Learning to See Regeneration
Updated: Aug 23
After writing the three blog posts in this series, a fourth came to me as I was walking the land. It wasn't part of the plan, but it's a thought that keeps circulating in conversations lately, and it's being perpetuated by an image: It's an image of a group of happy people wearing gardening gloves and holding shovels. Or perhaps it's a beach clean up, or a shoreline rehab project. It looks like regenerative tourism, but it's not necessarily so.
The myth of glove and shovel images
Lately I have seen quite a few images - visitors wearing gardening gloves planting a tree or tourists picking up beach plastic. It's a feel good image: tidy visitors giving back. It's a positive visual that fits neatly into a marketing template with a "regenerate your destination" caption. This post is an attempt to deepen our understanding of what is really going on - and to distingush claims versus real systems change.
The problem is that these kinds of images become shorthand for what regenerative tourism is, and in the process its attempting to redefine regeneration into a neat, controllable activity. It's an image that keeps us locked inside the idea that regenerative tourism is something that happens in tourism rather than something that changes tourism. It also promotes the idea that it's visitors who are responsible for small actions and no heavy lifting is needed by larger institutional players or the businesses sector.
In these pictures, a tree planting exercise becomes an activity bolted on to an existing itinerary. A beach clean up is added to a destination's "free activities" offered by a volunteer community group. Underneath it all, the business model stays the same. Growth and profit ambitions stay the same. Who wins and who loses, and who pays the real cost of tourism, is not changed. All that changes is the marketing message - a bit more altruism to soften the commercial message. Another visitor experience with a 'positive impact' , and an opportunity for businesses to project themselves as good citizens while continuing the same extractive business practices.
Now I want to be clear that I am not criticising a beach clean up or a tree planting activity, The problem is that this image has misrepresented regenerative tourism and is damaging the credibility of the destinations and organisations that employ this messaging. It lets us believe we have done the work of regeneration when in fact we have just experienced and photographed it. Its business as usual with better optics.
Working ON the system, not just IN it
Regenerative tourism works on the system, not just in it. Most of what gets called regenerative, the images we see, is working in the system. Working in the system includes things like developing new experiences, or reducing the environmental footprint of your operation, but it doesn't change anything at all. It asks "What can we add on so that we do less harm?" But it doesn't change the system.
A genuine regenerative approach works on the system - and it's different to working in the system. It asks "What would we need to change about tourism in this place - in its decision-making, inclusion, voice, how benefits are distributed - so that tourism might contribute to the flourishing of this place?"
This is an uncomfortable question. It points towards deeper structural challenges - like ownership, governance, finance, power, and community well-being. It's not about experience design at all - but about the very nature of tourism and what places can do to capture the value of tourism and redistribute that value back into the communities and places whose resources are being used.
The problem is of course, that these deeper questions aren't as easy to address as circulating a picture of smiling people with shovels.
See whole systems
So here is what I wanted to bring to this fourth post as I've been walking this land: it's the limits of our own awareness and understanding. Those who see pictures of visitors 'making a contribution' will feel good - but they may not be aware of the systems they work within or the systemic issues that lie outside their experience.
To illustrate, there is a well known video of a gorilla experiment where people are passing a basketball and the observer is asked to count how many times a basket ball is passed between people wearing a white t-shirt. (You know it - but it is copyrighted so I can't share it). A gorilla passed between the players, but after the experiment when people are asked if they noticed the gorilla, 50% did not. It's not a trick. The video shows how our focus on one particular task works to filter out information that is right in front of us, regardless of how obvious that information is.
The same process of blocking out happens when we see pictures of visitors engaging in stewardship activities. The sector is trained to see experiences, products, marketing opportunities, so that is what everyone sees.
The tools are conspicuous. They fit into the pattern that everyone is trained to look for. The underlying structural challenges of tourism - governance, finance, power, voice, impact - are walking right through the middle of that photograph, yet they are hidden. We are simply unable to see these issues because nothing in our training has taught us that they matter or how we might see them.
Before you circulate that next photo of a tree planting
So before you circulate that next photograph of a tree planting and call it "regenerative tourism", I want you to think about these questions:
What are the structural issues going on in that place that are being silenced in this photo?
Is this activity truly regenerative - i.e., does it make a net positive contribution to the social, ecological, and economic wellbeing of this place?
Is this activity helping to work on (and improve) the system? Or is it an activity in the system where nothing changes?
Put bluntly, regenerative tourism requires systems change, and most of the photographs of gardening gloves and shovels I have seen are not changing anything. They are the gorilla's opposite: perfectly conspicuous, endlessly visible, and mistaken for the whole picture precisely because they are the only part of it we have been trained to look for. What tourism actually needs is to take a better look at the systems change underpinning that photograph.
References
Simons, D. and Chabris, C. 1999. Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9): 1059-1074.
Four part series:
Learning to See the System (this post)
