![Sample our Tourism, Hospitality and Events journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5950/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Tourism-Hospitality-Events.jpg"})
Abstract
How does ecotourism – conventionally characterized by its pursuit of a “natural” experience – confront assertions that “nature is over” attendant to growing promotion of the “Anthropocene”? One increasingly prominent strategy is to try to harness this “end of nature” itself as a novel tourism “product”. If the Anthropocene is better understood as the Capitalocene, as some contend, then this strategy can be viewed as a paradigmatic example of disaster capitalism in which crises precipitated by capitalist processes are themselves exploited as new forms of accumulation. In this way, engagement with the Anthropocene becomes the latest in a series of spatio-temporal “fixes” that the tourism industry can be seen to provide to the capitalist system in general. Here I explore this dynamic by examining several ways in which the prospect of the loss of “natural” resources are promoted as the basis of tourism experience: disaster tourism; extinction tourism; voluntourism; development tourism; and, increasingly, self-consciously Anthropocene tourism as well. Via such strategies, Anthropocene tourism exemplifies capitalism’s astonishing capacity for self-renewal through creative destruction, sustaining itself in a “post-nature” world by continuing to market social and environmental awareness and action even while shifting from pursuit of nonhuman “nature” previously grounding these aims.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 While employing the same term, Haraway and Moore conceptualize it in quite different ways, the nuancess of which are beyond the scope of this article (see Haraway, Citation2016 and Moore, 2015 for extended discussions). In this analysis I follow Jason Moore’s (2015) approach in understanding the Anthropocene as an expression of the consequences of capitalist production in particular.
2 https://en.rotterdam.info/agenda/gaia-in-the-anthropocene/; accessed 6/12/2017.
3 https://durhammuseum.org/event/omaha-in-the-anthropocene-a-learning-exploration-with-creighton-university-2/?instance_id =4179; accessed 6/12/2017.
4 http://london.wtm.com/en/events/wtm-ministerial-programme/Ministers-Summit/; accessed 25/9/2017.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Robert Fletcher
Robert Fletcher is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. His research interests include conservation, development, tourism, climate change, globalization and resistance and social movements. He is the author of Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism (Duke University, 2014) and co-editor of NatureTM Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age (University of Arizona, 2014).
