes you want to flee to someplace remote, get in line. Cambodia does $1 billion in tourism from Asian nations alone, and its once-peaceful temples at Angkor attract so many tourists—856,000 a year—that they feel like a Disney World exhibit. This is madness. “The places we love are rapidly disappearing.” Now that nearly everyone can afford to travel, tourism may be most people’s idea of fun—but the world can’t take much more of it.