Welcome to your LibraryGuide for Flourishing Destinations
Tourist destinations face major challenges. They face global issues such as climate change, migration and biodiversity loss as well as specific problems such as over-tourism. Sustainability, or limiting negative impacts, is insufficient to allow all the beauty that once made tourism to exist. Things have to change and that requires a new mindset and a completely different system. Transformation rather than change.
In this guide you'll find links to articles and other sources. And there are videos from key champions of new thinking including Anna Pollock and Dianne Dredge.
Anna Pollock of Conscious Travel UK said in 2024 at the Regenerative Tourism by Design Summit:
"To regenerate is to renew, restore and create the conditions consistent for all life to thrive.
Regeneration is a new way of seeing, being and doing."
Realize that change is a process and therefore there is constantly evolving insight and so we will add new things and perhaps remove articles again.
Embrace the future and have fun!
Ellen Schulten
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"I wonder when people will realise
that caring for the environment and regenerating ecosystems
are not cute hippie things, but the only way for us
to survive on this planet."
In the fall of 2023, there were floods in several places in the Dominican Republic including near Punta Cana. The place where, as a young Caribbean buyer for Arke Travel in the late 1980s, I saw firsthand how bulldozers destroyed mangroves and covered them with sand, how huge lobsters panicked not knowing where to go. Sandy beaches and palm trees were the result. On horseback through the tropical vegetation, face to face with poor Haitian workers under harsh conditions. The forest disappeared, the luxury hotels opened. Contracts were signed, money transferred to Spain, tourists enjoyed, tour operator satisfied and in me uneasiness was born. That bridge to Cayo Coco Cuba; why was the water so salty, the flamingos suddenly gone? The wide asphalt road with that beautiful oh so dead black panther on what three years earlier had been a dirt road from Cancun to Playa del Carmen. The deep dark blue dark holes in the crystal waters of the Bahamas drained by the water needs of the ever-increasing numbers of tourists and new residents of those beautiful (outer) islands. The examples are endless.
In the middle-class family I grew up in, it was all about business and making money. Passion for nature in particular and well-being in general was also there, but away for the weekend.
Only in recent years has the realization dawned that the separation does not have to be there, or stronger, should not be there.
And so came the opportunities to restore what tourism was destroying and to turn the beautiful profession into a resource that benefits everyone. Now we know that mangroves are "ecosystem" services that also serve us humans.They are the nursery of young fauna, they absorb CO2, they are water reservoirs and a buffer against flooding.
If we had not let visitors change the destination in the 1980s, there would be no floods in 2023. It can be different, it must be different. Let's do it together!
