Tourism, Colonialism, and Disease

A recent bonne nouvelle for the jet-set is that the European Union will be reopening its borders to American tourists. The pandemic put a pause on many people’s travel plans, and despite vaccines not yet having enough distribution or time to truly eliminate the risk of the virus packing a bag and tagging along, the tourism industry is ready for summer vacation. Of course, some places, like Mexico, never ceased to host tourists. Still, despite some think pieces about taking a moment to reassess the value of tourism, it looks like it will emerge from this past year unchanged. Even the UN is desperate for it to come back, calling tourism “one of the world’s most important economic sectors.” This is a waste of an opportunity to reconsider why we travel and what effects it has on others. What some might write off as just a quick trip, or a necessary break for their mental health could carry with it disastrous consequences. There is an inherent problem in tourism of objectifying the places to which we travel—it’s just a beach, a city, a forest. But those places have people in them, locals whose lives are intertwined with the environment the tourist is enjoying, and who are often reliant on the tourists for their livelihood. Those people themselves end up objectified. In this paradigm there are direct parallels to colonialism: these towns and nations are often built up as escapes for the affluent of the Global North, and the objectification of people is often in service of a foreign enterprise. It becomes even clearer that tourists are colonial invaders when they continue to travel knowing they might bring with them an insidious plague. Last summer we saw statues of Christopher Columbus torn down all over the country, and yet this summer people are eager to follow in his footsteps on their way to the largely un-inoculated Caribbean.

The exploitative and extractive economy of Columbus, et al., is still here, but the supply chains have become more complex. Those who have tried to prioritize ethics in their purchases know that it is difficult to source products that are wholly divorced from human suffering or environmental destruction. Still, we need food, we need clothes and shelter, and the difficulty of removing oneself from these supply chains is extreme. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, the saying goes, and I’m not here (nor would I feel qualified) to tell you from whom to buy your bread. What we can live without—however often it may feel otherwise—is a vacation. Leisure travel is an opportunity to take deeper consideration of the ethics of our actions. Travel is an activity where we have an incredible amount of freedom in our choices, where we can, in existentialist terms, more easily transcend our mere facticity. And tourism, even more than capitalism at-large, relies on the same model as colonialism. As Hal K. Rothman puts it in his book, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West:

Tourism is the most colonial of colonial economies, not because of the sheer physical difficulty or the pain or humiliation intrinsic in its labor but because of its psychic and social impact on people and their places. Tourism and the social structure it provides transform locals into people who look like themselves but who act and believe differently as they learn to market their place and its, and their, identity.

Those from wealthy places visit the underdeveloped ones, they bring money, they enjoy what luxury and leisure they desire, and then they leave. They create a dependency among the locals for tourist dollars, and the economy shapes itself, in what I would argue is bad faith, to the benefit of the tourists. The place-in-itself, once “discovered” by enough tourists, becomes a place-for-others. Like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where locals can hardly afford housing because the wealthy tourists have distorted the real estate market. These places are outposts for the colonists, who instead of extracting gold or spices, extract relaxation and novelty. Rather than mine or farm, they ski or sunbathe—but the model remains the same.  Even in a National Park or Forest the location has been altered for visitors; next time you take in a scenic Yosemite vista, consider how many indigenous people had to be removed to create these places “untrammeled by man.” If the removal of native people from their ancestral lands to better facilitate camping trips (for mostly white people) isn’t colonial, I’m not sure what is.

These phenomena are not new ones, nor have they changed much. As industrialization brought smog and disease to overcrowded cities a couple centuries ago, the country vacation became de mode, especially since summer temperatures and primitive sewage practices made city air intolerable. So, those with means fled the stench and cholera for the coasts and the mountains. Their money went further among the peasants in the country, where labor and land alike were cheaper. The same behavior returned in 2020 when the wealthiest New Yorkers fled the city as COVID-19 ran rampant, hiding out in their summer homes and family beach houses. They were extracting what they needed from the countryside, the mountains and the beach, leaving little behind except some fleeting revenue and possibly a cloud of highly infectious virus. 

I’m certain the affluent residents of the Upper West Side do not liken themselves to Columbus, but where there once was only an economic parallel between tourists and colonizers, there is now an epidemiological one as well. In their escape from New York, those virus fugitives brought with them an illness to which no one had immunity, and they brought it into towns with little infrastructure to handle diseases, because the colonial economic model does not build community-based infrastructure. It builds parking lots, hotels, restaurants, gift shops and bars, but it doesn’t build hospitals of sufficient capacity. After all, while summer populations can double or triple the population of a beach town, most vacationers don’t end up visiting the hospital.  The same goes for ski towns in winter, as isolated Sun Valley, Idaho saw when their COVID-19 infection rate spiked in April 2020, when affluent travelers fled to their condos and chalets. In colonialism there is no real investment in the colony other than what is needed to extract the colonist’s preferred product—whether that be sugarcane or a sun-tan. The colonized are largely considered expendable.

This is why I hope this summer doesn’t see a resurgence of proposals like the TRIP act and the Explore America tax credit, both stimulus programs intended to subsidize and increase tourism. These ideas originated from hotel and restaurant association lobbyists, not from healthcare professionals, and not from hotel and restaurant employees. In hindsight we can say with no doubt that the TRIP act, which offered a $4000 per adult tax credit for money spent on vacations more than 50 miles away from one’s home, would have directly incentivized the spread of COVID-19. One might ask why, if so much money is there to be distributed, we don’t just give it to the workers of the tourism sector directly? The answer is that such a distribution would be against the colonial model that defines modern tourism. The intermediaries want to take their cut too, be they wealthy local owners or national corporations. They want to extract profits from their investments in the tourism industry, and that money comes from the tourists. As expanded unemployment benefits expire, the local workers in these places will soon be put in a position to either go to work servicing possibly contagious outsiders, or be unable to afford the necessities of life.

Still, tourism is often considered a good thing for a developing economy. After all, it does inject capital into places that might otherwise remain quite impoverished. Modern, global economics is oft lauded by neoliberal economists as the world having been flattened by technology, be that the relative affordability of air travel and consumer goods or the vast repository of free information on the internet. Capital is able to move about the world more freely than at any time in history, and this is good for everyone! A rising tide lifts all boats, they say, neglecting to mention that most do not own boats. As a tourist, you want to believe this. We are all biassed towards these convenient altruisms; it is easy to love the idea that the thing you enjoy doing is also helping other people, with little or no extra effort on your part. You want to believe that tipping 10% at a roadside shrimp stand will somehow, perhaps in aggregate, pay for that Bahamian kid’s college tuition. “These new shoes I bought also send shoes to a poor child in Africa! I’m helping!” These are stories we like to tell ourselves, but they are oversimplified ones that easily wander well away from the truth.  Interconnectedness alone does not equalize anything, and any claim of altruism in consumerism is merely marketing. While there are great advantages to the interconnectedness of the modern world, it also makes it easier for the colonial model to expand. It makes tourism more accessible for the middle class of developed nations, and although some tourist dollars certainly do trickle down to locals in tourist locales, in the end it merely expands the geographic breadth of the master/servant dynamic, rather than remedying it. Look at the shanty towns outside of Cancún or those camper-van villages in Jackson Hole and you will see that tourism in its current incarnation does not alleviate poverty or empower the people who inhabit toured lands. It is easy for those of us who might live in the middle or upper class of an affluent nation to embrace the global economy when it is built to serve us at the expense of others. But the world isn’t flat; we’re on top of it, and the blood is rolling downhill away from us while we take photos of the scenery.

Understanding that tourism is an entirely voluntary action within the framework of capitalism forces you to look at the consequences of traveling in a different way. Having a socioeconomic status that allows you to afford vacations is a rare privilege in the history of humanity, and with that privilege—with that freedom—there is an obligation to consider others who are less free to choose their own adventures. The most ethical forms of travel are those that maximize the health, well-being, and freedom of the local people. Interrogating the ethics of tourism is answering the question of how you can do that in a system built on a colonial, capitalistic model. The answer to that question right now is the simplest it will ever be: Do not travel. Certainly not very far. Not unless it is somehow absolutely necessary, which leisure travel is quite obviously not. The dilemmas of how long to visit a place, of where to stay, of whether to use AirBnB or a hotel, of eating at a chain or a local restaurant and how much to tip the server—these are all irrelevant in a global pandemic. The only question you have to ask is “could I be unknowingly carrying a deadly illness to this place?” and the answer right now, for nearly everyone, is yes. Vaccines are here, and they are helpful, but vaccination numbers are not rising at the same pace as infections are. Many governments have jumped the gun on loosening restrictions before vaccines have had a chance to create useful proportions of immunity. Latin America, where many Americans go seeking sun and sand, has largely unvaccinated populations and high rates of infection. We should acknowledge these factors and act accordingly. If you treat people, as Immanuel Kant implored, as an end in themselves and not a means to an end, it is incredibly hard to risk their health and safety so you can accomplish your goal of relaxation. 

That isn’t to say the decision is easy. I’ve spent a number of years studying tourism and pondering the ethics of it, and it isn’t because I think people should stay home. In fact, it is the opposite; I study this because I love to travel. The things you get to experience, the quest for novelty, connections across cultures, natural beauty, these wonderful things that drive us to step onto a train, board an airplane or pack up a tent and sleeping bag are valid and real. They are one of the best parts of the human experience. But when we engage in these activities without consideration for how they affect others, we are not creating joy but rather we are stealing it. I am not going to stop flying (with apologies to the marvelous Greta Thunberg), in part because as an American, I don’t have the benefit of available train routes to a myriad of other cultures, as exists in Europe. That does not mean, however, that I don’t consider the fact that any flight I take is inching our world closer to climate death. I try to consider the impact of my travel and minimize or offset its damage. Climate change and utilitarian carbon calculus is a topic for another time, though, fraught with its own moral hazards. Regardless, while I can’t preach abstinence-only when it comes to vacations, the risks now are too great for any major excursions. Treating everyone as an end in themselves in the purest sense isn’t possible, and even Kant understood this. Sometimes the waiter may just be a means to an appetizer—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tip generously. Do the best you can for others, within your circumstances. Subjectify the people of the places you visit as much as you can, understanding that you can never fully remove objectification from tourism, and never forget the humanity of the people you encounter. It’s true that if you were to apply these ideas in the future, the considerations of colonial economics, climate change, and epidemiology are a lot to weigh while planning your next trip. Perhaps more practically, we can emulate Michael Pollan’s famous ethos on food: travel some, not too much, mostly on the ground, in a way that benefits locals and minimizes harm. Right now, minimizing harm is harder than it used to be, so stay local, stay safe, wear your mask, and remember that the places you visit do not exist for you…except maybe Disney World.

Christopher Riendeau

Christopher Riendeau holds a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research focuses primarily on applied ethics in tourism, existentialism, and the life and travels of Simone de Beauvoir. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his partner and one very cool cat.