 what we're promoting, sustainable travel, responsible travel is actually superior for the traveler. It's not just the right thing for the planet, for the right thing for the local community or whatever, or the environment. But it actually provides a superior vacation. So we're selling a better product. And so we don't need to apologize for trying to get people to do the right thing. Dr. Martha Honey and Kelsey Frank Keel are my guests on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Martha is CEO of Responsible Travel Consulting and co-founder and former executive director of the Center for Responsible Travel Crest. Based in Washington, DC, her previous books include Cruise Tourism in the Caribbean, Selling Sunshine by Rutledge Press, Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, Who Owns Paradise by Island Press, and Ecotourism and Certification, Setting Standards in Practice Also by Island Press. She worked as a journalist for 20 years based in Tanzania and Costa Rica, more at ResponsibleTravelConsulting.com. You can go and find out more about her long history and the work that she's done. Kelsey is a program manager at Crest, where she manages research and consulting projects related to responsible travel and supports fundraising activities and manages the internship program. Kelsey is also a freelance travel writer and researcher, having supported publications for National Geographic Traveler, the Washingtonian and other outlets. Before COVID-19 hit, overtourism was the biggest problem in the world of travel. Then seemingly overnight, tourism nearly ceased. But as travel resumes, will we return to a world of overrun monuments, littered beaches, bumper-to-bumper traffic in national parks and gridlocked cities? Or can we create sustainable, healthy tourism centered on principles like equity, conservation, and good governance? This wonderful book, Over Tourism, I have it in my hands here holding it up, Lessons for a Better Future, publication that was released May 2021 this year by Island Press, was edited by Martha Honey and co-founder and former executive of the Center for Responsible Travel, and Kelsey, who are both my guests on the program today. And we're gonna talk about this book and overtourism and travel and any of our other questions that we have about this thing that probably everybody wants to have now. We wanna get back to getting out of the house and start traveling again. So welcome both of you to the show. It's great to have you. Thank you, Mark. Well, I wanna start out with the absolute first question because I do genuinely care about both of you, although we have never met live. I love your writing, I've followed your work before, I follow Chris, so I know what you guys do and what wonderful consulting and services and help you provide in general for the industry. And my question really is, how have you weathered this crazy time? It hasn't just been COVID and a pandemic, it's been Brexit and then nod duration and Black Lives Matters and Asian racism. And it just seems to go on with more craziness, not that now even Delta variations. And so I wanna know how has that affected you in your own lives, but were there maybe some learning lessons because you both have such a wonderful bio and resume and been doing this for a while? Are there any lessons for resilience that you've learned or are there any things that you're seeing in this overtourism, industry tourism and hospitality area that are getting better or worse or more people knocking down your door for help and consultation. And since we'll go with senior, if you don't mind, Martha, honey, please start first and then we'll go to Kelsey. And then I'll let you guys fight over the rest of the questions who takes the lead and who doesn't. Thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure to be part of this show and to be with my dear friend Kelsey and talking about our new book and life in general. So to your question, the pandemic, how have I fared? On a personal level, it's been a little bit of an up and down. I did get COVID even though I thought that I was, not anywhere near anybody with COVID and was doing everything that I and my family was telling me I needed to do, but it was a relatively mild case. The unfortunate part was that I did have what is now being called long-haul COVID symptoms afterwards, which I'm still grappling with, although I must say I am definitely feeling much better now. After taking my first, not vacation, but travel experience, which was work for a project, we're doing at Crest to Alaska where I was for a couple of weeks last and getting back a couple of days ago. But in any case, it's been on a personal level challenging and I've been part of a medical examination of what is this long-haul, what are the long-haul symptoms, how do we cope with it and so on. It's going on at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and that's been interesting and I've felt like I'm with a community of people who are really trying to figure out what's going on. But it makes me feel that we're just not, we've got a ways to go on COVID, we're not out of the woods, we don't know all of what we're going to be suffering long-term and so on. So that's been on a personal level. In terms of tourism and also partly on a personal level, what I got involved in locally in the town of Rheinbeck where I now live, which is in the Hudson Valley in New York State, a beautiful little town, two hours outside of New York City and a destination for many weekenders coming out of New York City. And it was a retreat spot for many people from New York who really fled here, property value shot up and et cetera, et cetera, as people moved here because it was deemed to be probably safer than New York City. But what I got deeply involved in was an organization that popped up during the pandemic called Rheinbeck Responds and it was a civic organization focused on two of the most vulnerable sectors of our community, the small business sector and the underserved community, mainly Latinos, Latinx and people of color who are kind of an underclass in the Rheinbeck area. And I focused on the small businesses working with them and really coming out of that, one, I think we had a great deal of success. We developed a grants program for small businesses and we did an online auction of painted bird houses by artists in town and I don't know, just a whole bunch of fundraising activities, marketing, joint marketing by the stores, the shops in town and so on. And basically most stores made it through, most of the businesses made it through and they're all sort of one of a kind owner operated businesses, we have no chain stores in the town. And so it was very important to us to the character of the place we live in and to these small, quite vulnerable businesses to try to keep them alive and we succeeded. So that has been, that was very gratifying, a lot of work but to see the community come together on Zoom and so on and really pull together as a community was great. The other piece that I think came out of is more related to broader tourism that came out of the pandemic that was, I didn't see it coming, but was what we have experienced with cruise tourism that cruises early on were identified as sort of super spreaders of the vaccine of COVID and were shut down. And so we've had a long period where cruises have not, cruise tourism has not been operating. And this has led to a lot of questioning, sort of deeper questioning of do we wanna return to the same kind of large scale mass tourism that we've seen before. And sort of questioning, deeper questioning of the impacts of over tourism as people began to see what life was like without cruises in places like Key West, Florida, places in Alaska, Southeast Alaska that I just visited, places in Europe like Barcelona and Venice, Dubrovnik and so on. So, and of course across the Caribbean. So that has been very instructive and I'm sure Kelsey and I will talk more in our interview about what we've seen and so on, but I think that there have been some real lessons that have come out of the halting cruise tourism for what the tourism industry might look like long term or could look like longer term. Well, I appreciate you sharing that very personal and I hope the long haul doesn't turn out to be the long haul and that they fix it in the short term and that you'll be okay. And really the pandemic was a global citizen and it didn't adhere to any nations or borders or lockdowns, it found us one way or the other. And so I'm sorry to hear that you had to deal with that and that there was some rough effects. It sounds, and really because you've been doing this for such a long time and you've been speaking about it at conferences and events, you've written about it and it's interesting that it almost seems to me and I'm not sure if it's true and I'd like you to confirm before to go with Kelsey is really did you kind of see some people coming and knocking down your door or coming to speak to you and say, hey, we should have started sooner. We should have done a little bit something sooner to fix this industry, to fix hospitality and tourism and get things in place and to be prepared because we're not prepared for when no one comes and we're not prepared for when everyone comes and we've got to kind of find a new system. Did that happen at all? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure people were quite that articulate in terms of identifying what they want but I think we saw, for instance, the development of a global network of people in different port cities where cruise tourism takes place that for the first time came together and it includes now about 30 different cities around the world. And this is unprecedented. This has not happened before and they're meeting every week and they're discussing what kinds of changes they would like to see and so on. And there've been some real initiatives like in Key West and several other places in Venice and so on where real changes are being made and people are learning from one another. So I think there's some good sharing of information. And I think on a local level, what I've seen here is a real added kind of renewed appreciation for small as beautiful for protecting the local community for paying attention to the workforces involved in those communities, respect for what we call the frontline workers in COVID but that also hopefully will translate into tourism where we have a renewed respect for the people who do the heavy lifting in tourism, the low paid workers who clean our rooms and the ships and so on and so on in the tourism industry and that we should really be paying living wages to these people and giving them the respect that they deserve. So I think that there were some silver linings that are coming out of the pandemic that at first, I think many of us felt that there's gonna be, there's just no good out of this. Sort of like the wildfires now in the West. I mean, what can you say is positive about this but in the end for many of us, I think it's been a mixed bag with some really deep thinking and some silver linings in terms of lessons learned. Thank you so much and Kelce, I appreciate you being so patient and waiting to have your turn but I would really like to hear from you and find out how you weather this and how it really ties to your, this is your life's work now that you do and this is what you do every day and what kind of how you weathered it and what the learning lessons were moving forward especially as you touched upon this a little bit in the book and I also did in the introduction that COVID played a big part in kind of a wake up call and seeing what's going on and what's happening in this industry and so I'd like to hear from you a little bit more. Yeah, thank you so much, Mark. It's really a pleasure to be here and as Martha said, working alongside her has been so enlightening and so many lessons learned from this book which took us almost three to four years to pull together and a lot has happened in that time. For me personally, during the pandemic, I'm based in Washington, DC and as a lot of organizations did when the pandemic hit, we went remote. So I think what was so profound to me and what I noticed right away was how unaffected I was and how privileged I was compared to other people who perhaps didn't have the privilege to be able to work from home and sit in their nice apartment every day and continue to do the work that they were doing and I think especially in Washington, DC that socioeconomic inequity is really stark and visible. There's a really strong traditional black and BIPOC community living in DC and the numbers for what communities were really susceptible to COVID were really telling and so that was kind of one of the things that came out for me. I think also just over the, what was it? Over a year that we were all sitting indoors and quarantining, prior to that, I had been traveling every single month on a plane at least twice a month on trains and in cars and trying to get myself to places, to weddings, to work, travel and it was too much. I, and to me responsible travel is so much about actually being able to slow down and think about where you're going and what you're gonna do when you get there and really doing your research and learning about the place. I mean, I grew up traveling across the U.S. with my family going to our favorite thing to do was to go to Revolutionary War and Civil War sites and to learn about that history. And that's what I love to do when I travel is learn about the place that I'm going to and it's history and traveling like that, you just don't have the time or the brain space to do that. And what COVID showed me is that if we really take the time to slow down, that's kind of the first step towards being a more responsible traveler. And I'm really trying hard to keep that that slow approach to travel in my new post COVID, I guess you could say life. It's really tough though. We're all global citizens these days and a lot of us have friends all over the world and obligations and things like that. So I find it really tough and I work and live and breathe in this space every day. So I understand that it's not so easy for everyone to apply those lessons from COVID to their everyday lives and their travel. Did were there any like moments where for you now that you're really day-to-day with Crest and by the way, this is, I explained it but some of the listeners might have needed to listen a little bit closer. Crest is an acronym for Center for Responsible Travel just in case anyone hears us repeat that but it's really a path towards tourism that is truly sustainable focusing on the triple bottom line, people, planet and prosperity. It's about bringing together tourism officials, city council members, travel journalists, consultants, scholars and trade association members that really can make an impact and come up with solutions to overcrowding and address the multifaceted systems or problems in the area. And that's what your book talks about over tourism as a fabulous book, I've read it twice. This is normally I don't get the physical copy in Europe quite as fast and I have to only read it in digital but it's really a beautiful thing. There are a couple of things that I want to, that you both have touched upon that I want to move forward in before you answer that question about if anything comes up about Crest that we can come back to them later. One is how history and culture plays a big part in most tourism spots. And then Martha brought up the cruise industry or cruise ships. And as an environmentalist, as somebody who's sustainable there's some different aspects of that as well that I want to make sure that we touch upon and address a little bit further into our conversation. So please don't let me forget to ask those questions but what were some of the learning lessons where people calling you and emailing you and saying, you guys have gotten us together or you've talked about this we really need help during this time. We need your support. Yeah, I think that COVID changed things in the travel industry in a few ways. Some of the problems that we were seeing, for example, was that in a lot of outdoor spaces so national parks, protected areas, beaches, places like that were experiencing huge numbers of tourists. In some cases even surpassing their 2019 levels. And the issue that the managers of these destinations were having because there are people that their job is to manage these destinations and make sure that the visitors have a great experience that the environment is protected and that community is to benefit from this. The issues that they were seeing were that some of the visitors coming to these places were what you might call atypical visitors. So people not very used to spending a lot of time in the outdoors and maybe not having those ingrained leave no trace principles that other travelers might have and leaving behind a lot of trash and pet waste and litter and things like that. And what do we do about this? These are visitors that might not be impacted by some of the traditional marketing that were used to giving visitors to take away their trash and things like that. Another issue that we were seeing is the stark opposite. Places that are indoors, museums, places that are typically very crowded like historic cities that really lost what they're used to, that revenue through tourism and how do we respond to that economic instability? So those are kind of the two sides of the coin. One thing that Cress did when we realized that collaboration was going to be a really important way to move forward was create the Future of Tourism Coalition together with five other co-founders, other profits that are working in this space. But what we wanted everyone to know is that this is an opportunity to really reset. We can take the lessons that we've learned from COVID and come up with a better future for the tourism industry and collaboration and not competition is the way forward. We came up with 13 guiding principles for the future of tourism. So for example, seeing the whole picture, tourism often isn't looked at very holistically using better metrics. So not just measuring tourism by the number of people visiting but what impacts they're having. So those are kind of the steps that we took to chart a better path forward after COVID and the responses that we were seeing from people because of COVID and the new ways, the new challenges that they were dealing with. Martha, did you have anything to add to that? You seem to seem like when I was mentioning Cress that you had something you wanted to say or did I misread? Maybe you misread. I think Kelsey explained very well how Cress moved proactively to really pull together a coalition that was looking towards the future which has been extremely important and Cress has played a leadership role in helping to think about how to come out of this more sustainably to build back better as we say. Great, I just didn't because we're dealing with the three of us on this podcast. I just want to make sure everybody gets their voice and I don't suppress any of your answers. One thing that you guys both don't know about me is that my mother was the director of air traffic control for an airport in Stuttgart, Germany and later went on to be United Nations translator. She spoke six different languages and later owned her own travel agency and was a tour guide and so through my mother I have a wonderful experience and you both know that I'm from the United States and living in Hamburg, Germany. The crazy thing is from my birth to today I was raised as a global citizen seeing not just my family around the world but experiencing culture and trips around the world from Italy to Austria to Germany to the United States to Asia, Africa and South America. Lots of my mother did lots of tours and tour guiding and Hawaii and a lot of traveling for the United Nations as a translator in many different areas. And so really got to see not only culture travel aspect but then later when she owned her own agency kind of what that world looked like and how she, you know, when I was younger she would travel a lot and give tours but also to learn about hotels or new resorts and different destinations. Then when I got up into junior high school and high school I actually went to work for her travel agency and became a travel agent myself first started out delivering tickets and so I also got that glimpse and not only the computer back in how do you book a ticket but also how do you speak to the resorts and to the hotels and know a little bit about the destinations. And so that's why also I read your book twice. I also like Kelsey, 2018 I had 200 events and 36 different countries around the world and then in 2019 it went up to 220 events. I was traveling probably four times a week and luckily doing carbon offsetting and through my companies doing some other offsetting measures and things and trying to visit as many destinations that use certain principles in hospitality and tourism. Crazy enough a lot of them were in Asia which you would think that they might be somewhere else but there was a lot in Asia that are really doing great things and other places of the world but that kind of leads me to why did you decide to write this book now and you said you've been working on it for three years but what were your thoughts and motivations? I know Martha's history she'd been doing this for a long time so it seems like a good fit but was there some telltale signs was there something that motivated you guys to get there? Yeah well I think in a way the summer of 2017 was a real sort of tipping point for us at Crest I was then the executive director of Crest and for a lot of people sort of thoughtful people within the tourism space because what happened in the summer of 2017 was in the Caribbean where we were doing a lot of work we had projects particularly in Cuba and several other places in the Caribbean but there were just sort of horrific hurricanes and that destroyed lots of tourism infrastructure since tourism infrastructure in the Caribbean tends to be on the coast or on the water and it was terrible what was happening there and it was also along the coastlines in the US and the southern US as well and over in Europe what we saw was for the first time public demonstrations against too much tourism against what was eventually being called overtourism and our realization that this problem of overtourism along with climate change were really the two biggest catastrophes facing the tourism industry and so we began to focus particularly on overtourism we had already been doing some work on climate change but Kelsey maybe you should explain sort of what Crest moved to do. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so as Martha said to use a careful term shit really hit the fan in 2018 and overtourism had been defined in the years prior to that but it really came to the world stage at that time and actually I think we can credit a lot of news media for covering the problem and for being at the forefront of this and making sure the world knew and residents were really fed up they were marching in the streets and Barcelona and Venice telling tourists to go home that they were sick and not only those day trippers but in Venice particularly the cruise tourists. So Crest in 2018 started off by hosting our World Tourism Day Forum which is in September we do this every year on overtourism and finding solutions. Coming out of that event we took some of the case studies we took some of those lessons learned and decided to come up with a book on these case studies and the solutions that they were facing. Also that year we saw 1.5 billion tourists cross international borders and all of the projections were saying that this was only going to exponentially increase. We never imagined that in the middle of writing this book tourism would halt completely and I think in 2020 it was only something like 400 million international arrivals which is still a huge number but for a time it was halted completely and obviously brought on by a global health crisis but I think what we saw was that as we touched on that COVID-19 triggered new and unique challenges for tourism and it actually proved to us that this information was more timely than ever. So we took that opportunity to really frame the book, talk about the pandemic and how this information could be used moving forward. Maybe just going back a little bit I wanted to mention that in the summer of 2017 when we were doing work in the Caribbean and the cities in Europe were exploding I was invited to present work that we had done on cruise tourism in the Caribbean at an academic conference in Barcelona. And while I was there presenting I heard about a small conference that was also being organized in Barcelona on over tourism where they were inviting the civic groups, academics, government officials from a bunch of key cities around Europe to come to Barcelona because Barcelona was already playing a leading role in trying to address over tourism. They had elected their first woman mayor and she had been elected on a ticket of control tourism. And so in the midst of all of these demonstrations and as Kelsey said signs saying tourists go home and so on anti-tourist movement in the streets there was also the beginnings of efforts to find solutions. And so I was invited to attend this small conference in Europe, which was just eye opening to really begin to hear both what cities were going through but also how they were creatively beginning to come up with some ideas about solutions. I mean, it was all very tentative and a little bit piecemeal, but it was the beginnings and I came away feeling that, you know that Europe was sort of the canary and particularly Barcelona kind of the canary and the coal mine for what we were just beginning to see in some cities in the US. And so there was a lot that the US and in other parts of the world could really learn from Europe in terms of what they were going through and how they were trying to address it. There are, as Kelsey said, there are a lot in the book. There's seven chapters and I'm going to put on my glasses because I don't want to misquote anything, but I'm just going to touch on a few. There's Galapagos Islands. There's the Big Sur in California. There's Galapagos Islands for those who are in Ecuador. There's Hawaii. There is Iceland. There's Lake Tahoe. There's Colorado. There's New Zealand. It starts out with in the beginning and I'd mentioned this just a moment ago that, you know, I come not only from well-traveled as a global citizen, but from a family who respects and looks at nature and culture and environment in a different way. And in the beginning, you kind of touched upon one of the Kennedys going on Hatch River Expedition and that set off kind of a movement for river running and not just the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon and Hatch River Expeditions. And I actually worked for Hatch River Expeditions as a river guide when I was younger, but before that, I actually went on several trips. I did the Salmon River in a sport yak with Hatch Expeditions. And so I have very fond memories in it. And back then it was kind of a rare occasion, but over the years, we just continuously see these tourist spots. You guys also talk about Peru and you talk about Brazil. You talk about so many case studies. And at the end of each of these sections and chapters on the case studies, there's a plethora of links and other references and places you can go. And with a nice conclusion about what's being done and what are some of the solutions and what you guys are working towards or what some potentials are. So there's a lot of things that kind of just sparked me to light up, but also where I said, okay, how does this look in my own life? Because, especially after this pandemic, I haven't traveled at all during this entire time, which is highly unusual. I've made a big shift in how I do it. But I also feel a little bit of an edge to meet people live and give them a hug and to see different cultures. I have friends and family all over the world and my family in the United States and Asia haven't been able to see because of this lockdown and just out of their consideration. And so there are so many facets of what you guys have discussed in this whole big picture. So there's emotions, there's culture, there's this way that we were raised or way that we weren't raised. And people specifically in the Dach region, the Germany, Austria and Switzerland area who speak German are really hyper focused on their vacations. The government pays for certain amount of time of vacation. And for us to start say, hey, you need to do it differently. You need to think about it differently. It could touch nerve, right? And so I really want to see how or have you explained not only how you touch in what you do and as well in the book, that nerve of population. And I want to refer or that nerve of culture of different people who are like, well, you can't tell me, I can't travel or I can't do this or how do I do it or how do we get them to go think in a different way when they go someplace? The reason I bring that up is like I mentioned, I traveled a lot. My father and my mother always taught me, leave the campsite or the place better than you found it. Pack out what you pack in and usually pack out more than you packed in. And that's kind of how I was raised with that. It was kind of a golden rule, treat people on planet how you would like to be treated. But not all of us have that. And so I kind of want to know, how do you deal with that in the book and how do you deal with it just in your general workings with Crest and if you could address that and then we'll get into more serious climate things in a moment. Wow, Kelsey? Yeah, I mean, off the top of my head, you were saying about how do we get people to realize that they need to treat these places with much more respect. And I think it ties into kind of what I was saying earlier about what I realized coming out of the pandemic. And to me, one of the things I realized is that travel is not a right. It's very much a privilege. And a lot of people don't have the freedom of mobility that during the pandemic, we all realized that we don't have the freedom of mobility that we're used to having on a day-to-day basis and that what I want people to understand is that the pandemic isn't unique. There are going to be hurricanes and natural disasters and political instability and other things that are going to restrict your right to movement. And I think that when people travel, they first of all need to recognize that immense privilege that they have, that they're able to go somewhere and spend time in that destination. But one of the principles I always like to use is kind of like what you were saying, Mark, when you go somewhere, leave it better than you left it, but also treat the destination like you're in someone's home. And you truly are. It's not just a place where visitors come and lay on the beach and drink in the bars. It's a place where people live, where they work. And I think you can do that by learning about the place that you're visiting. One of the first places that I had the privilege of going to when it was allowed and I was able to was seeing more in the Caribbean. And I very much enjoyed learning about the really unique history and the culture there. I hadn't really spent that much time in the Caribbean at all. Growing up, my family didn't do a lot of sun and sand vacations. As I mentioned, we did more historical vacations where we learned about US sites. But so I had this image in my head that the Caribbean was a monolith, that all the islands were the same and that what you did when you got there was you laid on the beach and that is not the case at all. And every island has a unique story to tell. And I just found that so fascinating. And I think as a traveler, you truly have a better experience when you get that opportunity to learn about the place you're visiting, talk to the people there, understand their way of life and their culture. You know, I think a couple of other thoughts. One, when we did our first conference on overtourism, we looked at, we tried to sort of organize or understand which types of destinations were being most impacted by overtourism. And we came up with five different types of destinations which are reflected in the organization of the book. And these are parks and protected areas, World Heritage sites, cities, beaches and coastlines, and then what we called sort of destinations, places like Iceland or New Zealand or Lake Tahoe, so on. And so we tried to look at those. And I remember at the conference, we had a speaker from the Canadian and the US Park Service and they were talking about how with overtourism, they really needed to grapple for the first time with limiting numbers of people coming into the parks, which was really anathema to the sort of democratic spirit behind the parks, which is that they're, this belongs to the people, it's open for everybody, it should be free or as cost free as possible and so on. And yet what they said was that when they began to put in reservation systems into some of the parks that were really experiencing overtourism, they were worried that people would resist it. And what they found was just the opposite, that actually people appreciated the fact that when they, if they made a reservation ahead of time, when they got to the park, they knew it would not be overcrowded. They knew that they would enjoy their time there. And so what had become a kind of obstacle and sort of a beginning of rules and regulations within tourism that hadn't been there before actually became a plus and was increasing the tourism experience for the travelers. And I think we also have seen that in some of the cities that have been overcrowded, that kind of the, among the front lines in terms of raising questions about it have been tour operators because they're hearing from their visitors, from their guests, from their clients, people traveling with them that they don't like being in Barcelona where there's a Zouian people or in Venice or in any of the other cities and that they want to either go somewhere else or they want to travel in an off season, they want some solutions. And so I think that this has been sort of a positive thing that has come out of the overtourism that it's not just telling tourists, no, you can't do this but it's actually the solutions can value of enhance the value of the tourism experience if they're done well because people will not be overcrowded because they'll go to a place that is not so familiar but has great attractions and so on. So there are ways to do the regulations that we need around overtourism in ways that are a benefit to the tourist as well as to the industry, to the planet, to the local residents and so on. Thank you so much for clarifying that, nodding, nodding extra. The book goes into not just so many case studies around the world, it's very diverse and it addresses really all aspects and then kind of wraps up at the end with a little bit of help and solution, some best practices and like you said, it's split up into those five sections which is so important. I want to kind of with that set up a little bit to go a little bit deeper because climate change really has a strong, strong impact on tourism but on biodiversity and life on our planet period moving forward and there's some issues that happen and one of those five that you mentioned are beaches and coastlines and for beaches and coastlines, they're the number one first hit by climate change, beaches and coastal areas are the number one hit. Number one is Philippines, many islands, thousand plus islands, maybe even more than that, 3,000 plus islands, something like that, a numerable number of islands, they were hit by Hurricane Hyane and Yolanda, 20,000 plus people were killed and billions of dollars of damage and there's many other coastal beach regions around the world that are beautiful, that are really hit hard because of the global warming that we have going on and in Crest's kind of vision or mission that I read that they talk about the triple bottom line, I just wanted to kind of mention something and I want to add on to that, thinking and see what your thoughts and ideas are. I don't know if you know about the triple bottom line but it's not only people, planet and profits, but it's economy, environment and society which are the same things just formulated different was actually come up with from a man about 27 years ago, John Elkington and this is his last book, it's green swans, he came up with the bottom line 27 triple bottom line 27 years ago, but and before that time we were really working on the single bottom line and the double bottom line which is antiquated it goes clear back to Leonardo da Vinci out of Franciscan friar mathematician out of Italy who came up with the single and double bottom line which is history and culture for that that we've been operating up on pretty much until 27 years ago. But what happened is in 2018, John Elkington said that this triple bottom line, people, planet and profit was being used in the wrong way and that people and businesses and organizations were using that as an accounting principle and he did the first ever sustainable recall and in 2018, he recalled it, he pulled it back and he said, we're not doing the triple bottom line I've never done this before, but we need to pull it back and it was shortly after he was working on a project called a project breakthrough with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development with a bunch of businesses and he realized, I want them to use the triple bottom line but they're only using the profit part as an accountability measurement tool and they're leaving society, people and the economy are in the environment out of it and they're only focusing in on the economy and the profit aspect. And so the general trend is what they call regenerative capitalism or regenerative economies that we're really doing these local economies and we're including the people on these coastal lines. So I appreciate you giving my setup for these other cases that you have in the book and how the triple bottom line and climate change comes into that. It's almost a twin threat and I want you to explain to me why is it a twin threat and what does it mean and how are you going beyond the triple bottom line to really help these areas or how are they emerging with new solutions moving forward with this exponential climate change that we're seeing all around the world? Well, I think as you rightly pointed out Mark where we have seen that the collision or the convergence of overtourism and climate change most acutely are in coastlines and beaches. And this is really presenting a lot of problems. I mean, one is that much of the tourism that takes place on coastlines in the shoreline off the coast and so on is, it's very difficult to move this. I mean, the cruise industry, for instance needs to be at sea and they need to have their docks built right along the sea front. People going to the Caribbean or elsewhere to the Philippines and so on are used to are expecting to vacation right on the beaches to have their infrastructure, their hotels and so on. So it requires a change in mindset and a change in a lot of infrastructure and probably laying aside some parts of the tourism industry that just cannot be done with the onslaught of climate change which for beaches and coastlines is killing the coral reefs and the sea grasses and so on and closing sea level rise, increased storms, increasingly fierce and frequent storms and so on that just makes living on the coastlines difficult. So that's one huge set of problems that it is very difficult to find an alternative kind of tourism for what we are seeing where we're having come together, masses of people wanting to, I mean, most people want a vacation, it's the most popular place to vacation on a coastline or a beach and plus the increasing assault from climate change. The other part of that I think is that oftentimes beaches are the least well managed. I mean, what we found in our book and looking at the different types of destinations, national parks, for instance, actually have a long history of rather good management. And so they have been able to cope with over tourism and with climate change with other kinds of and the pandemic and so on in an organized way. Cities oftentimes are quite well structured to come up with solutions and so on. Beaches oftentimes fall into a kind of, it's not quite clear who is jurisdiction, it may be a light hand of jurisdiction over it and so on. And so it is much more difficult to come up with workable solutions that need to be directed by some entity, either government or an international agency or something to enforce, to put in in place, the changes that need to take place. And so you've got these twin, you've got on coastlines and beaches, one, this is the fastest growing part of the tourism industry. The most popular destinations are on beaches and coastlines. And you've got this convergence of climate change and over tourism, very difficult to redo the kind of tourism that could take place in these areas. And administratively, it's management-wise, it's very difficult, oftentimes very difficult to see who's in charge. So I think this of all the places that we looked at, this is where I see the least progress so far and the most challenges for coming up with solutions. Do you have anything to say on that, Kelsey? Yeah, I love that you brought up the triple bottom line topic because Crest recently stopped saying people, planet and profit for similar reasons. And we started saying people, planet and prosperity. To us as a nonprofit, the word profit doesn't really mean what it doesn't mean economic benefit for destinations in the places that we're working. It sort of implies maybe a hotel doing really well or something like that. And what we wanted to convey is that it's about more than just profit, it's about destinations really prospering and that money going towards communities that need it. So a good example is in the Caribbean, a lot of islands aren't getting the economic benefit from cruise tourism that they should, especially when in port cities, a lot of the stores are owned by the cruise lines, a lot of the tours that cruise passengers can book when they come into a port, some of that money goes back to the cruise lines as well. So when you think about it, if you're a cruise passenger and you get off in a destination and you spend eight hours and you spend a few dollars here and there, a lot of that money isn't going to the destination at all, it's going back to the cruise line and we call that economic leakage. So if you really want a destination to prosper, you have to think about the entire system of where your dollars are going so that it's not just about profit but it's about, like I said, prosperity. I love that, I'm glad that you clarified that and it is truly about prosperity, it's about livability, it's about prosperity, it's about looking forward and the book is definitely not academic, it's definitely not doom and gloom, it's really well-written, beautiful case studies that enlighten many different areas. The last thing I have to say about the one of the five aspects, beaches and coastlines is they're also on the podcast by Carolyn Klosky and Billy Fleming on the podcast. They wrote for Island Press, the book called A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation. Island Press just amazed me, they're constantly have the best authors and the best topics thinking about our world and how we can help to really fix some of these environmental and problems that we have that are human cause, man-made cause. And so the last harp that I kind of have to get on and I don't know if we'll go down a rabbit hole but I wanna bring it up. During the pandemic, cruise ships, there's not enough docks for all the cruise ships to dock. So what happened is after they dropped off their passengers they've continued to cruise around with just a skeleton crew, their ships because there's no place to dock until they can start up their cruises again. That's one aspect that I'll let the listeners decide if that's something sustainable or would make sense. And then the second thing is we hear a lot about fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions but usually the fishing and cruise and tourism shipping industry is left on the side. There's not a lot of talk about the immense emissions that the ships leave but also the immense amount of food waste and different things that occur on the ship but also once they hit port or how that type of travel or that experiential type of tourism is. And I would just like to kind of hear is that something that's taking a shift towards more sustainable practices, better ships, less pollution, things that you see coming down the line or are there some sanctions or anything that we can kind of hope of in those areas. And I know some people will be upset. They love to go on cruises but really unless I'm wrong it's one of the most unsustainable ways to travel or to tour the world that's out there. Yeah, I think Crest has done quite a bit of work on cruise tourism over the years and our sort of central focus has been on what are the pros and cons of cruise tourism for the ports of call. So we've really looked at the island states in the Caribbean, countries in Central America and now we're involved in a project that's looking at Alaska and the network of ports that feed into the Alaska tourism. And our question has been how to compare cruise tourism to the other options that are out there to what is called in the Caribbean, stay over tourism, people who fly to the islands and spend their vacation on as Kelsey did, St. Martin's or some other place in the Caribbean. And what are the trade-offs? How much money is going into the local economy from both types of tourism? We're doing the same thing now in Alaska looking at cruise tourism, large scale cruise tourism compared with what's called in Alaska independent travel. And that includes a whole collection of different kinds of travel from small scale cruises and yachts to people who in some cases drive to Alaska, he can drive to parts of it, to people who fly in to people who come in on rails on trains and basically plan their own trip or on smaller cruises where the trips are planned. And we're looking at the comparison and what we've found where we've done most of our work in the Caribbean is that cruise tourism puts far less into the economy. For instance, in the Caribbean, in 2015, there were about the same number of people going to the Caribbean on a cruise and as stay-over passengers flying to an island and spending vacation there. Same number of people, it was about 25,000 in each category, 25 million, excuse me, in each category going to the Caribbean, one of 32 islands in the Caribbean. And yet what we found is that the cruise industry overall tourism was, let me just check the amount. I think it was, sorry, I hope you can cut out some of this but let me just get the amount. We'll find it. Anyway, what we found was that in the Caribbean, I'm not gonna get this exactly right but it was something like $6 billion that was raised through tourism. Of that, $0.8 billion came from cruise tourism and $5.2 billion came from the stay-over tourism, people who flew to the Caribbean. So overwhelmingly, the money that destinations in the Caribbean were gaining from tourism came from stay-over tourism, not from cruise tourism, even though they were both sending the same number of tourists to the Caribbean. We'll see what we find in Alaska but it's undoubtedly going to be something along the same lines that independent travel leaves much more in the local economy than does cruise tourism. So from our point of view, yes, the environmental issues are enormous in terms of cruise ships and cruise ships themselves are getting bigger and bigger all the time. So those issues are in some ways becoming greater but I also do feel there's been some efforts to deal with some of the most egregious problems with cruise tourism in terms of the smokestacks, including the smokestacks trying to have more ships that are plug-ins when they get into ports and trying to deal with some of the waste issues and so on. In a way, these problems, technological solutions could be found. What I worry about is these ships that are just so big and they're basically unloading so many people at a time in small either fragile islands or fragile cities and so on, that it's just too big to cope with and there isn't really a solution. We need to get, as Kelsey said, smaller, slower, less frenetic and so on. We need a different kind of travel which really the small cruise lines offer frankly but it's just hard to imagine how we can continue with ever-increasing ports, ever-increasing size of ships, ever-increasing numbers of passengers and be on a path towards sustainability. We're not. I really appreciate you addressing it in that way and I don't, we won't hold your feet to the fire with those numbers. This is just a discussion between us and we'll say, oh, you were off on the numbers, Martha. That's, we know that you guys have done your research, you've presented the cases and the data is good to a certain point but it's really not about the numbers. It's about really the results and it's about where is the trend going? Is it getting better or is it getting worse? And this leads me to another and this is almost a question and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to formulate it right. So in the book you talk about the UNESCO World Heritage Sites as well and just for our listeners, so UNESCO World Heritage really has great purposes and is great in its own right. There's currently two date as of today, 1,120 properties that are on the World Heritage Site. There's 51 of them that are in danger and 868 that are cultural, 213 that are natural sites and then about 39 mixed sites whether mixed between cultural and endangered or over natural sites and 167 different countries or state parties are involved in all those 1,120 and that's where I'm throwing out the numbers but that are accurate but I wanna go a little bit deeper. In some respects, there's a lot of wisdom and great benefits to belong to that but I see a flip side that it could maybe be a bad thing to be on the World Heritage Site maybe that that also puts a flag up that that's where everybody's gotta go and see and that then of itself brings a lot of problems along with it and so you guys are the experts and I kinda wanna get both sides of the coin and maybe you could tell us where that's going, what the positives are and if there are any and how that goes and then just for my listeners as well after this podcast or in their own musings please go to the world UNESCO's World Heritage Sites it's a treasure trove of information not only maths and data and books and free books and paid books that kind of get you up to speed on why, where and what and when you guys answer this question afterwards that's when I really wanted us to go a little bit deeper in culture and history which Kelsey brought up kind of that's why you as an individual started to travel and how that ties into things but I wanna let you answer this World Heritage and please feel free whoever wants to go first well why don't I start and then Kelsey please come in so in a way I think I've come to view the World Heritage Sites as kind of the world's equivalent to our national parks that it is taking the most iconic they have to be places that have world-class features that the world will be less rich without and so that they are naming the cultural sites and the natural sites that just like the Galapagos Islands or the Serengeti or so on that if we lose them we've really lost part of our richness of this planet. So it's a very positive I think it's very positive that the world community came together and said we're going to protect these places. The problem is that we've never put the United Nations has never put enough resources behind them to properly protect them and many of these places are located in very poor countries and as you mentioned Mark this simple designation of a site as a World Heritage Site begins to attract tourism and the reality is that most of these places have become dependent on tourism for their funding mechanism because they're not getting it internationally and they're not getting it from the local government. So they've turned to tourism and as we've seen in many places oftentimes they've developed a model of attracting more and more tourists of trying to attract more and more tourists and so on and of not having a really strong management system in place so that they frequently are not being properly managed. We see this in Venice for instance which is because of cruise tourism and too many Dave visitors too many Airbnbs, et cetera, et cetera is suffering from over tourism and is on what is called the World Heritage Sites in Danger List, the Endanger List. And this is an important instrument that UNESCO has to highlight when there is a real problem with the World Heritage Site and that basically the World Heritage Site can be taken off the list if it fails to maintain proper standards. The UNESCO is reluctant to take sites off of the World Heritage Site designation and local and countries do not want to have their iconic places removed from the UNESCO list. So this happens with great care and reluctance and so on, that doesn't happen very often but the two main problems I think having worked on that chapter on the World Heritage Sites are a lack oftentimes not always but oftentimes a lack of proper management of the site and a lack of sufficient resources to manage it. Yeah, and I can hop in and illustrate that with an example, one of our chapters was on Mount Everest. So obviously an incredibly iconic world class site. And as Martha is saying, the UNESCO designation comes with a lot of marketing potential, frankly. It comes with a lot of visibility and when there aren't resources put behind that visibility it becomes a huge issue. So, and I don't know if you saw the pictures of this from a few years back, but when we look at pictures of people climbing Mount Everest these days it's lines of climbers all crammed into one tiny little space trying to get to the top, get that photo and head back down. And it's not the experience that you would think of when you think of Everest as this world class site and destination, you couple that with, as we called the twin threat of climate change and overtourism on Mount Everest, a lot of the ice is melting away. Some of the human bodies that have been left there are becoming revealed. A lot of trash is being left behind by the climbers because of logistical issues with bringing it back down. It creates a lot of safety issues as well. There's because of the weather of Mount Everest and getting up safely, there's a very limited period in which you can actually ascend in a safe manner. So everyone ends up doing it on the same day. Another issue is that there's been a proliferation of lower cost operators that are helping people get to the top who perhaps don't have the experience that they should and they're a lot cheaper. So people that maybe shouldn't be climbing the mountain would have access and that creates a lot of safety issues as well. And the management comes down to Nepal and China who are on either sides of Mount Everest. And frankly, there's a lot of gaps, a lot of mismanagement, not a very well-structured permitting system. So I think UNESCO does have a responsibility to work with those destination managers, with those countries, with the people who manage those sites. They also have national park units around Everest and come up with a better management system. I really appreciate that. And I love that example and it's true. So I also like to climb and I have a wonderful partner who climbs, you know, Mount Blanc and Tanzania and many, many Kilimanjaro and many other mountains out there, Muters Alm. And so it's, I know and I've heard and seen some of those things as well. And that's just one example. That's a high probably where there's a small percentage of people who are explorers and adventurers that would go there and maybe it's becoming more attractive but there are thousands of other such locations. There are also World Heritage that have been increasing that today until the 31st of July is actually the 44th session. So we're recording this in the 23rd of July but the recording will be released much later. But actually while we're doing this recording is the 44th session of the World Heritage Committee and it's actually in China, that's a Fuzhu but it's an online meeting and I think there's some, it's a little hybrid but it started on the 16th of July and goes clear to the 31st where they're not only focusing in on China but also on the rest of the world and hopefully addressing some of these other issues that we brought up. And I think it's really important that we touched upon that because as many things in our world it starts out with good intentions and wants to help and then it quickly goes awry and we see the consequences of this and we finished up the cruise ships but there was a thing that came up twice for both of you is that for the growth in cruise ships or even to maintain the cruise ships that are currently operating there has to be an infrastructure put in place not just in ports where they can dock but also in once they dock that the infrastructure of those World Heritage or beach sites or coastal areas where they're docking then can support the almost exponential number of people that just pile off of those ships in one moment and overload some very struggling economies, cultures, communities when it is. And that's not just a problem in the cruise industry that's a problem for our entire world and especially for World Heritage sites the infrastructure is already lacking it's already behind in many respects. The roads, I mean, Rome's a prime example if you go to Rome, I go there all the time for the FAO wonderful World Heritage things there wonderful coliseums and things but the infrastructure is sorely lacking to maintain current population and current tourism let alone that's what's projected to go and forward in the future. And so the reason I bring that up is I deal a lot with innovations and infrastructures and cities and obviously I'm a sustainable development goal advocate which means sustainable development how do we develop so that we can be around for future generations in the future and most people don't understand that's infrastructure how do we keep that infrastructure growing and expanding to sustain those people who are going to visit are there and there are some new tools geospatial tools but also other modeling tools available to project whether those infrastructures can handle high flow high traffic, high population, high tourism and things you see more of those things solutions or more of those things coming about that are helping and supporting communities and cities that are struck with these problems that are in the line and this is also a good part to kind of tickle some of the end of the book where you guys present some solutions as well. Yeah, absolutely. And that issue is why we had a whole chapter on historic cities in our book because the issue that you have is that there's a lot of outdated a lot of historic infrastructure that isn't prepared to handle the sheer numbers of people that are coming into a city and when you talk about innovations and geospatial awareness the first thing I think of in terms of solutions is Barcelona. So the contributor for that chapter talked a lot about first of all just destination master planning which is a really important tool when you're looking at a city or a destination that's dealing with over tourism because as you said before tourism is so multi-sectoral it's transportation, it's environment, it's energy and in order to deal with all of those issues you need to look at it holistically. So Barcelona came up with a really effective master plan for the destination and one of the key components was that spatial planning that awareness coming up with better plans for city streets and sidewalks making sure that tourists were distributed more evenly so actually controlling where they're going and what they're doing. So I think that's a really interesting case study to look at in terms of that type of planning. I think we've seen also coming out of the pandemic some solutions that are very important for over tourism for instance, Hawaii during the pandemic where tourism is the most important industry of course and they did a survey of Hawaiians to say how do they feel about returning to tourism as they had known it before the pandemic and to the surprise of the tourism authority people overwhelmingly said no that they didn't want to return to the tourism that they had known before the pandemic they wanted revisions and basically they wanted what one of the crucial issues in Hawaii has been illegal Airbnb's that have cropped up and have really eroded and made very unattractive a lot of communities and neighborhoods particularly beach communities and so on and these are advertised on websites and so on but they're not legally registered they're not permitted and so on and so that was one big issue. So what Hawaii came up with rather than just sort of walking away from this crisis was that they now are doing as Kelsey was mentioning master plans for each island that are focused on management and not marketing. I mean, they're not ignoring marketing but they're not putting the focus on marketing which has again and again and again meant increasing the number of tourists that's the objective of marketing rather it is to talk about how to manage well tourism and to basically earn more per tourist rather than increase the numbers let's increase the earning per tourist by having people stay longer by having by doing away with some of the illegal Airbnb's that where money is just not staying in the local economy and so on. So they're in a process of doing that and that's really a combination of over tourism that they were experiencing before the pandemic and then seeing the during the pandemic what a return to what life could be like without cruise ships, without Airbnb without a mass, I mean, they don't have to meet cruise tourists, sorry that misspoke but without the hordes of tourists who they had seen coming to Hawaii and people basically were able to drive without a lot of traffic, were able to go to the beaches without huge crowds and so on and they liked it and they want to see if they can create a kind of tourism that protects the sorts of quality of life that they were losing. So I think we are seeing some really positive developments potentially that we still it's gonna be a struggle. I mean, the big players in tourism are going to be fighting to come back bigger, better or maybe not better but bigger than ever and just get back into business. But communities, a lot of communities are saying no this is not what we want. So I think that the verdict is that what will ultimately happen is still not known but I think we've got more of a fighting chance than when we were going into the pandemic that people now are really considering the importance of basic most fundamentally sustainability that they've got to protect their way of life by doing tourism in ways that are sustainable. The book is really a treasure trove and has a nice summation in the end and gives wonderful case studies. I want to, we're not done yet so don't go yet. What I'm saying is we could really talk for hours to even start to scratch the surface on what this book brings to light, what it covers, some of the issues we're seeing. One of them Kelsey brought up in the beginning is through the pandemic, travel and tourism will never be the same again. So right now Germans and Europeans are still not in the Schlingen I think group are still not allowed to travel into the US because of COVID restrictions. So that's one thing. The other thing is this global citizenry. We have a lot of nationalism, a lot of people, borders, walls, checkpoints that are there where it's just not easy and it's kind of a privilege to travel or to go anyway in a normal world but one of pandemics and mutations that's even harder. I hope we can have another time to talk at a different time, a little bit more of how you see tourism and travel industry going with maybe global citizenship or global passports or new digital forms that allow access to people to travel all around the world. And then secondly, how that maybe is something that might not happen or is unrealistic but there's a flip side to that because of climate change we're actually seeing a climate migrants forcing movement to different places and a lot of things happening and it's not just underdeveloped countries or those who are struggling, Germany was just hit and is still suffering greatly because of the floods which is all climate and believe it or not some very wealthy and developed people here in Germany are now displaced because they don't have a home anymore they don't have their belongings of their life and hopefully they won't leave Germany but they're being displaced as a refugee and understand how it can be to move and so those are some of the things that we also need to deal with with tourism and migrations whether it's a conflict or it's a climate migration or movement but I think if you wanna touch on it quickly that's fine but that's a big thing that we need to talk about that falls into this whole picture of overtourism, tourism and also this global view of the world. Ooh, you raised a lot. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think, yes, the global citizen I mean, I think that one of the things that we have learned is that when you travel, especially if you travel in a way that doesn't just take you to an enclave like an all inclusive beach resort or whatever but actually gets you out meeting other people that this is a profound form of education and that it sort of is stimulating parts of our brains that are not quite stimulated by classroom learning but it's a different kind of learning and experiential is the term most often used and in a way it can be more profound than book learning because all of your senses are involved and your hands, your smell, your taste, your sight and so on and so building global citizenship through travel is an extremely important reason for keeping the travel industry going and it was what was threatened by the pandemic, certainly but I think that we're convinced that we need this as human beings, we need this and as societies we need this kind of interaction that it educates us in profound ways that build better people and better societies. So that is extremely important. The flip side of that as you also mentioned is that we are increasingly going to see people being forced to move, not choosing to travel but forced to flee either because of poverty and economic reasons or because of political turmoil or because of wildfires and floods and so on and that we're going to see massive movements of people and we have not figured out at all how to deal with that. I mean we're just, I personally feel at the moment we're just battered day after day with more catastrophes that we have no idea that the wildfires in Oregon that they're saying just have to burn until someday it'll rain and the floods that you were talking about in Germany and so on, I mean, on and on and the turmoil, the squeeze that we're seeing through climate change and other factors that are forcing people out of Latin America, out of Africa, into Europe, into the US and so on and these destabilizing effects of desperate people and we don't know how to deal with that and I don't have an answer for that but I think there are positive, necessary things about travel but the reality is that we are going to see people on the move in ways that we have not fully anticipated and we just don't know how to deal with in an organized fashion. I take this bigger look that we're all Homo sapiens on this crew members on this big spaceship Earth and that really we're all global citizens we're all the same species and even though we've fallen into structures of division and nationalism I believe that there are some other tools and again, we won't be able to go into it too much but I really wanted to tickle upon it. I'd like to maybe hear your opinions or your thoughts as well. I believe the reason all inclusive resorts are big, that cruise ships are big that these package tourism or package deals for travel are good is because they're convenient, they take care of everything, it's all inclusive it's a complete thing, put your luggage on the ship and it stays there the whole time while you're exploring the world and seeing the seas and we feed you 24 seven and that's this life of royalty. On the flip side with that same convenience type of thinking if eco-villages, eco-tourism, sustainable ways were to kind of offer those same services like the minute you get to the airport you don't have to worry that your flight is carbon offset naturally that the travel from the airport to your resort or to the place where you're staying whether it's a hostel or a hotel or motel or a resort that that's taken care of. And as I was mentioning in the very beginning I said Asia, I've seen some great examples one of the very first world's hotels to have this ISO 20,121 certification is the Plaza Atini Bangkok which is basically not only enveloping the sustainable development goals but every kind of event or anything around their hotel is not only carbon offset, recycled, composted, different types of methods and standards and when I go to travel for events I also say is does this event do carbon offsetting? Do you have certification and standards? Are there things in place? And then if we take it even a step further so not only is there a big trend in carbon offsetting carbon capturing with resorts and locations but now there's these eco-villages and eco-tourism and there's this new one with the United Nation that's called the Decade of Restoration now above and beyond the sustainable development goals and they have these ecosystem restoration camps and it's like going on vacation except you get to work to restore nature and a lot of people are seeing those as an experiential as you mentioned, Martha that really are an experiential way that you're saying, wow, I just spent time restoring nature and camped out in nature under the stars and had a great time doing it that there's a real push in that. Well, what if instead of or we use the same tricks and methods as cruise ships and all inclusive resorts who maybe are damaging the culture or the community or the environment and we do that on the flip side and not only does it do the triple bottom line it goes beyond that because now they're covering and making sure that the thing that you've so worked so hard to do is convenient for you to do, you know? Yes, Kelsey. Yeah, I mean, I'll just say, I'll just say that that's what we advocate for every day is that the principles of responsible travel and ecotourism are not just siloed into certain types of travel. So only people that want to plant trees while they travel or protect nature or go to eco villages like you were talking about but that the principles are woven throughout all types of travel and specifically mass tourism. And in my mind, it would provide a better experience for travelers that are used to that all inclusive experience they're used to that convenience. Martha, do you have anything to add? Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that we are really convinced about having worked in this field for a long time is that what we're promoting sustainable travel, responsible travel is actually superior for the traveler. It's not just the right thing for the planet or the right thing for the local community or whatever or the environment, but it actually provides a superior vacation. So we're selling a better product and so we don't need to apologize for trying to get people to do the right thing properly done well. It's a superior kind of vacation. And I've just have seen this both personally and taking my family, taking friends on trips or sending them on trips and people have again and again and again come back and say, wow, that was the best vacation I've ever been on because they really engaged with people because they've learned something but learned it, you know, not because they had to read and sit in a classroom they felt, you know, as we talked about and they felt it and they experienced it and so on that other kind of learning that we were actually really relish and so on. So we're selling a good product and I think that's the starting point. But I think the other reality is that yes, cruises and all-inclusives are attractive because they're easy. They're also attractive because they appear to be cheaper. And this is a huge selling point. And I think there are a couple of things to say about that. One is that oftentimes they're actually if you add up all that you've spent, they're not cheaper. That there are lots of hidden costs on a cruise for instance, increasingly you may have to pay for drinks. There are all sorts of enticements, auctions and so on to try to get you to spend more money. Of course, all of the onshore excursions and so on are extra. So that oftentimes people, and we've done this we've done surveys with passengers and compared what they actually spent getting an accrues to for instance, Belize, compared with what a typical week stay in Belize costs. And the week stay, including airfare was cheaper than a cruise. We're not saying this happens all the time but it certainly happens a number of times, much of the time. So I think that that's one thing that cost may be a little bit ephemeral but it is an attraction to the all-inclusives and the cruises. And we need to begin to call out what the real costs are. But the other point that I want to make and this is something that we grapple with all the time is that we want to try to keep travel accessible, egalitarian. We want to be able to make it that it's not just, I mean, an easy way to control crowds or try to control crowds and so on deal with overtourism it's just to raise the price to make it so expensive that only a handful of people can afford to go. That is not a viable, that's not an equitable answer. People need to be able to travel. And I think our national parks are sort of the best example of places that have had wide access, they're widely accessible to people because they're not expensive to go to. And we need to be building into our solutions, solutions that encompass ability to travel to places that are not expensive. Now you may limit the number of people who can go and you can limit the number through a lottery system or whatever you don't have to do it by raising the price so that you cut out people who don't have the means but you do it through a lottery system of preregistration and so on. So that it remains equitable, but you are controlling the numbers. So these are, this is an area that we've spent a lot of time thinking about. And I think it needs to be front and center and the solutions to overtourism is how to do overtourism in ways that are equitable. I have a controller to ask. Oh yeah, please go ahead. Sorry, just to add to that question of cost, something that I think about a lot is, yes, it's nice to go on a vacation for cheap, but if you really think about where your money is going and who it's supporting, to me personally, I think it's important to spend a little bit more so that you are supporting fair wages for the restaurant workers, the hotel employees, the crafts people. So think about that the next time that you're trying to purchase a locally made craft and your instinct is to haggle for it. Really think about what that crafts person put into it, the value of their time and what it costs. And I think that when things are developed and sold so cheaply, there's issues at the systems level that you need to think about. So where were these products made that they can actually be sold so cheaply? How are they treating their workers since this entire vacation is so cheap? I think there's real questions there to be asked. I totally agree and I'm glad that you, but tone that again and spoke to that because it's really so important. I say this in many different areas, but it holds true to everything in our world that if you cheapen food, you cheapen life. If you cheapen tourism, you cheapen life. If you cheapen work, you cheapen life. I mean, if you cheapen anything, you're cheapening life, you're cutting someone else short, you're exploiting resources. And in the real effect, no matter what we do, we have to pay the true cost accounting, the total cost of what it is that we're doing. That's just the realities. And if we don't pay it, there's an environmental cost. There's a health cost. There's a cost somewhere that the environment or human health has to pay in the end effect. I have four last questions for you. And I know this has been long. I appreciate you bearing with me, but we really could go into much depth, a lot more depth. I want my listeners to know, even though it sounds like we've covered this book from beginning to end, we haven't, we've only tickled on some of the great wisdoms and the content in it. So I really want you to go out and get it. But the last point that I really need to touch in the book, and it was brought up right in the beginning from you, Kelsey, and it was history. And history has a unique tie to climate. It has a unique tie to civilization frameworks. It has a unique tie to a lot of things. And that's why I want to bring it up. So today we're in this mode of social media and selfies and a lot of the over tourism currently with TikTok and some of the new platforms that have emerged and even Instagram are really expediting tourism just to get that photo of the Parthenon or like you said, some people want to get to the top of the Everest, take that photo just to prove that they've been there. And it's that way in many respects. I want to make absolutely certain that all our listeners and everybody kind of knows, and we touched on it a little bit with the World Heritage Site. There are more than 20 world civilizations that have existed before that today no longer exist. Early Aztecs, Incas, Mayas, early Mesopotamia, the Greeks, the Romans, ancient China. There are civilizations that have been here on our planet before that don't exist anymore. And what we find in a lot of the World Heritage Sites and others that only thing is left is the ruins of those places. And so we go to, we should be going to learn the history like Kelsey mentioned and I'm glad to hear that, but a lot of us are going to get that picture in front of a ruin or in front of some historical place without totally understanding what they're doing. And what they're doing is they're saying, why did these other very advanced, infrastructurally advanced civilizations that have networks and roads and innovations and civilizations that were very advanced, why are they here anymore? And I'll tell you, all but two of those 20 civilizations that aren't here anymore collapsed because of ecological or environmental collapse. And alls we have left is the ruins today. And the two that didn't collapse because of ecological or environmental collapse because of displacement or conflict is why they collapsed. And so with that type of history in mind, and we look good for a selfie for Instagram or TikTok video or however we do it, how are we protecting ourselves from being facing a collapse with climate change moving forward through tourism to get that selfie? And so I don't know if that's far reached or if you can agree or you've seen that push in tourism as well, but I'd like to kind of get that education aspect of history in tourism and also how it ties into social media and what you guys see and what true learning lessons should we have when we're taking those selfies and having those experiences to avoid a collapse for our now civilization? Well, I think that one of the things, and this goes back to something that Kelsey was talking about earlier is that we need a new mindset. We need to talk about traveling slower and longer. And fewer trips but trips that are for a longer duration that allow a deeper dive into a destination, into a culture, into the history of a place and so on. And this will both lighten up the press of people in a destination if you have fewer people going there but staying longer and it will put more resources into the destination. This is the course we should be on. We've got a long ways to go to be able to put in place the apparatus that assures us that this can happen. And it means as we've talked about that setting limits and having various kinds of caps on how many people in a museum at a time, how many people in a World Heritage Site ruin at a time and so on, how many people up a mountain at time and a reservation system, a lottery system and so on to allow this to happen in an organized way. I don't see any other way out. And this is going back to what you were talking about. It's fascinating that you also did the Colorado River early on in your life as a guide and so on. And I think that what we learned early on in the 60s from the Colorado River and the fact that Kennedy, the Kennedy clan which involved a hundred and some people went on a trip and that began to raise the concerns of too much trash, too many people, too much so on. How do we control this? And the park service put in reluctantly but they began to experiment only in the Colorado in a kind of control of numbers which they have had in place since then. And that was like an early experiment with what to do with overtourism. It is now being writ large across the National Park system being used in many places. But this is the direction we need to move in. I wanna hit on the question of selfies and Instagram that you brought up. This is one of the huge drivers of overtourism at many destinations. And we touch upon that in our book. And it's actually really sad to me because I think when you go somewhere if your motivation is solely just to get a photo and leave you're really missing out. And in some ways putting yourselves in other in danger. I mean, one of the destinations we talk about in our book is Threlthunga. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly but I'm trying in Norway which is this incredible precipice, this cliff that checks out over a beautiful natural area. And a lot of the people that are trying to get there are motivated by getting that selfie doing a yoga pose at the end of the precipice and getting a cool photo. And it's creating a lot of safety issues. These people don't realize how long it actually takes to trek out there and they're unprepared. The Norway officials that manage that site have a huge number of rescue operations more so now than in past years to rescue these tourists. Another example that I'll bring up is a few years ago a photo went viral of a girl who was visiting Auschwitz and took a selfie of herself with her smiling face in front of the gate of Auschwitz. And it went viral for the right reasons. People were really upset that kind of mentality was being taken to a site that really needed to be treated with more respect and dignity. So I think that's a major issue. And I don't know how to solve the issue of civilization collapse that you mentioned but I think if I could advocate just for one solution to all of this is we really need to be thinking not just about adaptation to the current problems and these short-term solutions like moving visitors instead of over here and maybe changing the sites that they're visiting but really thinking about systems change and how to mitigate these issues before they happen. And the way that we can do that is by changing how destinations are managed at a systems level. And like Martha was saying earlier, the issue is that a lot of destinations don't have a centralized management structure or it's kind of unclear who's doing what. It's multiple different sectors. And I think what we're seeing is that destinations like national parks that have a clear mandate and a clear management structure do a lot better. And especially those destinations that are driving forward solutions in collaboration with local communities in an inclusive and collaborative way are the ones that are doing the best. So I think we really need to look at those structures at a systems level. I love that and I appreciate you batoning that or kind of setting the tone on that and I didn't expect either of you to solve our civilization framework problems but I think many of us tend to forget the history behind what we're actually taking a photo of that that was a pretty advanced civilizations in many respects that they're no longer here but yet because we have cameras and smartphones and computers and innovations that we think that that might not happen to us or we don't put that same reverence or that same type of thought process that, boy, am I contributing to the collapse of humanity with the way I live and the way I travel and the way things happen. And it seems so minuscule because it's one individual but it's one individual times billions who travel every year and to eat every year and do things that could lead to a similar collapse. Maybe it's the collapse of the selfies, you know? I don't think that's, it's that bad but it has definitely pushed over tourism and has definitely pushed some things in different ways than it should. We're running out of time so I'm going to just ask you two more questions and that is the burning question is the hardest one I have for you today. It's WTF, the burning question but it's not the swear word, it's what's the future? What's the future of tourism? Do we have a plan to be more responsible? Well, you know, I think that the good news is that we've made a lot of progress. I mean, historically, we can trace the origins of ecotourism which is the first sort of term within the tourism field that had a kind of ethics behind it was not just describing the kind of travel as nature travel or historic travel does, urban travel and so on but it actually had, it talked about the impact of travel and that done well, it can be positive. And from the original concept of ecotourism we've seen a sort of flowering of all kinds of other terms that, and some of these terms we use more in one part of the world than another but the most recent term to kind of emerge in part through the pandemic is regenerative tourism, leave a place better than you found it as we've talked about. All of these terms I think have within them the same core set of values to be light on the land and benefit the environment, to respect local cultures and benefit the local community and to be educational as well as enjoyable for the traveler. All of them have those same core principles. And I think we've learned a lot, we've put a lot of meat on these original terms and these new terms over the years through as you mentioned before mark certification programs setting of standards and so on and really trying to define what we mean by sustainability not just use the term for greenwashing, for marketing but really to put some criteria for how we measure that this tourism is not doing harm is actually doing some good. And so the good news is that I think we have the tools to do sustainability, right? We have developed those and we have also expanded from the original sector of eco-tourism, which is basically nature-based tourism to as Kelsey talked about really applying these same principles and good practices across all types of tourism. So that someday the whole tourism industry if done correctly should be sustainable. So it is spreading to resorts to large scale mass market tourism as well. We've got a long ways to go, but at least it's recognized that that's the direction we need to go in. So we've got the tools, we've got a sense of direction we've got a breadth of how we're applying those tools and so on, this is all good news. On the other side, we've got a flanked a very powerful and engine of mass tourism and a propensity to measure success in terms of more numbers rather than a higher quality of visitation. And this is a huge challenge. So we've got huge challenges, but the good news is that we do know how to. I mean, if we pay attention, the tools are there and the path forward is there. It's not as if we're stumbling around in the dark. We know how to do it. So for that, that's what keeps me feeling somewhat optimistic that we can do it if we put our minds to it and a lot of people are working on it. Do you want to add anything Kelsey? I think Martha summed it up really nicely. I'll just add one thing and say I'm really heartened by this kind of next generation of travelers that really do think about sustainability and there's also data that shows that millennials and Gen Z are willing to put much more money into companies that are doing the right thing, things that they perceive to have good ethics behind them, especially when they travel. And I think that's a really good thing. The last question for each of you is if there was one message that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life, what would it be your message, especially one around tourism? Well, one, I don't know what Kelsey will say, but I think one thing that I have long felt and continue to feel is that tourism is often looked at as kind of a light industry, a for fun industry, not something to be taken really seriously. And in fact, it's the largest service sector in the world, employing more people than any other and having a huge impact, particularly on vulnerable communities and vulnerable destinations around the world. So we need to take planning for our travel seriously. As seriously as we take the brand of coffee we drink or where we send our kids to school or where we decide to live or whatever, we don't check our values at the door when we head out on vacation. We need to take time, plan ahead of time, make sure that we are doing the research and it does take some research. I mean, doing the looking to try to pick a path for travel that is both educational for us, enjoyable for us, but is also respectful of the communities and the environment where we're traveling and leaves as much of our resources within those communities as we can. That takes some work, but it's our obligation to be doing it. Yeah, and I will just, if I'm thinking about what message is really going to sit with some of the listeners that we have today who are all, I assume travelers. I'll just repeat what I said earlier that travel is a privilege, it's not a right. When you go somewhere, treat it like you're visiting a neighbor's home and you wanna leave it better than how you left it. And don't just take travel for granted. And we've learned that over the past year and a half now that that travel is to have the disposable income to travel, to have that freedom of mobility that's not restricted by global health crises and hurricanes, it's not something that everybody has. And when we visit somewhere, it's an incredible opportunity to learn about the place, to meet the people that lives there and learn about their way of life and see what they can teach you and to really go into travel with that mindset. And I think it makes a huge difference when it relays into your actions as a traveler. Thank you both so much, Martha, Kelsey. It's been a sheer pleasure. Thank you for letting us inside of your ideas, sharing your wonderful book with us. We're gonna put all your links, how people can get the book, how they can look up and see some of the wonderful case studies, the research and tips and tricks that you've given us in the book, solutions to help us move forward. It is something that everybody does one way or the other or would like to do. And I think you've presented it in such a fabulous way. I really thank you and I appreciate your time for being here. Thank you, Mark. It's been a pleasure to be part of this conversation. Thank you, Mark. And we've learned a lot from you as well. A lot of really great information was shared. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye-bye.