“Ecotourism”: What a scam. Why not “solve” other problems by calling them “ecolittering,” “ecopolluting,” and “ecoextinction”?
I was listening to a podcast ostensibly about sustainability and nature. The particular podcast isn’t important because this pattern happens in many places. One of the guests was talking about tourism that seemed no different from any other tourism, but she called it eco-tourism.
The only difference I could tell from any other tourism was the name. People were destroying cultures and ecosystems as much as any other tourism. The people she described seemed to think of themselves as good guys, but as far as I could tell, based not on their behavior or impact on others, but only on how they thought of themselves.
Putting the prefix eco- before tourism seemed to justify their categorization in their own minds, as far as I could tell—that is, their self-deception satisfied them.
Why stop at tourism as a place to convince yourself that only prepending three letters to word describing it? Why not: “I ecodrove my ecocar to the ecogas station to fill it with ecogas. Then I bought some ecodoof and ecolittered the ecopackaging by throwing it to the side of the ecoroad.”?
Or “I ecoinvested in an ecocompany that ecodrills for ecooil and ecogas, some of which it transforms to ecoplastic.”?
Here’s an old picture of some ecogarbage to be hauled by ecotruck to an ecolandfill or maybe ecoburned in the ecooven of a big ecofactory.
People calling tourism ecotourism nauseates me.
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