The only real bridge in the month of May announced the color for the summer season: a historically high occupancy rate in hotels, lodges, campsites, bed and breakfasts, villages and holiday residences, record traffic on the motorways with more than 760 kilometers of traffic jams accumulated on Ascension Thursday, coastlines and historic sites taken by storm… For a weekend, France announced “full” throughout the territory. Two years after the onset of the Covid crisis, this good news for the domestic economy hides bad news for the preservation of the fundamental resource on which it is based: the environment itself.
Quota time
During the deconfinement two years earlier, the appetite of city dwellers for natural sites located near large agglomerations had generated unprecedented influxes and pushed the municipalities to limit the frequentation of massifs and lakes. As soon as the summer season returns, the subject of overtourism comes up more and more regularly in the news: in Corsica, certain exceptional sites such as the Lavezzi Islands, in the Bouches de Bonifacio nature reserve, should be the subject of a limitation of their attendance from this summer. In Marseille, for the first time from the end of June, the Calanque de Sugiton will be accessible by reservation only and access will be limited to 400 visitors per day only.
Airplane’s comeback
An indicator of the paradoxes of post-Covid tourism, air transport has also resumed with a vengeance when it was said to be doomed a few months ago. This summer, Air France plans to increase the number of its connections with the United States by 20%, with 200 weekly flights serving 14 destinations. Between Paris and New York, the alliance between the French company and Delta Airlines will allow travelers to benefit from a “shuttle”, the flights being linked at an unprecedented rate of one every two hours or so. A recent Ifop pollin partnership with the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, on the relationship of French people to flying shows that environmental concern is certainly present for a quarter of the young people questioned, but that, for a majority of respondents, it is before all the price of the tickets which constitutes an obstacle to the choice to take the plane…
How did we get here ? Common explanations highlight the Covid, which has traumatized populations and made them even more eager to travel, the heat wave, which makes it unbearable to stay stuck in town for long periods of heat, or even the culture of perch in selfie or Instagram, which concentrates the flow of tourists to a few particularly photogenic spots. More fundamentally, the setting in motion of the world is linked to the advent of an international middle class which has been added to the Western one which alone traveled a generation earlier. From 60 million international tourists in 1968, we have passed the billion mark in 2019, say Jean Viard and David Medioni in a small work aptly titled Year zero of tourism (L’Aube – Jean-Jaurès Foundation).
Invent another form of tourism?
Faced with the contradictory and sometimes discouraging signals sent by the tourist industry, condemning tourism and, above all, the tourist, seems as ineffective as expecting the use of the automobile or the choice to live in individual house do not collapse in the years to come under the pretext that the populations will have been exposed to the film don’t look up or IPCC reports. Especially since “the civilization of tourism and leisure” is rather to be credited to the benefits of humanity, write the authors. Tourism is a commercial sector, but it is also above all “a tool for pacifying the world, for pooling the idea of beauty”, even if this sharing comes at the cost of an inevitable loss of authenticity and a certain homogenization of lifestyles.
Condemning tourism or threatening to ban it will be perceived as an elitist discourse opposing its democratization. On the other hand, being satisfied with a call for another type of tourism risks turning into ethnocentrism: very often, “slow”, sustainable, local or low-carbon tourism is the prerogative of a certain type of alternative tourist, Western, educated and, paradoxically, having traveled enough to afford to turn away from the companies low-cost and weeks in all-inclusive resort. Therefore, is tourism for all possible and even desirable? Once again, the climate imperative collides head-on with the ambition to continue to live and travel as if nothing had happened…