Word: tourism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cobblestoned streets of Bath, where angry Britons turned hoses on tour buses grinding through their neighborhoods last summer, to the sinking shores of Venice, where visitors on a summer Sunday often number 100,000, overcrowding, pollution and plain incivility have become unwelcome guests. Europeans in particular are realizing that tourism has got out of hand. This year alone more than 400 million people around the globe will travel abroad. By the year 2000, the number will be 650 million. And those figures do not include the millions who go sight-seeing in their own countries...
...times past, putting up with litter, noxious fumes and bad manners seemed an acceptable price to pay for the revenue tourism brought in and the jobs it created. A big business it is too. In Britain the tourist industry contributed $39 billion to the economy last year. Italy took in $21 billion. France, the world's second most favored destination after the U.S., collected $17.7 billion from tourism, more than it earned from agriculture or arms. For poorer countries like Greece, tourism is the main source of foreign exchange, so a drop in the number of visitors, which is feared...
...increasingly, ordinary citizens as well as public officials and cultural guardians are beginning to believe that the costs may outweigh the benefits. Jobs generated by tourism in hotels, restaurants and parks, while in demand among local people, are usually at the low end of the pay scale. The biggest beneficiaries of tourist spending are developers and owners, who often take their profits out of town and, if they are foreigners, out of the country as well. Even the tourist industry is starting to recognize that threatened treasures must be protected or business will not survive. As London's Daily Telegraph...
...much the same elsewhere in Europe. Alpine forests in Austria and Switzerland have been denuded to make way for ski runs and cable cars. For the Conservatoire du Littoral, the French agency charged with preserving the Mediterranean coastline, the grossly overdeveloped French Riviera is the sorriest example of tourism gone awry. Not only has the coastline been ravaged by urbanization and the sea severely polluted, but tourism was down 30% last year from 1989. Pollution and overcrowding also figured in a similar drop in tourist revenues in Spain...
...worth preserving as much as Stonehenge -- and that is community life," says Amy Hall, a resident. "If we lived in the South American jungle, you'd be saying, 'Save the natives.' We're the natives here." The Rev. Robert Runcie, retired Archbishop of Canterbury, goes even further, charging that tourism "creates pollution, prostitution, economic exploitation and disregard for indigenous life-styles...