Thank you very much gentlemen, glad you found the article interesting
Interesting thoughts and proposals that I fully subscribe to. I am just a hobbyist/enthusiast landscape photographer from Portugal. I have seen several areas of my country being spoiled by what you describe.
It is a challenge to achieve, and then maintain, a sustainable level of visitors/intruders, so to speak. In recent years, Portugal has seen an increasing level of tourists, particularly from cruise boats. This brings much needed income to the country; thankfully, the majority of tourists stick around the most famous locations, and do not venture into the more isolated and pristine regions of the country. I have visited some of them, and try to keep a certain level of "secrecy".
Of course when you have famous TV productions being shot in some locations (Iceland, Morocco, etc), it does not help. As for photographers, with workshops being an important part of their income source, finding new locations to exploit and diversify the offer is vital. Such new locations work for a few years, before being "invaded" as you describe.
A typical example in Portugal are the islands of the Azores.
Thank you for sharing some information about Portugal, Paulo. To me, tourism is a necessary evil these days, that we have to factor in both when we go somewhere to do our photography, and when we think about environmental protection. As you said, tourism brings money. However, tourists could be educated about the areas they are about to visit, the fragilities of the environment (if any), about not littering, not camping and lighting fires where they shouldn't, and so on.
You have a point about the "famous" locations: on the one hand, it is probably better for the environment, in the long run, if we sort of "set aside" some iconic places for everyone to go to, organise them, create parking lots, toilets, restaurants, put rangers / guards to control the masses of tourists and so on., so that most people will go there, do little damage and leave the rest of the country alone. On the other hand, though, if we want to create an environmental conscience we need to bring people in the middle of "real" nature: this could be done via organised groups / workshops, where the leaders take care of sensitising the groups and so on. Perhaps this could be a good "middle way" between the need for tourism, people's desire to travel, and the need to protect the nature and environment.
I see the advent of smartphone cameras as a critical factor. When a newspaper or magazine publishes a picture of an area with wildflowers at peak bloom there will be literally thousands of families who will visit the following weekend and trample all the flowers while taking selfies to put on their Facebook page.
There has been a tremendous increase in quantity of images and an accompanying decrease in quality. Too many individuals get their multi thousand dollar camera and lens and start taking snapshots and posting them and expect praise for their "work".
I dislike having government agencies restrict access to areas but I also appreciate how necessary it has become to protect them from people and from their pets. Environmental consciousness is at a very low point in the United States in particular where the focus is on status and private ownership of the land.
You definitely have a point re: smartphones, to me it's more a combination of smartphones + social media. The killer combo is the extreme ease of taking
and sharing picture with smartphones compared to a regular camera, together with this absurd new thing that everyone should: 1. Share everything they do (why should I care about what someone's feet look like??), 2. Go take photos and especially selfies of themselves in all the "must go" places they find somewhere online to tick each one off their list.
Again, a bit of environmental education wouldn't hurt here
Thoughtful article, Vieri. It should be translated also to Chinese.
I am not even go there
Best regards,
Vieri