dohboi wrote:Ibon wrote: ".... You cannot defend tourism as somehow being exempt from these cumulative impacts."
Nicely put.
Thats a straw man argument. No one is trying to defend tourism from being exempt from having cumulative impacts. Of course tourism has cumulative impacts.
The point I'm making is a bit more sophisticated than that straw man. I'm pointing out that
everything has cumulative impacts and
everyone is producing or has produced them during their lives.
For instance, consider The millions of loving mommies carefully driving their kids to school? Thats millions of trips in the old car twice a day, every week day. Total it up and you've got cumulative impacts.
Millions of teens going out for burgers in their parent's car and stopping in the park for a quick schnog after the friday football game? cumulative impact.
Tens of millions of of people heating their homes? Cumulative impacts.
Farmers growing their crops and driving tractors and using fertilizers? Cumulative impacts.
Ferryboats steaming back and forth across the bays in Seattle, New York, Boston, etc? Cumulative impacts
Buy buying bicycles with rubber tires made from Indonesian rubber and gears made in Japan and tubes made in China and pedals made in Italy, all imported the US on big diesel boats and trucked the store in CO2 spewing trucks? There are cumulative impacts.
Tens of millions of people in Egypt growing cotton and harvesting cotton and shipping it to China where tens of millions of chinese are sewing jeans and clothes and shipping them to the US and Europe and trucking to stores and heating the stores to sell the clothes to tens of millions of people who drive to the stores. Well, each step of the clothing biz has a cumulative impact.
On and on and on it goes. And even worse, consider that its not just what one is doing now--- everything a person has done through their entire life has cumulative impacts. Some CO2 from travel and every other kind of activity done 10 or 30 or 50 years ago is still in atmosphere.
Alas, we have all fallen short of perfection.
Cheers!