8 ms·

Thousands protest against Canary islands' 'unsustainable' tourism model

62 points by skilled 3y ago

basisword 3y ago
Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs. They’re between a rock and a hard place. The government needs to figure out a way that the locals can capture more of the value tourists bring.
- Jedd 3y ago
  > Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs. That's not strictly true, and it's (stopping all tourists) not what they're advocating. A third of their GDP comes (directly) from tourism, which suggests some room to move (downwards) on tourist quotas, while still retaining a fair amount of revenue from that sector, but without jeopardising access to scarce resources (potable water, housing, etc).
  - _1_1_1_1_1_1_ 3y ago
    They could change the laws so as to halve the tourist load, but double the money extracted per tourist. Really just a matter of stopping unscrupulous businesses from renting out common (public) resources at rock bottom prices and externalizing the costs. Sure it would destroy the cheap end of Canary Islands tourism, but the local government should be looking out for it's citizens interests, not the interests of outsiders who want a cut-rate vacation.
- dendrite9 3y ago
  I struggle with the idea of tourism being a good basis for an economy. At some point you reach a level where the appeal is outweighed by crowding, and the experiences people want are no longer available.
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    Sounds like that’s solved by raising prices, no?
    - forkerenok 3y ago
      Yep, exactly my thought. Start raising prices (via taxes or touristic accommodation quotas or whatever) and find that goldilocks zone balancing revenue and pressure on the environment/locals.
      - ggpsv 3y ago
        The problem here is that this creates negative externalities on the housing market unless regulation is in place. Otherwise, it creates an incentive for short-term housing over long-term housing, which affects the people who do live there. This is the crux of the matter in many places that have a problem with tourism.
        BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
        Regulation is definitely necessary to protect low-income residents. Areas that understand this and implement it well will be rewarded for it.
        _1_1_1_1_1_1_ 3y ago
        tax stays of less than 3 months by 50%
    - chgs 3y ago
      Surely it’s self limiting, as more tourists arrive the attractiveness goes down. From a sustainability point of view though 10,000 people concentrated in a single tourist complex is better than 100 villages with 100 people each.
      - defrost 3y ago
        It's not a 100 villages though, is it? It's 2.2 million local residents living a long term largely sustainable life that are being swamped by an additional non resident 13.9 million people per annum.
- eesmith 3y ago
  Which is why Víctor Martín in the article is quoted as saying: “The problem isn’t the tourists,” he said. “It’s a model that was built around – and with the connivance of – a business class that doesn’t want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.”
  - kvgr 3y ago
    There is a lot of illegal accommodation and illegal housing. They are not able to catch that.. or they dont want to
    - eesmith 3y ago
      Yes, the "they" in your "They are not able" is the "political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens".
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I know the islands well. Tourism is still only a third of the economy there. International shipping and agriculture sustained the islands for hundreds of years, prior to the 1970s when cheap jet air travel came of age. They import a lot now, but can in theory totally self-sustain. Each of the islands has a very different biosphere suited to different farming. We should pay attention to the Canary Islands, the rest of the planet is the coal mine, The problem is identified as "tourism" but their relation to the global economics within a climate change context is the real story. > 13.9 million people visited the islands Nearly all of them flew there. A few passenger cruise ships stop by. > a water emergency is already been declared on Tenerife They've a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis and now 36 degrees in April after a dry winter. Most of Tenerife is volcanic and the plant life around tourist areas is heavily irrigated. Without that it's a quite barren, unattractive environment. Without enough water for just the population, tourism is unsustainable. > It's a model that was built around a business class that doesn't want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens. So, the usual root causes, greed and short-term thinking.
  - yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
    > We should pay attention to the Canary Islands, the rest of the planet is the coal mine I enjoyed this line.
  - hcks 3y ago
    > only a third of the economy Yeah and I’m sure the rest is advanced industry and not at all goods and services consumed by the tourism-industry workers and their families
  - NoPie 3y ago
    Santa Cruz where most of the local population lives gets half of its water from desalination plant. Desalination is already cost-effective and can provide water for tourists if needed. They would just need to build a desalination plant in the south. Electricity already is largely generated by wind, solar and tide. Air transportation probably causes the biggest pollution. Apart from that such tourism is very sustainable. It provides value to people who need to go on holidays. It doesn't matter if the food and necessities are imported because tourists would have consumed the food anyway if they had stayed at home. While it causes unsustainable rent increases to local population, that can be managed somehow. Maybe give subsidies to them by using the profits from tourism. Tourism tax is not unusual invention in many places.
- lobochrome 3y ago
  Tourists bring little value beyond what they spend on themselves. That’s why countries that have developed a strong tourism base struggle to develop further. It’s an economic dead end.
- newswasboring 3y ago
  > Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs. Nobody is arguing to take away tourism. They are arguing against it's unsustainable growth. The industry is perfectly ok in it's current state, brings in 16bn dollars a year.
  - pydry 3y ago
    “The problem isn’t the tourists,” he said. “It’s a model that was built around – and with the connivance of – a business class that doesn’t want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.” Yup. The problem is the local elites and their tendency towards profit maximization at the expense of everything else. It's a very familiar story.
    - robocat 3y ago
      Place the blame where it belongs: the government and regulating the industry. Businesses and elites are playing the game according to the rules that they are given. Maybe the rules need improving, but that is a governance problem. There are reasons why the governance is difficult (e.g. capture) but that doesn’t mean blame should be shifted.
      - javcasas 3y ago
        Businesses and elites are playing the game according to the rules that they are lobbying for. Fixed that for you.
        pydry 3y ago
        Yeah, they do like to pretend that the game either exists in either a vacuum or a direct democracy that is untainted by those same elites.
      - newswasboring 3y ago
        > Place the blame where it belongs: the government and regulating the industry. Why? Why are we blaming the guard who is trying to stop the hoard from destroying the city rather than the hoard which is destroying the city? Companies need to behave ethically and if they dont know what is ethical I'm sure they can afford to have some philosophers on the board. And if they can't afford that, that still doesn't absolve them from their unethical behavior. I refuse to participate in this blame shifting mentality, as if companies have no other choice but to be unethical.
- kvgr 3y ago
  It is a beautiful place, but without tourists its basically just goats and bananas.
  - Gud 3y ago
    And what’s wrong with that?
    - kvgr 2y ago
      Inherently nothing, but you cannot build economy just on that. How would you import all expensive stuff on island? People would be unhappy that they don’t have jobs. People are never truly satisfied with anything.
  - lifestyleguru 3y ago
    That's all a real man and a woman need.
KolmogorovComp 3y ago
Limited number of tourists VISA per year, available via a bidding system. This will obviously restrict the destination to the richest and not fair for the tourists, but from the host country it’s definitely a way of limiting the number of tourists while extracting the maximum value from each of them.
- sveme 3y ago
  They are part of the EU, so anyone from there can freely move and live there. You cannot restrict this. Limitations in flights would be feasible, I guess.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  I don't think that is compatible with Schengen / EU freedom of movement
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kgwgk 3y ago
    We’re not even talking about an independent country. Tourists could still arrive via internal flights.
- forkerenok 3y ago
  There are a lot of people in the EU and other countries that don't need visas, so I'm not sure that's the right dial to use.
  - lukan 3y ago
    Yes, the vast majority of canary tourists are from EU. Mostly british and german. And we can not just fly there, we can just move there, thanks to the EU. And this is good. But that I can fly there for 20€ from germany, this is nuts. So maybe the solution is to stop subsidizing flying (taxfree kerosin etc)
Dibby053 3y ago
Canary Islands has one of the lowest property taxes in Spain: 0.3% rural and 0.5% urban (+0.05% if it's unoccupied). Obviously not enough judging by the ~20% of empty houses. It's easy to blame tourists and/or immigrants but it's really their own government policies' fault.
- heavenlyblue 3y ago
  So you pay a 10% premium for an unoccupied property?
  - karma_pharmer 3y ago
    That's the whole point. With high property taxes the property won't be empty for long.
vintermann 3y ago
Interesting use of 'quotes' in the title.
- steve1977 3y ago
  ‘Interesting’ use
pelasaco 3y ago
This isn't the only one unsustainable tourism model in Canary island
openrisk 3y ago
Just one hundred years ago tourism was only available to a tiny elite. Like with all goods and services provisions that have been scaled exponentially in the mean time, the problem is that there is poor accounting and management of side-effects (externalities). Impacts on environment and local communities are ignored as it is simpler and more profitable to do so. Sustainability is a complex problem facing every aspect of modern life that we have barely begun to acklowledge, let alone start really solving. E.g., the article does not discuss the interplay with the other intensive industry of the Canary islands (banana plantations) that also competes for resources and creates its own problems. It will take major economic, political and behavioral development to transition to long term sustainable economies and its anybody's guess what the final outcome will be.
- Voultapher 3y ago
  For me personally I've only recently connected the dots. Collectively as a society we are currently talking about carbon-neutral vs carbon-negative, global warming and clean energy. As someone who fell for that narrative for quite some time, I can see why. The more uncomfortable but in my opinion significantly more compelling answer to what stands in the way of a sustainable human co-habitation of planet earth, is: not CO2 emissions, it's modernity. The writing by Tom Murphy drove that point home for me. One example: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/03/lets-make-a-deal/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/03/lets-make-a-deal/ > Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life. Big picture: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/our-time-on-the-river/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/our-time-on-the-river/
  - korantu 3y ago
    This is very dangerous point of view, which will lead to a lot of suffering. Humanity managed to lift vast majority of itself from abject poverty, grow enough food for everyone, prevent children mortality - unimaginable 100 years ago. And this is called modernity, which if reversed will bring back hunger and misery.
srge 3y ago
I would like to comment on the Guardian reporting. It was always a news organization that I loved but their reporting has become so one-sided that it’s now questionable if this is really journalism at all. Why not interview the local elected politicians or the local tourism organization? Apparently there’s a problem with those two resorts being built. Are they really that outrageous? Why not report on them even just by calling a representative? Even if they are biased it would be a counterpoint to the other (also biased) claims in the article.
- badgersnake 3y ago
  What are you talking about? They include a quote from Fernando Clavijo, the regional president of the Canary islands and link to an article reporting on a statement he made to the media. Admittedly it’s in Spanish, but it’s 2024 your phone can translate that in a heartbeat.
  - srge 3y ago
    The selected quote is not a counterpoint to the claims of the activists. It’s merely an admission that mass tourism causes issues. Also as I said they did not interview him but only quoted another interview.
    - badgersnake 3y ago
      So you’re not satisfied with an interview with a local politician, you also want them to disagree with the activists? That’s not balance, that’s creating disagreement where it doesn’t exist. I bet you’re fun on Twitter
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >their reporting has become so one-sided that it’s now questionable if this is really journalism at all. I haven't regarded The Guardian as a journalism outfit ever since they painted Trump's koi feeding in such a biased light that even the Japanese media went "Nani[1] the fuck?" in utter bewilderment. [1]: https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BD%95 https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BD%95
Joel_Mckay 3y ago
Singapore had a similar challenge being in proximity to some of the largest population centers on earth, and having finite space/resources of an island. 1. "Right of first sale" to citizens born in the country. The real-estate speculators were not happy with the two tier bidding model, but the first home purchase a citizen makes shunts the international market pressure. They once had the same issues Brazil developed, where the opportunists priced local citizens out of their own cities. The absurd outcome was some natural Brazilian citizens would have to work 34 lifetimes to live in their own city. 2. Prohibit commercial ownership in favor of 7+ year leases asset managed by the government (it is an island remember, and unused holdings are a liability due to malaria/mosquitoes.) 3. Put illegal-drug-dealers in front of firing-squads the following Tuesday, and seize their assets. Most idealists think this law is savage, but have never had to deal with real organized crime at scale. 4. Oil refinery produces excess energy for fresh-water desalination. Say what you want, but an island has very low carrying capacity for tourists. Even importing massive resources to cater to customer needs still hurts local ecosystems. Note, Hawaii also had long battles over water-rights with resorts playing dirty politics, and then literally burned down due in part to invasive dry-grass take over. Poor people do not have a lot of influence outside of voting. A cathartic protest is essentially asking the same people that benefit from misery to handle their existing conduct differently. Give a clear list of pragmatic political demands, warn of lawsuits, then follow up and sue domestically with a jury of your peers... I assure you investment funds give zero F's about complaints, but will eventually leave if their behavior has negative economic outcomes. The argument that they offer something economically unique is a false dichotomy, so just build a Starbucks and or McDonalds on top of whatever abomination they were planning... daily revenues will win out over hypothetical trickle-down economic urinal models. Good luck, as I have only seen Singapore successfully deal with this phenomena due to its oil industry resources. =)
makomk 3y ago
Oh huh, a Guardian article about a protest about unsustainable tourism in Tenerife and the Canary islands and the environmental damage it's creating. Wonder if they're going to mention that an awful lof of those developments on Tenerife are illegally dumping all their sewage in the sea rather than building sewage treatment... nope. For context, there's been a huge amount of anger in the UK that was basically kicked off by the Guardian about how the UK's seas and rivers are catastrophically polluted with sewage by our water companies, we're supposedly the dirty man of Europe now, privatisation and Brexit has ruined everything and it's all getting worse, to the point it's likely to influence the next election. One of the big headline stories involved a British windsurfing champion leaving because it's like "surfing in a sewer"... and moving to Tenerife, where sewage treatment is objectively far worse and as mentioned there are sewage systems that just dump all their sewage out into the sea basically everywhere. (This is something that was fixed in the mainland UK decades ago post-privatisation, and in fact seems to be one of the big infrastructure improvements that privatisation was done to get funding for.) The rest of the coverage has been about as founded in reality as that. When looking for information on this, I even ran across people that were presumably from there complaining on a forum about this and how it'd probably only get fixed if British tourists found out about it and started objecting. Guess there's little chance of that.
lifestyleguru 3y ago
Where Canaries take electricity from, it's all oil power plants right?
hankchinaski 3y ago
In the bealearic where I lived they call it “turismo basura”. Here now the main concern is the construction of new hotels in the coast. Ironically also the issue is lack of affordable housing for locals. Many buildings are run down and sit empty in the capital. There is some truth to the message but as always the way is delivered leaves you wondering. Not to mention the negative effect the clampdown on tourism would have on the local economy. I classify this as petty noise.
orwin 3y ago
And despite having extraordinary trails, almost no tourist is going in the inside of the Islands. Imho, they should limit new tourist developements on Fuerteventura and El hierro (reserving part of fishing towns for fishermen maybe), maybe on La gomera and La Palma (i don't know those well), and leave Tenerife and Gran canaria alone (i also feel that Lanzarote has too much character to add new development)
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  > And despite having extraordinary trails, almost no tourist is going in the inside of the Islands. Thx for the tip! I'm considering a visit to the Canaries some day (by boat), and I'd be way more interested in say, hiking a trail up a volcano, than hanging out at bars / restaurants / souvenir shop etc.

62 points by skilled 3y ago

Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs. They’re between a rock and a hard place. The government needs to figure out a way that the locals can capture more of the value tourists bring.

Jedd 3y ago
> Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs. That's not strictly true, and it's (stopping all tourists) not what they're advocating. A third of their GDP comes (directly) from tourism, which suggests some room to move (downwards) on tourist quotas, while still retaining a fair amount of revenue from that sector, but without jeopardising access to scarce resources (potable water, housing, etc).
- _1_1_1_1_1_1_ 3y ago
  They could change the laws so as to halve the tourist load, but double the money extracted per tourist. Really just a matter of stopping unscrupulous businesses from renting out common (public) resources at rock bottom prices and externalizing the costs. Sure it would destroy the cheap end of Canary Islands tourism, but the local government should be looking out for it's citizens interests, not the interests of outsiders who want a cut-rate vacation.
dendrite9 3y ago
I struggle with the idea of tourism being a good basis for an economy. At some point you reach a level where the appeal is outweighed by crowding, and the experiences people want are no longer available.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  Sounds like that’s solved by raising prices, no?
  - forkerenok 3y ago
    Yep, exactly my thought. Start raising prices (via taxes or touristic accommodation quotas or whatever) and find that goldilocks zone balancing revenue and pressure on the environment/locals.
    - ggpsv 3y ago
      The problem here is that this creates negative externalities on the housing market unless regulation is in place. Otherwise, it creates an incentive for short-term housing over long-term housing, which affects the people who do live there. This is the crux of the matter in many places that have a problem with tourism.
      - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
        Regulation is definitely necessary to protect low-income residents. Areas that understand this and implement it well will be rewarded for it.
      - _1_1_1_1_1_1_ 3y ago
        tax stays of less than 3 months by 50%
  - chgs 3y ago
    Surely it’s self limiting, as more tourists arrive the attractiveness goes down. From a sustainability point of view though 10,000 people concentrated in a single tourist complex is better than 100 villages with 100 people each.
    - defrost 3y ago
      It's not a 100 villages though, is it? It's 2.2 million local residents living a long term largely sustainable life that are being swamped by an additional non resident 13.9 million people per annum.
eesmith 3y ago
Which is why Víctor Martín in the article is quoted as saying: “The problem isn’t the tourists,” he said. “It’s a model that was built around – and with the connivance of – a business class that doesn’t want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.”
- kvgr 3y ago
  There is a lot of illegal accommodation and illegal housing. They are not able to catch that.. or they dont want to
  - eesmith 3y ago
    Yes, the "they" in your "They are not able" is the "political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens".
nonrandomstring 3y ago
I know the islands well. Tourism is still only a third of the economy there. International shipping and agriculture sustained the islands for hundreds of years, prior to the 1970s when cheap jet air travel came of age. They import a lot now, but can in theory totally self-sustain. Each of the islands has a very different biosphere suited to different farming. We should pay attention to the Canary Islands, the rest of the planet is the coal mine, The problem is identified as "tourism" but their relation to the global economics within a climate change context is the real story. > 13.9 million people visited the islands Nearly all of them flew there. A few passenger cruise ships stop by. > a water emergency is already been declared on Tenerife They've a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis and now 36 degrees in April after a dry winter. Most of Tenerife is volcanic and the plant life around tourist areas is heavily irrigated. Without that it's a quite barren, unattractive environment. Without enough water for just the population, tourism is unsustainable. > It's a model that was built around a business class that doesn't want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens. So, the usual root causes, greed and short-term thinking.
- yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
  > We should pay attention to the Canary Islands, the rest of the planet is the coal mine I enjoyed this line.
- hcks 3y ago
  > only a third of the economy Yeah and I’m sure the rest is advanced industry and not at all goods and services consumed by the tourism-industry workers and their families
- NoPie 3y ago
  Santa Cruz where most of the local population lives gets half of its water from desalination plant. Desalination is already cost-effective and can provide water for tourists if needed. They would just need to build a desalination plant in the south. Electricity already is largely generated by wind, solar and tide. Air transportation probably causes the biggest pollution. Apart from that such tourism is very sustainable. It provides value to people who need to go on holidays. It doesn't matter if the food and necessities are imported because tourists would have consumed the food anyway if they had stayed at home. While it causes unsustainable rent increases to local population, that can be managed somehow. Maybe give subsidies to them by using the profits from tourism. Tourism tax is not unusual invention in many places.
lobochrome 3y ago
Tourists bring little value beyond what they spend on themselves. That’s why countries that have developed a strong tourism base struggle to develop further. It’s an economic dead end.
newswasboring 3y ago
> Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs. Nobody is arguing to take away tourism. They are arguing against it's unsustainable growth. The industry is perfectly ok in it's current state, brings in 16bn dollars a year.
- pydry 3y ago
  “The problem isn’t the tourists,” he said. “It’s a model that was built around – and with the connivance of – a business class that doesn’t want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.” Yup. The problem is the local elites and their tendency towards profit maximization at the expense of everything else. It's a very familiar story.
  - robocat 3y ago
    Place the blame where it belongs: the government and regulating the industry. Businesses and elites are playing the game according to the rules that they are given. Maybe the rules need improving, but that is a governance problem. There are reasons why the governance is difficult (e.g. capture) but that doesn’t mean blame should be shifted.
    - javcasas 3y ago
      Businesses and elites are playing the game according to the rules that they are lobbying for. Fixed that for you.
      - pydry 3y ago
        Yeah, they do like to pretend that the game either exists in either a vacuum or a direct democracy that is untainted by those same elites.
    - newswasboring 3y ago
      > Place the blame where it belongs: the government and regulating the industry. Why? Why are we blaming the guard who is trying to stop the hoard from destroying the city rather than the hoard which is destroying the city? Companies need to behave ethically and if they dont know what is ethical I'm sure they can afford to have some philosophers on the board. And if they can't afford that, that still doesn't absolve them from their unethical behavior. I refuse to participate in this blame shifting mentality, as if companies have no other choice but to be unethical.
kvgr 3y ago
It is a beautiful place, but without tourists its basically just goats and bananas.
- Gud 3y ago
  And what’s wrong with that?
  - kvgr 2y ago
    Inherently nothing, but you cannot build economy just on that. How would you import all expensive stuff on island? People would be unhappy that they don’t have jobs. People are never truly satisfied with anything.
- lifestyleguru 3y ago
  That's all a real man and a woman need.

KolmogorovComp 3y ago

Limited number of tourists VISA per year, available via a bidding system. This will obviously restrict the destination to the richest and not fair for the tourists, but from the host country it’s definitely a way of limiting the number of tourists while extracting the maximum value from each of them.

sveme 3y ago
They are part of the EU, so anyone from there can freely move and live there. You cannot restrict this. Limitations in flights would be feasible, I guess.
walthamstow 3y ago
I don't think that is compatible with Schengen / EU freedom of movement
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kgwgk 3y ago
  We’re not even talking about an independent country. Tourists could still arrive via internal flights.
forkerenok 3y ago
There are a lot of people in the EU and other countries that don't need visas, so I'm not sure that's the right dial to use.
- lukan 3y ago
  Yes, the vast majority of canary tourists are from EU. Mostly british and german. And we can not just fly there, we can just move there, thanks to the EU. And this is good. But that I can fly there for 20€ from germany, this is nuts. So maybe the solution is to stop subsidizing flying (taxfree kerosin etc)

Dibby053 3y ago

Canary Islands has one of the lowest property taxes in Spain: 0.3% rural and 0.5% urban (+0.05% if it's unoccupied). Obviously not enough judging by the ~20% of empty houses. It's easy to blame tourists and/or immigrants but it's really their own government policies' fault.

heavenlyblue 3y ago
So you pay a 10% premium for an unoccupied property?
- karma_pharmer 3y ago
  That's the whole point. With high property taxes the property won't be empty for long.

vintermann 3y ago

Interesting use of 'quotes' in the title.

steve1977 3y ago
‘Interesting’ use

pelasaco 3y ago

This isn't the only one unsustainable tourism model in Canary island

openrisk 3y ago

Just one hundred years ago tourism was only available to a tiny elite. Like with all goods and services provisions that have been scaled exponentially in the mean time, the problem is that there is poor accounting and management of side-effects (externalities). Impacts on environment and local communities are ignored as it is simpler and more profitable to do so. Sustainability is a complex problem facing every aspect of modern life that we have barely begun to acklowledge, let alone start really solving. E.g., the article does not discuss the interplay with the other intensive industry of the Canary islands (banana plantations) that also competes for resources and creates its own problems. It will take major economic, political and behavioral development to transition to long term sustainable economies and its anybody's guess what the final outcome will be.

Voultapher 3y ago
For me personally I've only recently connected the dots. Collectively as a society we are currently talking about carbon-neutral vs carbon-negative, global warming and clean energy. As someone who fell for that narrative for quite some time, I can see why. The more uncomfortable but in my opinion significantly more compelling answer to what stands in the way of a sustainable human co-habitation of planet earth, is: not CO2 emissions, it's modernity. The writing by Tom Murphy drove that point home for me. One example: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/03/lets-make-a-deal/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/03/lets-make-a-deal/ > Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life. Big picture: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/our-time-on-the-river/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/our-time-on-the-river/
- korantu 3y ago
  This is very dangerous point of view, which will lead to a lot of suffering. Humanity managed to lift vast majority of itself from abject poverty, grow enough food for everyone, prevent children mortality - unimaginable 100 years ago. And this is called modernity, which if reversed will bring back hunger and misery.

srge 3y ago

I would like to comment on the Guardian reporting. It was always a news organization that I loved but their reporting has become so one-sided that it’s now questionable if this is really journalism at all. Why not interview the local elected politicians or the local tourism organization? Apparently there’s a problem with those two resorts being built. Are they really that outrageous? Why not report on them even just by calling a representative? Even if they are biased it would be a counterpoint to the other (also biased) claims in the article.

badgersnake 3y ago
What are you talking about? They include a quote from Fernando Clavijo, the regional president of the Canary islands and link to an article reporting on a statement he made to the media. Admittedly it’s in Spanish, but it’s 2024 your phone can translate that in a heartbeat.
- srge 3y ago
  The selected quote is not a counterpoint to the claims of the activists. It’s merely an admission that mass tourism causes issues. Also as I said they did not interview him but only quoted another interview.
  - badgersnake 3y ago
    So you’re not satisfied with an interview with a local politician, you also want them to disagree with the activists? That’s not balance, that’s creating disagreement where it doesn’t exist. I bet you’re fun on Twitter
Dalewyn 3y ago
>their reporting has become so one-sided that it’s now questionable if this is really journalism at all. I haven't regarded The Guardian as a journalism outfit ever since they painted Trump's koi feeding in such a biased light that even the Japanese media went "Nani[1] the fuck?" in utter bewilderment. [1]: https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BD%95 https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BD%95

Joel_Mckay 3y ago

Singapore had a similar challenge being in proximity to some of the largest population centers on earth, and having finite space/resources of an island. 1. "Right of first sale" to citizens born in the country. The real-estate speculators were not happy with the two tier bidding model, but the first home purchase a citizen makes shunts the international market pressure. They once had the same issues Brazil developed, where the opportunists priced local citizens out of their own cities. The absurd outcome was some natural Brazilian citizens would have to work 34 lifetimes to live in their own city. 2. Prohibit commercial ownership in favor of 7+ year leases asset managed by the government (it is an island remember, and unused holdings are a liability due to malaria/mosquitoes.) 3. Put illegal-drug-dealers in front of firing-squads the following Tuesday, and seize their assets. Most idealists think this law is savage, but have never had to deal with real organized crime at scale. 4. Oil refinery produces excess energy for fresh-water desalination. Say what you want, but an island has very low carrying capacity for tourists. Even importing massive resources to cater to customer needs still hurts local ecosystems. Note, Hawaii also had long battles over water-rights with resorts playing dirty politics, and then literally burned down due in part to invasive dry-grass take over. Poor people do not have a lot of influence outside of voting. A cathartic protest is essentially asking the same people that benefit from misery to handle their existing conduct differently. Give a clear list of pragmatic political demands, warn of lawsuits, then follow up and sue domestically with a jury of your peers... I assure you investment funds give zero F's about complaints, but will eventually leave if their behavior has negative economic outcomes. The argument that they offer something economically unique is a false dichotomy, so just build a Starbucks and or McDonalds on top of whatever abomination they were planning... daily revenues will win out over hypothetical trickle-down economic urinal models. Good luck, as I have only seen Singapore successfully deal with this phenomena due to its oil industry resources. =)

makomk 3y ago

Oh huh, a Guardian article about a protest about unsustainable tourism in Tenerife and the Canary islands and the environmental damage it's creating. Wonder if they're going to mention that an awful lof of those developments on Tenerife are illegally dumping all their sewage in the sea rather than building sewage treatment... nope. For context, there's been a huge amount of anger in the UK that was basically kicked off by the Guardian about how the UK's seas and rivers are catastrophically polluted with sewage by our water companies, we're supposedly the dirty man of Europe now, privatisation and Brexit has ruined everything and it's all getting worse, to the point it's likely to influence the next election. One of the big headline stories involved a British windsurfing champion leaving because it's like "surfing in a sewer"... and moving to Tenerife, where sewage treatment is objectively far worse and as mentioned there are sewage systems that just dump all their sewage out into the sea basically everywhere. (This is something that was fixed in the mainland UK decades ago post-privatisation, and in fact seems to be one of the big infrastructure improvements that privatisation was done to get funding for.) The rest of the coverage has been about as founded in reality as that. When looking for information on this, I even ran across people that were presumably from there complaining on a forum about this and how it'd probably only get fixed if British tourists found out about it and started objecting. Guess there's little chance of that.

lifestyleguru 3y ago

Where Canaries take electricity from, it's all oil power plants right?

hankchinaski 3y ago

In the bealearic where I lived they call it “turismo basura”. Here now the main concern is the construction of new hotels in the coast. Ironically also the issue is lack of affordable housing for locals. Many buildings are run down and sit empty in the capital. There is some truth to the message but as always the way is delivered leaves you wondering. Not to mention the negative effect the clampdown on tourism would have on the local economy. I classify this as petty noise.

orwin 3y ago

And despite having extraordinary trails, almost no tourist is going in the inside of the Islands. Imho, they should limit new tourist developements on Fuerteventura and El hierro (reserving part of fishing towns for fishermen maybe), maybe on La gomera and La Palma (i don't know those well), and leave Tenerife and Gran canaria alone (i also feel that Lanzarote has too much character to add new development)

RetroTechie 3y ago
> And despite having extraordinary trails, almost no tourist is going in the inside of the Islands. Thx for the tip! I'm considering a visit to the Canaries some day (by boat), and I'd be way more interested in say, hiking a trail up a volcano, than hanging out at bars / restaurants / souvenir shop etc.