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Comment by dantillberg | Hacker News Reader

Nature tourism needs to be scaled horizontally. There are plenty of beautiful places to go, just not everyone can go to the same few places.

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On the other hand if we concentrate nature tourism to a handful of places then all those other beautiful places will be left alone and remain beautiful. Everybody dumping their trash on Everest means that there's no trash on any of the other mountains.

For many, the beauty is derived from the uniqueness or low supply of the features of the place. Whether it’s status signaling or genuinely wanting to see it in person, the limited quantity of great waterfalls, accessible and scenic mountains, sunsets, clear blue green water on a white sand beach, combined with good weather, will never be able to be substituted with ever abundant plains or deserts.

Landscape of Hawaii will be more popular than Nebraska, unless maybe 90% of the world looked like Hawaii and 10% like Nebraska.

> Nature tourism needs to be scaled horizontally.

Fuck no. Tourism is a vampiric money-making enterprise that absolutely ruins that which it attempts to make accessible.

Enterprise or not, people like novelties, want to experience other places, wonders of the world, etc.

And of course since we specialize, it's not surprising that this too became something that produces a surplus.

It's up to society and culture as a whole to protect and preserve said wonders. (From park rangers to laws and entrance limits and lotteries.)

I'm gonna have to disagree, I live in East Tennessee and Dolly Parton opening Dollywood right outside Great Smoky Mountain National Park created a booming tourism economy here when we used to be one of the poorest places of the country. And now Big Moonshine, who got big on a lot of those tourism dollars in the past decade or so, is turning around and dumping money into revitalizing lots of East TN cities that used to be total dumps (who knew Johnson City could be so cute?!), as well as pouring tons of money into boosting Knoxville's already strong arts and crafts scene. Tourism has absolutely been East Tennessee's salvation. All you gotta do to see that is cross the border into eastern Kentucky, left behind and still one of the poorest parts of this country.

Sure, tourism ruins a lot of shit, but tourist dollars have improved the quality of life for millions and millions of people all over the world.

Sure, some of the money from tourism helps local economies, if there are already local economies that can provide, e.g. food and hotels and such. But in Third World countries, which wasn't clear from my OP, tourism has annihilated people's way of life and thrown millions of people off their native lands--in particular in island countries where beachfront property brings in tons of rich westerners who end up creating an over-economy where the vast majority of money stays in an upper class. Sure, there are middle-class jobs then available, like cleaning toilets and stocking hotel rooms. But fisherman, mom-and-pop shops, farmers, all of them, kicked out and their lands taken over because it is just too damn profitable to turn into resorts and such. Sad.

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