Sustainable Mass Tourism: More Smudge than Nudge The Canard Continues

Flights of fantasy: A reformulation of the flyers’ dilemma

“…If frequent flying is the outcome of structural conditions of contemporary capitalism rather than dis-ordered psyches, we need to understand the interplay, contradictions and historical momentum of these conditions in order to imagine alternative futures. Yet our attempts to imagine the future, including the quasi-utopian ideal of 'sustainable' tourism (Høyer, 2000;Wheeller, 2012), are foiled by the ideological apparatus responsible for the construction of the flying addict we commenced by critiquing. This acts as a double bind-we need imagination to resist the system, yet our ability to move beyond the current restrictive configuration of consumer capitalism is crippled by our inability to imagine an alternative concrete utopia that might break us out of hegemonic ahistoricism.…”

“…For now, we simply locate travel and tourism as heavily implicated in the risk-politics of climate change (Gössling, Hall, Peeters, & Scott, 2010). The contribution of transportation (Peeters & Dubois, 2010;Wheeller, 2012), and particularly aviation (Lee et al, 2009; to climate change is significant. Flying, in particular, has started to appear in the risk-biographies of individual tourists .…”

Psychological and behavioural approaches to understanding and governing sustainable mobility

“…There is a groundswell of opinion in tourism, transport and cognate academic fields, that the travel and tourism industry is profoundly environmentally flawed (Gössling, Hall, Peeters & Scott 2010;Wheeller, 2012). Deeply embedded in neoliberal consumer society and entrenched in the structures of late-capitalism (Harvey, 2011), efforts to address the environmental failures of global tourism have, for the time being, rested largely with the consumer.…”

Framework model to assess leisure and tourism sustainability

“…The question arose as to whether the four descriptive platforms of tourism scholarship (¼research perspectives or paradigms) first published in 1990, should be supplemented by one or two platforms relating to sustainability and ethics [5,6]. The basic assumption that tourism sustainability -referring to niche, conventional or mass tourism -could be a practically attainable goal and thus an effective concept has even been challenged [7,8]. Overall, scholarly interest is in the impacts and prerequisites of leisure and tourism development at different scales and in different perspectives, including the choice of comprehensive assessment systems as well as political and other influential action, appropriate for promoting sustainability in practice.…”