Tourism Spoils
There’s a type of travel industry which defines itself as different: ecologically minded, even “responsible.” It’s a type of travel meant to support the conservation of threatened ecosystems. This is not just tourism, but “ecotourism.”
In our last episode, journalist Yardain Amron reported on the conservation strategy - and the controversy - around the creation of the GHNP in the 1980’s and ‘90s. In this second chapter, Yardain turns to 21st century ecotourism, and explores just how much the Tirthan Valley is changing. Who profits from tourism based on exploring wilderness? And just how eco-friendly is ecotourism?
Featuring Raju Bharti, Karan Bharti, Dimple Kamra, Upi Kamra, Rosaleen Duffy, Stephan Marchall, Robert Fletcher, Narottam Singh, and a traveler named Nishant.
Translation by Vibha Kumar.
The ecotourism industry is on the rise in the area around the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP) in northern India, especially since the park was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014. The list also includes globally recognized locations like Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, and the Galapagos Islands.
Being on the list comes with global recognition, sometimes funding for conservation, and pressure to preserve the site for future generations. Plus, it can contribute to transforming these places into destinations, as tourists in search of authentic travel experiences add UNESCO sites like the GHNP to their itinerary.
Ecotourism is a crucial part of the plan to conserve the GHNP and the larger Tirthan Valley for future generations. From one perspective, the strategy is working: tourism is on the rise, which provides jobs to locals and incentivizes conservation.
But from another perspective, the very thing meant to help conserve the Tirthan Valley might also be one of its biggest threats.
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Public Service Announcement. Credit Parth Joshi on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Raju’s Guesthouse. Photo Credit: Varun Bharti
A map of the Great Himalayan National Park, and the surrounding areas.
Links
To learn more about this approach to conservation, check out our episode on the origins of Yellowstone National Park, “Fortress Conservation.”
Dorceta Taylor, “The Rise of the American Conservation Movement.”
Bram Buscher and Robert Fletcher, “The Conservation Revolution.”
Credits
Host: Justine Paradis
Reported and produced by Yardain Amron
Edited by Taylor Quimby with help from Justine Paradis
Executive Producer: Rebecca Lavoie
Mixed by Yardain Amron and Taylor Quimby
Additional Editing: Felix Poon and Jessica Hunt
Special thanks to: Guman Singh, Tony Gaston, and Hema Marchal.
Theme: Breakmaster Cylinder
Additional Music by Blue Dot Sessions
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/In[box] hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Justine Paradis: Some people choose a vacation destination for the white sand beaches… others, for the shopping... or scenic views.
Some people pick their vacation spots because they’re on a list…. Specifically, the list of UNESCO Word Heritage Sites.
UN video: In order to learn the devastation and destruction of the two world wars, to promote understanding between peoples, and to secure peace, UNESCO was founded in 1945 as the educational, scientific, cultural organization of the UN.
Justine Paradis: The UNESCO list of World Heritage sites includes places like Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, The Galapagos Islands.
Many were already huge tourist attractions long before being added to the list.
But being put on the UNESCO list is special.
It comes with global recognition, international pressure to preserve the site for future generations… sometimes even funding for conservation.
Yardain Amron: Who knows, maybe this story - I wouldn’t have heard about the park if it wasn’t a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Justine Paradis: Interesting yeah.
Justine Paradis: This is Yardain Amron. He’s a freelance journalist who traveled to the Tirthan Valley in India, just outside the borders of the Great Himalayan National Park.
It's a gorgeous patchwork of forests, glaciers, mountains, and wildlife… aWhen Yardain visited the area, he stayed at guest-houses…which are basically hostels or bed and breakfasts. nd, coincidentally, it was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014.
Yardain Amron: I heard about, from a lot of the guest house owners. They had people coming through that were just checking off boxes, of going to all of the UNESCO sites throughout the world. That was
their travel motive.
Justine Paradis: Oh that’s how they were organizing their travel?
Yardain Amron: Yeah, which is interesting to hear…
Justine Paradis But the UNESCO world heritage program has critics.
Of the more than eleven-hundred sites around the world, nearly half are in Europe and North America.
It seems to imply that some people’s heritage is worth more to the world than others.
[pause]
And what about the costs of conservation? Not the financial costs, but the tangible costs…. how might the list change the very place that’s been listed?
Yardain Amron: So yeah, there are upsides to the amount of money that can bring in. But at the same time, with that same money comes a lot of people. A lot of feet, a lot of trash. A lot of conflict.
[mux creeps in]
Justine Paradis: Since being listed as a World Heritage Site, tourism in and around The Great Himalayan National Park is on the rise. It’s actually a crucial part of the plan to save this area for future generations.
But what if the thing that’s supposed to save this special place, the Tirthan valley… is also one of its biggest threats?
[mux hit]
This is Outside/In, a show about the natural world and how we use it. I’m Justine Paradis.
In our last episode , producer Yardain Amron told us the story of how The Great Himalayan National Park was first created.
Today, Yardain looking at the ecotourism industry that’s been growing since the GHNP was listed as a UNESCO site in 2014.
How much is the Tirthan Valley changing?
Stephan Marchal: They started talking badly about me
Justine Paradis: Who profits from tourism based on exploring wilderness?
Dimple Kamra: I don’t go by the inside outside nonsense. You have a responsibility towards the people you employ.
Justine Paradis: And how eco-friendly is eco-tourism?
Upi Kamra: Ecotourism according to me would be just the basics
[mux fades - river sound rises]
Yardain Amron: To get to Raju’s guesthouse, you have to cross the Tirthan River in a cable basket and climb up the opposite bank into a place that looks like a fairytale.
Vines climb the dark wood facade. There are flowers, fruit trees, and a fire pit. When we visit, kittens are playing around an old cherry tree. Some guests are fishing for trout in the Tirthan. And dogs are barking up steep south face -- I learn later, probably because they’re smelling leopards, who come over the ridge at night sometimes and stalk them.
Raju of Raju’s Guesthouse has been running the guesthouse since 1991. He’s in his late sixties, toothpick-thin, and the day I interviewed him he was wearing a baseball cap.
Raju Bharti: When I was a kid there was no electricity until 1973. And there was very few business... No tourism at all.
Yardain Amron: Raju’s pretty soft-spoken, at least when my microphone was out, but don’t let that fool you. Some years back, he and his father, who was a local politician, fought against hydro-developers who wanted to dam up the Tirthan River -- and, amazingly, the locals won.
[music rise]
Raju Bharti: It was not really many group, I was the only one in the beginning you know.
Yardain: No one from the village came together to help you?
Raju Bharti: At that time they were all against me, they thought they would have some employment by selling momos or you know...
[fades out]
Yardain Amron: Raju is an example of a local villager who’s doing well catering to regional tourists... and doing well. But the people I met staying in his home had complex feelings about the growing tourism industry here.
Because while the park remains relatively low impact… it’s the surrounding areas that are growing, changing, and not always for the better.
[music fade]
One night at Raju’s we were crowded around the wood stove in the dining room.
Karan Bharti, Raju’s son, said that the summer right around the World Heritage designation, a music festival had shown up in the Tirthan valley. Foreigners and urban Indians flocked to the valley.
As did DJs from some 17 countries across 4 continents. It was a rave party.
Karan Bharti : I can call it a rave party, or what, it was called Shiva Square Festival. They were selling liquor on the roadside. There was no check. They were doing theft of electricity, direct from the poles.
Yardain Amron: They were stealing electricity - right from the telephone pole.
There were laser lights. Fire jugglers. A VIP lounge with butlers. And lots and lots of body paint.
For those three days of the Shiva Square Festival, the rush of the free-flowing Tirthan...
[sound of the Tirthan River]
... was drowned out by the pulse of 125 BPM trance music.
[TRANCE mux]
The people I talked to at Raju’s weren’t anti-EDM per se... But stealing electricity is probably the polar opposite of “empowering local communities”.
[mux]
One of the people sitting around the woodstove, a guy named Nishant, told me the rave parties are part of a pattern for players looking to build a tourist economy in India.
Nishant: If I'm from a business point of view, I'll start with rave parties. Rave parties started in old Manali—that's how Old Manali got introduced to the tourism circuit. Rave parties started in Kasol, Tosh—that's how Kasol and Tosh became famous. So if you're starting with rave parties, you're kind of doing a soft opening for that location.
Yardain Amron: I ask him - you’re saying it’s strategic?
Nishant: It is strategic. It is strategic for any place. But that is how it begins.
[mux fades]
Yardain Amron: So that’s what I saw at Raju’s Guesthouse - some long-time locals who maintain a healthy skepticism of ecotourism, even as they’re taking part in the industry.
But what happens if I go down the road to another guest house - one run by people who didn’t grow up under the shadow of the Himalayas?
[mux fade and AMBI SWELL]
Yardain Amron: There’s a little village in the Indian Himalayas named Deori.. Step inside, and you’ll see a dozen or so slate roof homes wedged inside a deep river valley. A mother tree and a glistening stream, called The Kalwari. It’s idyllic.
But up the road is a swanky stone property that looks and sounds just a little out of place. It’s a guest house - one with a very Western sounding name : “Gone Fishing Cottages”.
Gone Fishing has come up just in the past three-four years. It's got seven suites. Satellite TV. Locally organic sourced food. Rooms start at about 75$—a substantial amount for the Indian Himalayas
One afternoon, I went to talk to the owners.
Dimple Kamra: Ok, I’m Dimple Kamra, wife of Upi Kamra.
Yardain Amron: You don’t need to say that.
Dimple Kamra: [Laughs] I’m just being funny. Oh no no no. I’m the girl friday for this man. My role is that.
They’re not foreigners - but to the people who grew up here, they might as well be. They’re city folks from Chandigarh, the capital city of the neighboring state of Punjab. They first visited the Tirthan valley 25 years ago.
Upi Kamra: THere was nothing here, except for Raju. We stayed with Raju.
Yardain Amron: Everyone starts out staying with Raju.
Upi Kamra: There was nothing! He’s a role model. Even today he’s a role model for us…
This is Upi - Dimple’s husband, and the other half of Gone Fishin’ Cottages.
Yardain Amron: Are there any memories you have from that first trip?
Upi Kamra: There was nothing. It was so beautiful and quiet. In fact, all this construction has come up in the last seven years, maybe.
Yardain Amron: The last seven years - that is—right around the park’s UNESCO World Heritage designation.
[pause]
As we talk about their memories and stories of the valley, we’re sitting out on the patio, while their local staff served us coffee -- which I couldn’t help but feel was a class divide - that, to me, was symbolic of the conflict -- of what a lot of people I spoke to framed as between insiders and outsiders
Sure, some villagers -- insiders -- get jobs through tourism - but it’s the wealthy outsiders, like the Kamras, who are making the real money.
But when I brought it up, Dimple rejected that framing.
Dimple Kamra: I don’t go by the inside outside nonsense. You have a responsibility towards the people you employ. I fund their kids’ education. I make sure that the medicals are paid for. It's not that I'm an outsider or an insider, or a whatever, I don’t care. It is my moral duty, they are working for me...
[mux]
The way Dimple talks about her role in the local economy reminds me a lot of the way government planners did when they were first designing the park.
That she and her husband, in operating this place, are helping locals who don’t yet know how, or have the means, to help themselves.
Dimple Kamra: These people weren’t working before. Some of them have never worked...So we are training them to do that. And I think that's what you need to do. You need to create jobs. You need to create employment for them… Logically you have nothing and then you have something and then you're complaining that something is not enough. So it doesn’t make sense to me.
[music]
Yardain Amron: Essentially, I hear Dimple saying: ecotourism creates jobs.
But as far as how locals, or insiders, feel about employment in a service economy -- it’s not so simple.
Remember Narotham Singh? He was the veteran forest guard from last week’s episode. When the GNHP was created, he was caught in the conflict between government-conceived eco-development and local protests.
But now, he’s caught in a new conflict—catalyzed, again, by the very park he’s employed to protect.
He owned some land in the Tirthan valley and since the park’s UNESCO designation, property prices have skyrocketed. So Narrotham, like many locals, reasonably decided to lease his land to an outsider who had the capital and knowledge to build a guesthouse.
It seemed like a great idea—a win-win for everyone.
But, now, Narotham is not excited by the idea of his own children working at such a place.
Narottam Singh [translated by Vibha Kumar]: But my son and my son's son, if they don’t study, what they're going to be doing is—all of these outsiders who have taken land on lease for thirty thirty years—they are probably going to be cleaning utensils and sweeping in the guesthouses of these people. And that's the dark future.
Yardain: For some, that’s not a dark future - it’s the present. When I stayed at Raju’s guesthouse, the one from the first half of this episode, his son told me many young men here are so ashamed to work as servants on their own land that they’re fleeing the valley altogether. It’s a pattern that’s taken place in other countries too.
Rosaleen Duffy is a professor at the University of Sheffield who studies the global politics of biodiversity conservation.
Rosaleen Duffy: So definitely that is the common pattern, so the people who are almost the objects of the ecotourism experience, the people who’s villages you go into, the people you meet, are nearly always at the bottom of the chain in terms of getting any of the revenue.
Yardain Amron: At the bottom of the chain, but their homes and landscapes increasing in desirability, as an exotic backdrop for Instagram influencers --
VLOGGER2: I love the fact that these houses are so old and there’s not a single modern structure.
VlOGGER1: In the last episode of my off-beat Himachal series, I trek to the Great Himalayan National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site...
[mux]
Yardain Amron: With examples all over YouTube and travel blogs, and outsider guesthouses dominating the internet marketing game... It’s no surprise that younger locals aren’t satisfied with this arrangement.
Duffy: You know, here was an assumption in the past that if you develop an ecotourism resort, people in rural areas will be only too delighted to act as tour guides, maids, cleaners, waiters, without actually asking them what they wanted out of their life. But perhaps they wanted to be a doctor or a vet or a teacher? And that’s the kind of development that needed to be supported.
Yardain Amron: But, the Indian government is doubling down on the hospitality industry. Over the past five years, the Asian Development Bank has loaned the Himachal Pradesh government 83 million dollars to continue developing tourism across the state.
Along with constructing a bunch of parking lots and ropeways, a key component of the project is prescribed job training… Gendered programs that emphasize different roles for men and women in hospitality and food.
Like Upi, of Gone Fishing cottages said - the tourism industry is creating more jobs for locals. What it doesn’t seem to be doing is actually improving the vast majority of locals’ lives.
[Mux BEAT]
Justine Paradis: Outside/In will be right back, after a break.
-BREAK-
Justine Paradis: Welcome back - this is Outside/In, a show about the natural world and how we use it. I’m Justine Paradis. Today, reporter Yardain Amron has been taking us on a trip through the region surrounding the Great Himalayan National Park in Northern India. Before the break, he was exploring this idea - that tourism has a way of dividing people here into two categories: insiders, or locals who grew up in the area. And outsiders - people who come from other parts of India, or the world, in order to capitalize on the opportunity, or simply to visit the park itself.
It’s an idea that not everybody agrees with.
Here’s Yardain.
Yardain Amron: One thing I came to realize, reporting in the Indian Himalayas, is that Dimple was right about the insiders and outsiders thing—at least in part.
It is a reductive framing—insiders good, outsiders bad—and it doesn’t tell the whole story.
The villagers in the ecozone aren’t a monolith, and neither are the people who have discovered the valley in the past twenty years. But it’s also reductive to do away with the distinction altogether. Outsiders do by and large have more power than insiders.
There’s one story in particular that, to me, really embodies just how complicated and contradictory it is to hold both these ideas in your mind.
And this story is a particular example of an ecotourism outfit: Himalayan Ecotourism
Today, it’s one of the top tour operators in the entire Tirthan Valley.
It was founded by this guy...
Stephan Marchal: My name is Stephan Marchal.
Yardain Amron: He’s originally from Belgium, but he’s what’s called “an overseas citizen of India”
Stephan Marchal: I was born in Belgium, so I'm still Belgian, but I'm a permanent resident of India. I have that status, that gives me the right to undertake—I'm like an Indian except I cannot vote and I cannot apply for a government job. For the rest I'm equal to an Indian.
Yardain Amron: Vibha and I stayed with Stephan and his family at his homestay for a couple days. The house is high up on a ridge, in a little village, that looks down on the Tirthan river. His wife, Hema, is Himachali and together they manage the business and the kids full-time schooling.
But, here’s the thing: Stephan be the founder of Himalayan Ecotourism... but it’s designed as a cooperative.
It’s owned by more than 60 locals: guides, porters and cooks -- who organize treks into the park.
He got the idea around 2011 after hiking around the ecozone trying to understand the politics of the Tirthan Valley.
Stephan Marchal: Understanding what is happening, what the people think about the national park, what the people think about the park administration.
Yardain Amron: This is another long story, but essentially, at the time ecotourism inside the park -- was offered by only one organization, with a name that sounds noble, if stuffy - it was called Biodiversity Tourism Community Advancement.… it’s an NGO but also had offices inside the park administration itself.
And it had a terrible reputation. Locals I talked to had little love for it -- like, that forest guard Narottam Singh -- called them incompetent --
[sound of Narottam]
So when Stephen began talking to locals about starting a cooperative ecotourism company that gave them ownership over their own work, a lot of people were really into it.
But not everybody.
Stephan Marchal: Well, they started talking badly about me using any kind of information. To throw mud in my face. Mudslinging.
Yardain Amron: Let’s go back to this insider/outsider framing: here’s Stephan, an outsider, starting this new company.
Naturally, some of the opposition came from park management -- arguably, outsiders?
But it also came from some more powerful locals, who had a stake in the NGO or saw Stephan’s cooperative as a threat to their own profits from the tourism industry. .
Stephan Marchal: And spreading rumor...: 'Stephan is an outsider. He has nothing to do here.' 'Stephan has come to make money only.' And so on.
Yardain Amron: But Stephan’s collective offered a more equitable relationship for local guides -- also insiders -- and so his collective started peeling away some of BTCA’s employees.
Stephan Marchal: Well, they started talking badly about me using any kind of information. To throw mud in my face. Mudslinging.
It’s now been 10 years since Stephan started the company. And despite this conflict, he and the rest of the owners of Himalayan Ecotourism have managed to build a sizable presence, not just in the Tirthan Valley, but throughout the Indian Himalayas.
They even won a national award for their work… The 2019 Indian Responsible Tourism Award.
[sound: This year the judge’s decided on Himalayan Ecotourism… ]
[mux]
Again, this might sound like a success story: a more cooperative, equitable relationship - rooted in local knowledge of the place -- something that feels different that a straight-up service job. And... maybe it is?
But the model still exists within a much larger competitive industry that doesn’t take kindly to the kind of sharing and collaboration Himalayan Ecotourism claims to be striving towards. In a way, the cooperative model—with its sustainable, equitable characteristics—becomes another objectified selling point. And more broadly, like other tour operator, it still depends on flying in tourists seeking authentic ecotourist experiences.
Which raises the question: Is it possible to build a profitable tourism industry that brings in the masses, — and still call it conservation?
Again, the answer depends on whom you ask.
Upendra Kamra : So I will give you my take on ecotourism. Ecotourism according to me would be just the basics.
Yardain Amron: That’s Upendra, or Upi, again -- Dimple's husband, and the other owner of Gone Fishing Cottages in Deori.
Upendra Dimple: You're using minimal energy, You would be using no plastic. You would not be storing meat, frozen foods. So things like that.
Yardain Amron: To Upendra, practicing true ecotourism requires operators to really think carefully about what they’re doing -- especially the “eco” part of “ecotourism.”
After all, the hospitality industry is energy intensive - constant washing of sheets and bedding, single-serving plastics and toiletries… it adds up.
Whether or not consumers really want to have this kind of experience is an open question - but even so, Upi’s husband and business partner Dimple even says they’re trying to go “zero waste”.
Dimple Kamra: So we're also changing all our toiletries, getting all eco-friendly stuff. Trying not to use plastic at all. But in 5-6 months, I think we'll confidently be able to say, yes we are doing ecotourism.
Yardain Amron: That is of course part of the whole brand appeal of a place like this, perched over a mountain stream and tucked under the shadow of the Himalayan mountains.
In the ‘about page’ from Gone Fishin’s website, they say: e: “We welcome you to our world – a world of living in tune with nature,” end-quote.
But the focus on individual responsibility and the environmental impact of guesthouses within the Tirthan Valley itself -- isn’t the whole picture.
Arguably, the biggest environmental impacts -- comes from transportation. Travel emissions.
[music begin]
Things like people flying or driving long ways to get to the place itself.
A recent study out of the Nature Climate Change journal found that tourism’s global carbon footprint accounts for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emission -- four times the last estimate.
By 2050, aviation could take up a quarter of the world’s “carbon budget,” or the amount of CO2 emissions permitted to keep global temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees Celsius
Yardain Amron: the key to the leisure activities, right, the whole thing that most people are looking for is a certain escape.
Rob Fletcher is an anthropologist that studies sustainable development at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Robert Fletcher: And so people want to feel that their leisure activities aren’t harming other people, and will be beneficial. But they don't want to necessarily spend a lot of time investigating whether those claims are actually true. Right? Because it diminishes from the experience itself.
Yardain Amron: If climate change has taught us anything, it’s that carbon emissions can’t be contained.
Rob Fletcher: I think the long and the short of it is that model of travel, that model of experience, is just not really compatible with a sustainable world.
[music beat]
What Rob seems to be saying, is that the only eco-friendly tourism is local tourism.
Which would make sense, except whether it’s ecodevelopment or ecotourism -- the Great Himalayan National Park rely on the same thing: locals getting kicked out of the park, and tourists traveling to the valley.
Stephan Marchal: What I will say will sound very weird from someone who is a founder of an ecotourism company. But tourism spoils. It spoils.
Yardain Amron: Again, here’s Stephan Marchal - the founder of the Himalayan Ecotourism cooperative.
Stephan Marchal: It will destroy the beauty. It will generate pollution. And your initial purpose if it was conservation, will be completley missed - I think.
Yardain Amron: In his view, tourism by definition works by creating a place and a people into a hyper-competitive relationship with each other. It degrades community and the environment.
Stephan Marchal: And if you have not planned it from the beginning, it will go plah-plah-plah-plah. It will be uncontrolled. If you want to share a huge money made by tourism, you need to bring a lot of people. A lot of people. A lot. And this is not the kind of place you can bring a lot of people. Otherwise, if you do, you spoil it, and it's finished. Story's finished.
[mux]
Yardain Amron: Like I said earlier, me and my friend Vibha stayed with Stephan’s house for a couple days, when I was reporting on the Tirthan Valley. It’s one of the ironies here - you can’t really report on the place, without also patronizing the very people you’re there to report on.
It was a beautiful couple days of bird watching and pakhora eating and playing with his kids.
When we left Stephan’s, the road down the mountain was still iced over from a huge snowstorm. I was nervous with the motorcycle, and a couple locals guys generously offered to take the bike down the mountain for us. Vibha and I walked behind them—throwing snowballs and slipping on our butts.
At one point we passed some men, bundled up and huddled on the side of the road.
We started chit-chatting, well mostly Vibha did. And in less than a minute, one man asked if we were looking to buy land.
He’d sized us up—obvious outsiders: a white guy, a non-local brown girl. They’d seen that combo before. But Vibha quickly assured him we weren’t on the hunt for real estate.
But I still wonder why he asked. Whether he was looking to sell. Or to tell us to take our money elsewhere.