Well today is blog action day. A concerted global effort on the part of bloggers to get the topic of Global Poverty on the agenda. It is quite an inspiring thought that blog action day will reach approximately 8 million readers, an amazing achievement for non-manstream media.
So in thinking about blog action day I wanted to speak about the topic of tourism. Being a speaker and preacher I have spoken in front of people for over 15 years. I have only had people interupt me twice in anger. Why was I interrupted? Did I preach some kind of heresy? Was I shouted down by angry Christians or militant atheists? What sacred cow did I dare to question? Our modern addiction to travel. People in the audience could not contain their anger, How dare I question our right to travel? It reminded me of a moment I saw on the news when former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was questioned by a journalist at a environmental launch. Blair was encouraging people to cut down on their carbon emissions. The journalist asked Blair if that meant that he was going to now holiday in Britain rather than fly halfway around the world several times a year to holiday. Was he going to tell the British people to quit their addiction to cheap overseas flights and holidays. Blair got very perturbed and replied that it was not practical to ask the British people to cut back on their overseas holidays. This was a revealing response. It seems that overseas holidaying once a luxury only for the super wealthy is now seen as a right of every citizen of the West.
The American writer and social activist Henry David Thoreau was once asked if he did anything over his summer vacation. He replied that he explored half the world and only got as far as half way across his backyard. He was making the point that just before our eyes is a whole world to explore. However such a view does not cut it today. We look down on the familiar and the mundane of our everyday lives. We are told that we must regularily escape our day to day existence through travel and tourism.
Our culture has attached an almost religious importance upon the act of travelling. In a secular culture that struggles with a meaning vacuum; we are told that we can find a meaning and purpose in acquiring a portfolio of experiences. Thus the 21st century hipster will set of to traverse the globe in order to ’sample’ the exotic cultures of the world, to taste the food, see the sights, and ‘rub shoulders’ with the locals. In contrast to the consumption of material goods, travel and the acquisition of experiences is as seen as a noble alternative. In his book the Age of Access Jeremy Rifkin shows how we are becoming a culture of experience consumers rather than material consumers. For example If you tell you friends that you are going to travel through south east Asia for a year ( a trip that will cost you $8000) your friends will smile, get jealous, tell you how it will be an amazing experience and how much you will grow. If you turn up to a dinner party in a new suit and tell your friends that you spent $8000 on it, your friends will worry that you are coming down with a case of influenza. This is because in a consumer society it seems less consumerist if we are consuming experiences rather than material things.
However there is a cost to travelling beyond the massive carbon footprint made by jet travel. Tourism can become a form of ‘culture consumption’. The economies of whole third world nations have become dependant on foreign tourism. On one hand this can be a positive thing in that it can move a country out of extreme poverty, but it can also mean that a country can stagnate in its development, and thus stay poor.
When you travel to an exotic place you want to see the local culture, thus there is a pressure from locals to deliver that culture, thus they create a kind of hyperreal version of their culture, that is more about the Western tourists tastes and fantasies rather than the reality of that culture. The local culture then becomes a consumer item to be bought and sold rather than genuinely connected with. Thus abusive economic practices continue that keep locals impoverished. Check out this provocative video from the guys at world vision.
Tags: blog action day, poverty, tourism, travel
