Ecological grief generates desire for environmental healing in tourism after COVID-19

Abstract

Tourism research is starting to take interest in the psychology of environmental distress, particularly as it relates to climate change. For both the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and the climate change movement that dominated international media in 2019, psychological parallels exist in terms of our experience of loss. As the world grapples with the pandemic and tourism grinds to a halt, stories on social media are surfacing that claim wildlife is returning to quarantined cities and that the Earth is healing itself. Much of the implicit critique of these stories is directed at the tourism industry, with two viral posts in particular supposedly documenting the ‘rewilding’ of Venice, that infamous icon of overtourism. While the popular media have been concerned primarily with the factual accuracy of these claims, what has gone largely unexplored is the apparent desire for environmental reparation that they express. The fixation on environmental healing evidenced in tourist social media can be interpreted as a response to widely-felt ‘ecological grief’, triggered by the events of COVID-19. In this context, animal reclamation of urban spaces can be identified as a motif of environmental hope that symbolises life, regeneration and resilience, the understanding of which may contribute to the project of hopeful tourism in the post-COVID-19 era.

摘要

旅游研究开始关注环境灾难心理学, 特别是与气候变化有关的心理学。无论是2020年的COVID-19全球大流行, 还是2019年霸占国际媒体的气候变化运动, 我们的损失体验在心理上都存在相似之处。随着世界与这一大流行病的斗争, 旅游业陷入停滞, 社交媒体上有报道称野生动物正在返回被隔离的城市, 地球正在自我修复。对这些报道的许多含蓄批评是针对旅游业的, 特别有两个热帖, 记录了据说是声名狼藉的”过度旅游标志”威尼斯的”回归自然”。尽管大众媒体已经关注了报道事实的准确性, 但尚未充分探究它们表达的环境补偿渴望。旅游社交媒体对环境修复的关注, 可以解释为是对COVID-19事件引发的普遍的”生态悲伤”的反应。由此而论, 城市空间的动物回归可以被视为环境的希望, 象征着生命、再生和复原力。认识这一问题, 对后COVID-19时代的希望旅游有所裨益。

Keywords:

• Hopeful tourism
• social media
• environment
• climate change
• pandemic
• wildlife
• grief

关键词:

• 希望旅游；社交媒体；环境；气候变化；大流行病；野生动植物；悲伤

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Émilie Crossley

Dr Émilie Crossley is a doctoral mentor at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Her work draws on social psychoanalytic theory to approach the psychological in tourism in a non-reductive and culturally engaged way. Her research explores volunteer tourist subjectivity, tourists' affective responses to poverty, qualitative longitudinal methodologies, cosmopolitan empathy, and researcher reflexivity.