REGENERATIVE TOURISM: THE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS
“April is the cruellest month” - so wrote T.S.Eliot at the start of ‘The Waste Land’, regarded as one of the most important poems in the English language (Collected Poems 1909 - 1962, Faber). How true today.
It was Eliot who, in ‘Towards a definition of Culture’ (1922, Faber) gave us a a useful insight about that tourism should be about: “A diversification for the provision of the incentive and material for the Odyssey of the human spirit. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration.”
The Odyssey of the human spirit is at the core of the thinking of Anna Pollock (www.conscious.travel) on the subject of regenerative tourism. In an article of October 2019 (Regenerative Tourism: The Natural Maturation of Sustainability) Pollock presents us with the situation that has unfolded over the past four months and recognising that tourism as had been practised was unsustainable. She was unambiguous stating that: “In times of such rapid and radical change on every front, tourism is proving far more vulnerable than many want to admit” - a sentiment acknowledged by many voices at the Hospitality Tomorrow virtual global conference held on Tuesday 7th April (organised by Bench Events). Pollock predicted ‘increasingly wicked (and existential) challenges’ for all of us and called for a growing number thinkers both inside and outside of tourism to find alternative ways of framing and delivering tourism for the net benefit to all and setting out to redefine what the economy really means and how can tourism play a key role in shifting society to a healthier relationship with the environment and with ourselves.
Her model of the Journey of Exploration illustrates “the shift from self-centred extraction of value for the benefit of few to the community and life enhancing, service-orientated associated with regeneration that involves ever higher levels of care and interdependence.”
Anna Pollock’s advocacy for regenerative tourism is exceptionally strong, well-considered and very well-written. Her words are worth repeating and I hope she doesn’t mind me quoting her at length. She reminds us that regeneration is about creating the fertile conditions for life to thrive and that there is an inspirational dimension to recovery with the verb ‘to inspire’ being all about breathing new life into the way forward - How apposite!!
She concludes her thinking with a set of rules for us to follow. These are very relevant to the discussions about the future recovery of travel and tourism. the seven pathways she maps out are:
1.learning to see the planet, our relationship with it and with each other through fresh eyes;
2. Exploring what it means to be fully human (mind, body and soul) to whatever tasks we do;
3. Learning and practising the alchemical art of communing;
4. Defining growth and success differently;
5. A regenerative approach to tourism starts at home within ourselves, then our workplaces and our communities;
6. By its holistic nature, regenerative tourism is the antidote to fragmentation;
7. Regenerative tourism depends on caring hosts willing to ensure their destination is healthy and full of life.
I am most grateful to the sustainablity activist and adventure tourism entrepreneur Andy Middleton (based in St Davids in west Wales) for introducing me to the work of Anna Pollock and also to the work of Michelle Holiday (www.michelleholiday.com)
On a very personal note and relating back to T.S.Eliot my father was the village carpenter - and hence by default the local undertaker - in East Coker (Somerset) and was invited by the Eliot family to prepare the casket and manage the interment of the poets ashes in the village church of St. Michael’s and All Angels in 1965. Eliot’s forefathers had come from the village which bears the title of one of his Four Quartets.
