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Tourism – an earthly business
For us the tourist and tourism imaginationing is about the social, cultural
and geographical context of tourism, but within the triad’s geographical
focus, the Earth itself emerges. The important role that non-humans, like
boulders, aeroplanes, landscapes and cars, play in tourism clearly implies
that tourism is something that takes place on planet Earth.
That the Earth becomes an explicit plane of reference on which
tourism takes place may well sound like a self-evident and trivial truism.
Yet, an earthly take does not only mean that tourism is very much about
being and experiencing something somewhere, but also has consequences
for tourism theory. One of these is that it puts a question mark around onesided
theorizations of tourism as a social phenomenon that occurs only in
society. Tourism conceived of as an earthly business means that even such
seemingly more “immaterial” things as tourist images are ultimately about
relations and processes that re-, and de-territorialize the Earth. Indeed, in
our understanding tourism is in essence all about the de/re-territorialization
of the Earth for tourist and tourism purposes (Gren and Huijbens, under
review).
Although we obviously do speak and write as geographers, we
would also argue that there is now a pressing need in tourism studies to
more explicitly address the Earth in both tourism theory and in tourism
research. By now there is an established discourse around tourism in the
context of sustainable development, but there is a rising political focus on
global climate change. Regardless of the scientific basis, for example
whether or not we are witnessing a warming that is due to human impacts
or weather events that are due to climate change or not (for debate see:
Lomborg 2007), it poses a host of real and difficult challenges for how to
address earthly environmental issues in tourism practices (Davos
Declaration 2007). The real destination of climate change is very much the
Earth itself rather than a SPA, or one of the too numerous to mention
shopping malls or cultural heritage tourism sites that can be found “in
society”. In the time of writing there is an upcoming climate change
summit to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009, and the
World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) is “making a strong commitment
to ensure tourism stakeholders support the ‘Seal the Deal!’ campaign and
lobby for a fair, balanced and effective agreement” which will “power
green growth and help protect our planet”. 6
6 http://www.unwto.org/media/news/en/press_det.php?id=4781&idioma=E (retrieved 2009-09-30).
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