Future of tourism within the environment (46)

By Jim Dator

If I were to convene a group of decision-makers now, in 2012, to talk about the futures of tourism in Hawaii (or anywhere), most people would want to talk about the fact that tourism is one of the biggest and most important industries in the world today.

They would want to discuss all the ways tourism will continue to grow, and that every community that intends to prosper in the futures must focus on developing its “hospitality” resources.

I, on the other hand, would want to talk about “the unholy trinity, plus one” that suggests that we are nearing the end not only of tourism in Hawaii, but everywhere — as well as the end of the global neoliberal political-economy of which tourism is a major part.

But before we consider the futures, we must first understand the past. How did something as “frivolous” as tourism become one of the most important global industries?

Imagine we are attending a meeting taking place in Hawaii a scant 236 years ago — in 1776. Whoever we are and whatever we are doing, we aren’t worrying about the future of tourism! Neither are we discussing the possibility that our way of life, secure after 2000 years of spectacular growth and development — is about to come to an end. But it did.

Next imagine our meeting taking place 110 years ago. Now we might be talking about tourism. The Moana Hotel in Waikiki had been built a few years earlier. Tourists, few in number — 2,000 a year, and almost all very wealthy with lots of spare time — arrive by steamship which in itself was a relatively new invention, replacing the earlier sailing ships. A few more hotels are being built or planned, and even though airplanes are just beginning to fly, we certainly are not planning for them at all, viewing them as mere dangerous toys.

Increase in tourism

Imagine our meeting taking place 80 years ago, in 1933. All tourists still arrive by steamship, but in a few years, the first Pan American Clipper will be flying between San Francisco and Hawaii. An airplane ticket costs $360 one-way. In 2012 dollars, that is roughly $6,000. Moreover, the gruesome flight takes almost 22 hours. Nonetheless, the number of tourists increased over the next decade to about 40,000 per year.

By 1956, the tourist count reached well over 100,000 per year. But are we planning for the impact of statehood in three years? How about the arrival of the first passengers by jet plane also in only three years? By the early 1960s tourists numbered almost 300,000 annually, and hotels were beginning to spring up like mushrooms after the rain.

And so on, with many ups and downs — but mostly mainly ups — to the present count of 8 million tourists per year and rising. It is Hawaii’s only industry, by far. All livelihoods depend on it.

I focused mainly on one thing in the past that created the present of tourism — the transforming power of new transportation technologies: from voyaging canoes, to sailing ships, to steamships, to propeller airplanes, to jet airplanes, beyond which (it is very important to remember) there have been no major advances since the 1970s. Aircraft have gotten bigger recently and there are more and bigger airports. But no breakthroughs in transportation technology.

There are many more crucial causes of tourist growth than just changes in transportation. One is the invention of the credit card so that anyone with enough cards with some credit left on them can fly now and pay later.

Electronic ticketing

That was not possible 40 years ago. For most folks then, “you no pay, you no go.” Tourist growth itself might have stopped long ago without consumer credit available worldwide by merely flashing a piece of plastic. A true miracle.

Another revolution was in electronic ticketing and reservation systems, like Sabre, which would not have been possible without Arthur C. Clarke envisioning telecommunication satellites in space, making instant global communication possible.

People had to know about Hawaii and want to come here for tourism to grow. It is not a place that most people just happen to stumble across. Locations like Hawaii are the most remote — and last discovered — spots on the planet.

But more fundamentally, for all of these things to happen, the world had to transform from being a labor-intensive agricultural society dependent on horse power, wind power, water power and human power into an industrial society dependent on oil, electricity, and machines, and then into an information society dependent on people who sit around all day reading and sending electronic messages to each other while producing absolutely nothing at all but more messages.

To have mass tourism you need masses (including retired masses) that are rich, numerous, idle and healthy enough to want to travel for fun. If people still had to work for a living on a farm or in a factory, as most people did until about 50 years ago, there would be no gigantic tourist industry.

A lot of absolutely unbelievable things had to happen to create jobs in tourism — things that were so totally unbelievable that you would have laughed at anyone who told you about them before they existed.

One final important point before we leap into the future: The owners and managers of hotels and other tourist attractions went from being essentially small mom and pop innkeepers to local business magnates to global corporations and now to global corporations who only care about making money, and don’t care whether it is via tourism or not.

They will drop tourism like a hot potato the minute before it stops making them lots of money. They will gladly change hotels into condos or homeless centers or homes for fish if that is the most economical thing to do.

That is the nature of the world we live in now. While this logic makes total sense to economists and the managers of industry, it means that tourism, the flagship — as well as most of the flotilla — of the economy, is fundamentally very fragile and dependent indeed.

And so here we are at the present. Recently, after the hiccups of 9/11 and 2008, tourism has had one fantastic year after another. Tourists and money are pouring in.

What’s next?

No one can say for sure. Most people answer the question “what’s next” by responding, “more of whatever is happening now.” Maybe. But here is my answer, presented not as a prediction of what will happen, but rather as a forecast of what might happen, and for which we should be prepared. I call it the unholy trinity, plus one. It is a trinity because it is composed of three things that people consider to be separate, but which in fact are deeply joined as one.

The first person of the unholy trinity is:

1. The end of cheap and abundant oil before any equivalent replacement takes over.

Hawaii is almost totally dependent on imported oil for everything. In spite of abundant sunshine, wave, wind, geothermal, and ocean thermal energy conversion potentials, about 90 percent of our energy comes from imported oil — more than anywhere else in the U.S. And yet, the brief 100-year era of cheap and abundant oil is over.

While the daily price will certainly go up and down with the economy, oil is becoming more and more scarce, difficult to get, and hence progressively more expensive from now on until it essentially “runs out.”

Of course, many energy solutions exist in principle, but none are nearly ready to take over from oil. A gap of uncertain duration awaits us before other energy forms take over — if they will be able to take over at all within our lifetime.

This will be a disaster for mass tourism of course. It simply will be too expensive for most people to travel. More seriously, almost all of the food we in locations like Hawaii currently consume is flown or shipped in. It will take a lot of money and time to solve our energy problems. Where will that money come from? Do we even have time?

2. The focus of life globally and locally will switch from the production and consumption of goods, to addressing long-neglected — and exacerbated — environmental issues: Climate change, sea level rise, water shortages, new and renewed diseases, environmental refugees. All of these will very seriously impact us in Hawaii. Where will the money, energy and time come from to adapt effectively to them?

3. Collapse of the global neoliberal political-economy: Our global and local economy is built very largely on debt and financial tricks, not on markets, productivity or hard work.

Over the past 75 years, we have faced a series of economic crises that we “solved” each time by inventing new and ever-confounding debt instruments, thus kicking the day of inevitable reckoning into the future for our children and grandchildren to deal with — not by our inventing a sustainable economy.

When will the economic system finally collapse? Tomorrow? Next year? Ten years later?

So that is the unholy trinity: the end of cheap and abundant energy, environmental change and economic collapse. They are all part of the same thing.

We can’t solve one by making the others worse. We certainly can’t solve the end of oil by using ever-more polluting energy sources, as we are currently doing. We can’t solve environmental change by throwing money at it. We don’t have enough time, money or credit to throw anything at it but hard work and prayer.

What is the “plus one?”

Many concerned economists say, “The government, by Keynesian measures, should fund new energy, infrastructure, and environmental research and jobs, thus preventing total economic collapse.” That won’t work because of the other two persons of the unholy trinity.

But even if this were not so, government can’t help because of 30 years of bad-mouthing — the mantra that all government is bad and that we should each take care of ourselves entirely. This has resulted in under-resourcing, downsizing, privatizing, outsourcing and debt, each of which has been intended to drive nails into the coffin of effective government.

And while massive national debt is the final nail, please understand that, as the Republican candidates for the American presidency have recently made completely clear, this is the purpose of our debt — to cripple and kill all government functions. The huge debt is not an unfortunate consequence of certain policies. It is their fundamental intent.

We have driven the government and ourselves deeper and deeper into debt not to solve current problems but rather to make it harder and harder for people to act collectively through the government in the future, leaving everything up to private forces.

As a consequence, the United States has become a strong nation with weak states — that is, while many Americans remain wildly entranced by certain American icons, they have allowed the government to become too weak to aid ordinary Americans when communal help is needed. This seems to be the road to rejection and ultimately revolution.

It is far too late to prevent the consequences of the unholy trinity, plus one. We can only adapt to them.

Jim Dator is professor and director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science, and adjunct professor in the Program in Public Administration, the College of Architecture, and the Center for Japanese Studies, of the University of Hawaii at Manoa; co-chair, Space and Society Division, International Space University, Strasbourg, France; former president, World Futures Studies Federation; fellow and former member of the Executive Council, World Academy of Art and Science.

Environment Info Eco-friendly Tourism

Sound environmental management of tourism facilities and especially hotels can increase the benefits to natural areas. But this requires careful planning for controlled development, based on analysis of the environmental resources of the area. Planning helps to make choices between conflicting uses, or to find ways to make them compatible. By planning early for tourism development, damaging and expensive mistakes can be prevented, avoiding the gradual deterioration of environmental assets significant to tourism.

Cleaner production techniques can be important tools for planning and operating tourism facilities in a way that minimizes their environmental impact. For example, green building (using energy-efficient and non-polluting construction materials, sewage systems and energy sources) is an increasingly important way for the tourism industry to decrease its impact on the environment. And because waste treatment and disposal are often major, long-term environmental problems in the tourism industry, pollution prevention and waste minimization techniques are especially important for the tourism industry. A guide to sources of information on cleaner production (free) is available here.