The Roman emperor Nero is said to have played the fiddle while the city burned down. Probably apocryphal but it serves as an image of irresponsibility in the face of a disaster.
Sean Sheehan
A real-life equivalent is a tourist attempting to grab a piece of melted iceberg from the North Pole while their other hand holds a selfie stick.
The level of the Dead Sea, between Jordan, the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, is dropping by one metre annually and parts of the Jordan River have shrunk to a muddy trickle.
Climate change is part of the problem but so too is Israel’s policy of diverting headwaters and –no surprise here – not sharing the water equally with Palestinian farmers.
Despite the shortage of water, a luxury hotel constructs a pool on a natural rock terrace in the Negev Desert in Israel and a travel agent advertises it as “The coolest pool in the world”.
In the Dolomites, winter visitors are becoming accustomed to skiing on artificial snow. The Dolomite Superski area in Italy provides artificial snow on 1,200 km of pistes and can accommodate over 600,000 skiers per hour. Across the Italian Alps, thousands of people are employed creating and maintaining artificial snow – the visual equivalent of the sound of music from Nero’s fiddle.
The threat to coral reefs by tourism is well documented, from direct physical contact to the release of chemical from sunscreen products. The tourist industry responds by reclaiming small islands with a higher level above the sea, creating private resorts where holidaymakers can forget about rising sea levels and, in the Maldives, enjoy themselves at the world’s largest all-glass underwater restaurant. On Fushifaru Island, part of the Maldives, coral bleaching has wreaked its damage but this need not bother tourists who can enjoy themselves in an underwater playground.
Visiting disappearing icebergs is seen as a fun thing to do on a boat in Canada that takes over 40 people at a time for two-hour trips. In Greenland, where the annual number of tourists equals half the country’s population (56,000), tourists can find luxury igloos in a four-star hotel, Thai chefs and a golf club. A photo shows a man there retrieving a piece of iceberg to use in his whisky. In 2017, says the book’s note to a photo of a sign advertising the sale of iceberg ice in Canada, Harrods in London launched a ‘luxury water’, Svalbaroi, from a Norwegian company that sells iceberg water for between £75 and £390 for a case of six 750ml bottles.
The photographs in “Tourism in the climate change era” reveal in stark colours the contradictions of the tourist industry when it comes to climate change. When hotels ask guests to conserve their use of towels out of ecological concern, one suspects they only really care about reducing their laundry costs. Tourism is thriving while polar ice melts, sea levels rise and pollution destroys environments.
“Tourism in the climate change era” by Marco Zoranello is published by AF Editions.
(Photos supplied by the publisher)
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