Subject: Viridian Note 00067: Eco-Disaster Tourism Key concepts: tourism, ecological disaster Attention Conservation Notice: It's quite long, very speculative, rather morbid. Grimly accurate news clips can provoke feelings of despair. Links: The Viridian Library . http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/viridian/ Another green library doing something similar, but with different sets of books: http:www.geonetwork.org/bookstore/ Entries in the Viridian Power Banner Contest: http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~rmharman/img/viridian/warn.fo ssil.gif http://www.subterrane.com http://www.netaxs.com/~morgana (note dino animation at bottom of page) http://www.phuq.com/viridian http://www.freeyellow.com/members6/vandewater/banner.gif http://humlog.homestead.com/viridianart/index.html http://www.powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike/banner.html http://www.stewarts.org/users/stewarts/sunservr.html http://www.dux.ru/digbody/viridian/vir.htm http://members.aol.com/stjude/viridian http://www.id.iit.edu/~chad/viridian/viridian_banner.htm http://www.dnai.com/~catnhat/viridianbanners.htm This contest expires May 31, 01999 From: Alan Wexelblat (wex@media.mit.edu^^^^^^^^^^***?) From a front-page article in the Boston Globe, May 12, 01999: "Cape Breton town seeks role as toxic waste learning site "Sydney, Nova Scotia: The most polluted place in Canada is chasing a dream that most communities would call a nightmare: transforming itself into a sort of living laboratory of toxic waste. "The municipality on northern Cape Breton Island is seeking to power an economic revival with the very poisons that permeate its earth and waterways == and that have defeated every other renewal and cleanup scheme. (...) "There is even talk of promoting Sydney as a center for 'reverse eco-tourism,' where visitors can ponder the terrible contamination and ruin that accompanied the triumphs of the industrial age." (((Alan Wexelblat remarks: I note that no mention is made of the terrible contamination and ruin that accompany the *present* age. Basically, Sydney in Nova Scotia is an old coal/steel town gone severely to rust. I expect to see more stories like this as 1999 rolls along. (((Meanwhile, on page 2 of the Boston Globe, there's a picture of Hondurans rebuilding from the storm damage. They have a line of manual laborers flinging rocks up to the top of a wall, where others catch the rocks and stack them. One is reminded of ancient Egypt and pyramid construction.))) (((Bruce Sterling remarks: there did seem to be quite a spate of disaster eco-tourism in Honduras after their historically unprecedented hurricane. Certainly the storm-chasing contingent here in the Texas-Oklahoma "Tornado Alley" has been visibly growing for years, very much aided by digital storm forecasting, sport utility trucks, and cheap cellphones. The tornado chasers are very active this season. (((Is there a general trend here? To our innocent, vanishing Belle Epoque era, chasing horrific climatic and industrial catastrophes seems graceless and declasse': 'a cheap holiday in other people's misery.' But a generation that grows up in a world with routine climate catastrophe is likely to have a very different attitude. (((Just suppose, for instance, that the Australian Great Barrier Reef succumbs wholesale to increasing ocean heat, as many other reefs are said to be doing now. We might further surmise (as some scientists do) that the limestone in the Great Barrier Reef may be eaten away by increasing carbon-dioxide dissolved in the ocean, rather like a giant Alka-Seltzer tablet. It's hard to imagine all these Aussie "experience retailers" simply shutting up shop and absorbing the loss to their vital commerce. The tourist economy has been growing for years as a percentage of global GNP, and there seems to be no particular reason it should stop. Are we supposed to spend our whole lives indoors mourning the outdoors? How long can that regime last? People bore easily. (((Let's further consider this recent suggestive news from Reuters:))) "Swiss Face Floods As Rhine Reaches Record Level "Reuters Wednesday, May 12, 1999 "Zurich: Heavy rains in Switzerland have raised Rhine waters near Basle to their highest level in 100 years, closing the river to shipping and bringing fears of the worst floods for centuries, authorities said Friday. "In Berne, a spokesman for the Swiss Interior Ministry called the situation 'tense.' "He added that experts expect the water flow volume at Rheinfelden east of Basle to reach 4,550 cubic meters per second by late evening. "'It would be the highest level seen in the past century,' the spokesman said. "This would surpass the previous high of 4,270 cubic meters per second measured on May 18 and 19, 1994. "A spokesman for the civil emergencies center in Basle, a city bisected by the Rhine, said the river was within two feet of overflowing its banks. "It was expected to overflow within days. The city was putting sacks of sand along the banks to stop the flows. "Swiss radio said Wednesday, quoting one expert, that the current situation could develop into the worst flooding Switzerland has seen in several centuries. "Besides a wet spring, in February the country had to cope with snowfall that was the heaviest in decades. This snowmelt was adding to the already high water levels." (((bruces remarks: This situation has the sooty thumbprints of the Greenhouse Effect all over it. Any time you see that spectacular, astonished litany: "the worst in a hundred years; the worst in decades; the worst in several centuries" and the previous worst record was also set in the 1990s, well, that's it: the culprit is confessing. No further evidence should be necessary unless you're in the carbon-mining industry. (((My point here is that this situation should have been dead obvious to the Swiss tourist industry since last February, when "historically unprecedented" snows in the mountains were burying and freezing their skiing-trade, wholesale. The Swiss tourist trade has a peculiar choice here: to kill people while trying to show them a good time, or to entertain them with "reverse eco-tourism" by showing them a serious, spectacular, amazing bad time. ((You might argue that people should, by their very nature, get the hell out of the way of giant floods == but a major loss of tourist revenue for 1999 will probably harm Switzerland even worse than the floods will. And that's the *Rhine* flooding == the Rhine is a major European tourist asset, it flows through Basle, Strasbourg, Bonn, Cologne, Dusseldorf and Rotterdam. Water runs downhill, people. Think ahead a little. (((In a final stretch of the Viridian imagination, consider this:))) From RFE/RL list in Prague: "UN ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAM TO INVESTIGATE AIR-STRIKE DAMAGE. United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said in Nairobi on 12 May that he is setting up a working group to look into the possible damage to the environment in Yugoslavia caused by NATO air strikes. The working group will also be charged with compiling reliable data on the damage to the infrastructure and residential areas. The experts will focus on possible water and air contamination as well as on the release of poisonous substances." (((bruces continues: This is "reverse eco-tourism" at its starkest. There is a fascinating military experiment going on in Serbia right now. Serbia is becoming the Greenest country in Europe, probably the greenest country on Earth. Week by week, and bomb by bomb, Serbia is being transformed into a Ted Kaczynski Utopia. The entire industrial infrastructure in Serbia, *especially and deliberating including all forms of industrial carbon- dioxide emission,* is being blown up. Generators are shorted out, oil refineries smashed, the bridges for car traffic demolished. Furthermore, when this undeclared war becomes an undeclared peace, it's going to be very difficult to restore any of this infrastructure without major outside investment. (((One might hope that the Serbs would derive a valuable security lesson about the nature of the modern military, abandon centralized grids forever, kick the humiliating, dangerous oil-importing habit, and go for distributed, un-blastable swarms of sustainable solar and windmills. Knowing Serbia, however, it's far more likely that they will try to make a major industry of exhibiting their NATO wounds to interested third parties. For cash. As, yes, a spectacular attraction.))) O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O CARBON-POWERED NETWORKS RUIN THE CLIMATE O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O