A Plea To The Tourism Industry: Stop Using Nature To Sell Travel

By the time I was 12 I had already spent a good portion of my life in the mountains. Growing up in rural Washington State in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains you were limited on how you could spend your time. Sports. Nature. Or getting into trouble. Those are your main choices. I did my fair share of all three, but being in nature was what I loved most. Pre-teen me thought they were pretty tough. I was doing multi-day backpack trips, paddling rivers, fishing the many thousands of creeks and streams. By all accounts I thought I was conquering this natural world and making it bend to my will.

Hunting was big where I grew up. I was never a hunter. I didn’t feel drawn to it, didn’t understand the point, and struggled to understand how killing an animal for sport was interesting. But all my peers were doing it so I ended up tagging along sometimes. One particular trip I was joining a friend and their father on a deer hunting trip. We were traipsing through the dense, damp forest mostly struggling to move in what is some very unforgiving terrain. But I was enjoying the solitude.

Pretty soon I find myself a bit separated from the rest of the group, absentmindedly wandering, looking for mushrooms and pretending to look for deer. All of a sudden I hear behind me a stick break and I freeze. If you have spent any time in the wilderness you quickly come to understand there are certain sounds that trigger terror. Rock slides. Thunder. And the unexpected sounds of something moving behind you.

I slowly turn to see what has snuck up on me, hoping at best it is a coyote or badger. As I turn around, no more than 10 feet from me is standing one of the most beautiful White Tailed Deer I have ever seen. A majestic male with huge horns, standing calmly, steam shooting from his nose with each deep, purposeful breath. Though I was standing I felt as though he was towering over me, huge broad chest filling the forest and exuding power and confidence. But also calm.

I didn’t feel any fear. I felt deep peace. I felt a sense of kinship. What I felt was a shift in my relationship to nature. No longer was the natural world a disconnected bystander in the grand adventures of Tanner, galivanting around pretending to be something he is not. As I stared deeply into his eyes I saw something I had never seen before. I saw myself in him. I saw a primal relationship. I saw all the past lives I spent being with nature in harmony. All of a sudden the line between the natural world and me was gone.

For what felt like a lifetime we stood. Locked in a conversation as old as time itself. Then he turned slowly and walked off into the misty forest. I didn’t understand then, but I know now that I had just had my first real encounter with nature and it changed me to the core.

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When I look at the tourism industry I see 12 year old me there. Brash. Unknowing. Ignorant in so many ways. The relationship between nature and our industry is a complex one that has gone through many iterations. I don’t want to sound completely jaded as I do appreciate the evolution that is taking place in how travel and tourism interacts with nature. Now, more than ever, the natural world is part of the narrative, but I still feel something is missing.

What I think is missing is what I found that day in the woods communing with that deer. It was a new understanding that nature is not separate from me, but it is me, and I am it.

So what I am hoping for is for travel and tourism to move from using nature as a tool, a story, and bystander in order to sell a product, and into a deep and thriving relationship with nature. This is not just about sustainability, conservation, and nice initiatives that make us feel good. This is about a fundamental shift in the role that nature plays in how we do our work. I don’t have all the answers and I am sure there are lots of smart people who can articulate this much better, but I would like to share some of my thoughts on what that might look like.

Nature As A Co-Creator

“Conquer The Mountain Half Marathon & 5K”

“…become professional at conquering the mountains”

“Travel in nature, you’ll save money”

These are actual quotes I pulled from a 2 minute internet search. This is the way that tourism views nature. A way to sell products, inflate travelers egos, and ultimately make money. Now I realize I picked these to make a point, so this doesn’t represent all of travel. But the ease at which I found them illustrates it is prevalent.

I want us to ask the question: What does it look like for nature to co-create meaningful experiences?

When interacting with nature we so often forget the fundamental ways in which we engage with others. If we wanted to create a trip in Mongolia with a local partner, what is the first thing we would do?

We would ask. “What types of experiences can we create there?”

This is because we see that local partner or operator as an integral part in the creative process. Why do we forget that step when creating travel experiences in nature? This is because, for most of us, “nature” is an abstract idea, a place that is “over there” just being what it is. We don’t see a living being in nature and that way of seeing absolves us of our responsibility to ask.

What if we started any creating of travel experiences by asking “What can we do with nature to create a meaningful experience?” What if we asked nature just like we would ask a person? Spending time listening to what the answer is and acting according to what is told is not an easy thing to do, especially for people like me who come from where I come from. But this shift in roles is profound and can lead our industry down a new path.

A Relationship Based In Reciprocity

The amount of attention paid to sustainability, conservation, climate change, and the impacts of our humanity on the nature world is encouraging. Even in my lifetime there has been an exponential increase in how much time and energy is dedicated to taking care of our planet. That is amazing.

But for tourism, I want to challenge us to go a little deeper. Just as with the previous point, what if nature became a living being and not a concept? The foundations of any healthy relationship include a connection that is rooted in reciprocity, the act of give and take from a heart center of compassion.

Nature gives our industry so much, not the least of which is a venue for our travelers to explore. But it also gives us so much more. A sense of belonging. Learning about ourselves. Knowledge on balance and harmony. A glimpse into our souls. A connection to our past. Nature is giving us more than just a place to do our work, so how can we give nature more than just a cursory role in our industry?

How can we give a piece of our soul, our knowledge, our being to nature? Can we give respect, love, and autonomy to the natural world in an industry that takes a lot from it? And at the end of the day how can we build our industry so that we can give nature the ultimate gift: To be itself.

A Model For A New Way Of Being: Balance

As our human world has grown exponentially and without an end in sight, we have lost sight of one of the fundamental truths that guide all of existence. The need for balance. I challenge you, in whatever you can where you are, to spend extended time sitting in nature. Not moving. Not looking. Just sitting and observing. Very quickly you will find that there is nothing out of place. All things are connected and all things are important. Nothing more than is needed and nothing less than is necessary. One leaf supporting one insect supporting one flower toward harmony and health.

What does this look like in the tourism industry? Well, what we see now is like what we see in most of the world. Perpetual growth and expansion without regard for the impacts it has. “Conquering.” Where can we go next that is going to make a good product? What exotic landscape or “interesting” culture can I seize on to make a profit?

Over tourism and extraction seem to be our default methodology. This is in direct conflict with balance. Balance would tell us that sometimes the best choice is not to go, not to impact, not to take. Even if that means a missed economic opportunity, balance is paramount. Balance would tell us that perpetual expansion and exponential growth has limits, barriers that we are dangerously close to crashing into. Balance teaches us that the choice to do or act must be accompanied by a choice to give and not do.

What Happens When You Love

Again, I want to acknowledge the many ways in which travel and tourism is seeking to care for nature, to repair the damage, and to regenerate land. Amazing progress is being made and many people are doing important work.

Think about the person you love most. What would you do to protect them? Does your love come with a price tag? How would you feel if they were gone?

Experiencing nature is great in many ways. Spending time in natural environments has all sorts of positive impacts, its fun, and it enriches our lives. Travel is a great venue for exploring nature and many thousands of people have made contact with the nature world through travel that might never have seen it before.

But is the outcome of those experiences love? Do travelers come into a relationship with nature? Or is nature a bystander, a tool, for personal experience?

Our greatest tool for sustainability, conservation, and ecological repair is not research studies and initiatives and fancy frameworks. It is love.

Love leads us to see ourselves in them. Love leads us to make choices to bring joy and health and wholeness to that being. Love is the only thing that can actually change the way we behave when it comes to nature.

So tourism industry, what can we do to love nature? What can it look like to give without expectation, to care without condition, and to discover something deeper than just nature as a platform?

I could give you the answer, but I promised that deer I wouldn’t tell…

-Tanner Colton