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TRANSCRIPT
Dieckman: When Katrina Kuh went to the Everglades with her family in 2018, she was dead set on making sure her kids got to see Florida’s reefs. For most of the trip, the surf was too high to go out.
Kuh: And the last day we were there, even though the surf was still pretty high and my daughter gets wildly motion sick, we got a green light to go. And we made her go out for this rocking and it’s rolling.
Dieckman: Sure enough, her daughter ended up vomiting over the side of the boat. It worked out for the best. Kuh and her kids got to snorkel the reef.
Kuh: But why did I feel compelled to push so hard for her to have that experience? And I’m sure it’s partly I wanted her to have that experience. But partly it’s an awful feeling thinking that humanity is losing that experience.
Dieckman: Coral reefs around the world are facing threats such as record-breaking temperatures and ocean acidification. These stressors can cause coral to bleach and the ecosystems around them to die off.
Kuh: Something like snorkeling a reef is…you can’t, you can’t, experience it in a 3D theater. You can’t explain it to someone. There are some things that are just lost. They’re really lost. They cannot be replicated. And I do think something like snorkeling a reef is one of them.
Dieckman: Kuh is an environmental law professor at Pace University in New York. Sometime after that trip to the Everglades, she and Robin Kundis Craig, a law professor at the University of Kansas, were chatting about how they were both planning future vacations around which places are most threatened by climate change. When they looked around, it seemed to them that they weren’t the only ones doing this.
From 2008 to 2015, Glacier National Park in Montana had about 2 million visitors a year. Every year since, except 2020, it’s been about 3 million. People in countries from Iceland to Mexico have organized and attended glacier funerals to mourn the loss of glaciers. Scientists have even studied the specific phenomenon of Reef Grief, or the way people are psychologically affected by the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef.
Kuh and Kundis Craig took a legal lens to the topics of climate anxiety and ecological grief, along with the age-old concept of “last-chance tourism,” and coined a new term: eco-necrotourism. Here’s Kundis Craig:
Robin Kundis Craig: So we came up with eco-necrotourism to describe going to a place to grieve the fact that the ecosystem was being lost. Climate change adaptation is usually treated as a physical phenomenon, and what we realized—particularly when we started reading about glacier funerals—is that there’s a psychological component to this. And nobody’s really planning for that psychology, the actual grief, the influx of tourists to some places, the abandonment of other places by tourists.
Dieckman: In a paper outlining their analysis, Kuh and Kundis Craig laid out some suggestions for factors public land managers to consider when planning for a future with more eco-necrotourism.
They suggested considering visitor psychology when planning for park adaptations, reconceptualizing how parks might be used and accessed, and making culturally appropriate decisions about equity of access for current and future generations.
But Kuh and Kundis Craig emphasized that their paper is not suggesting a one-size-fits-all course of action for all public lands or parks, which can have widely varying needs.
For example, Glacier National Park is already being inundated with visitors, but their presence isn’t necessarily going to cause glaciers to melt faster. On the other hand, clumsy tourists visiting the Great Barrier Reef could stress reefs that are already struggling to adjust to climate change.
Another thing for park managers to consider? “The last visitor problem.” If not everyone gets to visit these places, who does, and how?
Kundis Craig: So getting creative about access. Do you privilege the scientists who need to figure out what’s happening, and what they learn on the Great Barrier Reef might help in, say, the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, where the coral reefs are likely to last a decade or so longer? Do you privilege the aboriginal Australians who had a whole culture around this reef that they’ve been largely excluded from? Do you privilege children? Do you privilege families? I mean, so, these are all decisions that some nature parks are going to have to think about. And we can’t prescribe an answer to that, because the cultural situation and the history and the priorities legally are going to be so different.
Dieckman: Jim Newland, acting chief of the strategic planning and recreation services division for the California State Parks Department, said the erosion of public lands is certainly something that park personnel are considering. For example, many Southern California beaches, which get millions of visitors per year, have lost 70%–80% of their width in the past couple of decades. Though he’s not yet seeing, say, organized eco-necrotourism groups coming to see the California beaches, he said he found the study interesting and relevant.
Newland: ButI think it’s something we want to keep an eye on to see if we start to see some intensive use. I mean, I know the National Park Service has been dealing with that a little more, in places like Yosemite where they’re trying to figure out, well, how many people is too many people, right? That you’re actually degrading the resource? People are loving it to death, as we like to say sometimes in parks.
Dieckman: As Newland put it, the three-legged stool of the State Parks’ mission is to preserve natural and cultural resources and to provide recreation. Sometimes, those missions conflict with one another. Here’s Kuh again:
Kuh: If you’re operating pursuant to a mandate to manage a resource for future generations, and it’s a resource that is changing in ways that means it won’t be the same as it was, how does that change your decisions about what are the number of people we allow in today? Might that speed the demise of this place? Is the answer to photo document or video document, or is the answer to really restrict visitation to try to extend out the viability of it for as long as possible? I think those types of decisions are different and unique in this context.
Dieckman: Kundis Craig added that another concern is shifting baseline syndrome, or the gradual change in the way people perceive an environment’s conditions as “normal.”
Kundis Craig: This generation’s going to experience loss, but next generation, you know, maybe they never knew it in the current condition. And so, that’s part of why we both thought it was important to document, is because I want the loss remembered. I want people to realize we are experiencing climate change. It’s real, and we can slow it down or halt it at some point in the future. This is the real deal.
Dieckman: Kuh and Kundis Craig published their recommendations in Florida State University Law Review. Thank you to Katrina Kuh, Robin Kundis Craig, and Jim Newland for speaking with me.
The music you are hearing is a requiem for Iceland’s Okjökull, or Ok Glacier in Icelandic, composed by Roger Zare. Okjökull was declared dead in 2014, when it shrank and thinned so much it was no longer able to move. Mourners gathered at the site for its funeral in 2019. To listen to the piece in full, visit rogerzare.com.
I’m Emily Dieckman with Eos.org, your source for Earth and space science news.
—Emily Dieckman (@emfurd), Associate Editor