Untitled

meaning and matter. The research agenda to emerge is one where the
constant mobility of tourists is being allowed for and at the same time
represented by information technology that allows real-time
communication and continual readjustment of that which is being
represented. In this mobile world we as earthlings are most certainly coextensive
with the Earth. So:
Beware! Consider what you strike at with so much glee. Look first at
what you might risk destroying instead! (Latour in Latour & Weibel
2005, p. 19).
In methodology there have been calls for a re-conceptualization, so
as to include the usage of “nonlinear methods fundamental to complex
systems” because “the Earth and its components have been found to
operate as an interactive whole” (Farrell and Twining-Ward 2004, p. 276).
In tourism this complexity is to be seen in the relationship with the natural
environment which is made complex through the involvement of a
diversity of stakeholders, the variance of the spatial dimension of its
activities, a lack of clear definition of key conceptual themes, and the
subsequent difficulties of the systematic planning of its development. For
example, whilst most stakeholders in tourism would probably agree that
‘sustainable tourism development’ is a desirable goal, the variety of
interpretations of what it actually is, typically lends it a reductionist
approach, limited to isolated examples of environmental initiatives and
improvements undertaken by tour operators, hotel groups or destinations.
This shared observation leads Saarinen (2006, p. 1133) to ask if present
local salutations to global challenges are enough, and do they represent all
that tourism can do (Holden 2009, p. 374)?
Tourism is a phenomenon that can cook your food or burn your house
down. In other words, we all risk destroying the very places that we love
the most. 38
So it is that images in fact take us to the Earth, and not to a tourism
locked inside the bubble chamber of a separate social. Tourism, then, as
we conceive it here, becomes less another social slice in and of society,
and more “a total trip problem” of imaginationing matter-movements on
38 http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/features/islandsrated0711/islands.html (retrieved 2009-
12-03).
102