Building. Back. Better.
Hmmm ... sounds vaguely familiar?
One of the benefits of having a porous memory, courtesy of introspection, indifference and quite possibly certain excesses of the 1960s and ‘70s, is the frequent inability to pull pertinent facts out of my random access memory. Infuriatingly, I seem to be able to remember rivers of trivia the value of which diminishes as I age and the cultural references I toss out are received with numb silence. While I remember a rich treasure of detail from, say, The Firesign Theater and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, I dare not mention either unless I’m writing something for the CARP journal ... which I don’t ... ever.
But Building Back Better, B3 should it become necessary to reference it again, sounded so, so, borrowed? Plagiarized? Lifted? For a minute, I thought maybe Smokin’ Joe or Kamala might be coming to town. Virtually, of course.
Instead, it was a presentation, panel discussion, Q&A hosted by the Whistler Institute last week as part of its Global Perspective Speaker Series. While I would generally be engaged in something more manual and less enlightening at noon on Friday, I tuned in to hear what the panel had to say about post-pandemic tourism in Tiny Town.
It was, in a word, frightening.
Billed as a vital discussion about the future of tourism, the promotion hinted at a wide-ranging discussion covering:
• Adjusting our tourism practices to protect and manage the vital ecosystems, cultural wonders, and community life that attracted residents and visitors to our destinations in the first place;
• Uncovering and accounting for tourism’s hidden costs to ensure we build environmental and social resilience, while simultaneously achieving economic recovery;
• Understanding how travel can be truly transformative when we uphold what we value, mitigate our impacts, and recognize a prosperity in sync with place, community and environment.
Don’t expect me to explain any of those points; I’m still trying to figure out what they mean.
With Happy Jack as moderator—at least when his microphone was working and hadn’t been hacked by ransomwear miscreants—our own Barrett Fisher spoke first and gave a brief synopsis of Tourism Whistler’s (TW) rebranding launched before the good ship Tourism went aground in pandemic seas. I won’t go into detail except to say this was the laser focus TW wants to implement to go after the Right Kind of tourists, those who will stick around longer than it takes to lick an ice cream cone and who share at least one of our community values.
I’ve written glowingly, if uncharacteristically, about that effort and hope to see it brought to fruition when we are once again open for tourism.
But I question just how far we—and by we I mean the Resort Municipality of Whistler, TW, the Chamber of Commerce and the business community—are willing to go to attract the Right Kind of tourists and the corollary, repel the Wrong Kind. I suspect much effort will go into the former and basic Canadian timidity will preclude doing much about the latter.
If we want curious, longer-stay tourists, should we still embrace, OK, tolerate, the day-trippers? Herein lies the conundrum. What, other than bulk, is the value of the busloads of day-trippers? You know the ones, they come on big buses, the buses park in lot 4 for the duration of their stay, they all shuffle back on the buses and go back to the Lower Mainland at the appointed hour.
I’m not talking about the shuttles run by, for example, Whistler Connection or Epic (trademark infringement) Rides. Well, maybe the latter. I mean the folks who wander the village aimlessly, maybe ride the Peak 2 Peak gondola, but generally view Whistler like an ersatz shopping mall. Their saving grace is they’re coming on buses instead of all driving private cars. But are they, in fact, the Right Kind of tourists? Just askin’.
After Jack’s vocal interuptus, Megan Epler Wood took control and gave a thoughtful talk on sustainable tourism. So far, so good.
But Rodney Payne, speaking about those hidden costs of tourism, spun out a future for tourism with, possibly, no place for a place like this place. The specific hidden costs that may spell the death knell for Whistler centre on our cumulative carbon footprint. No, not the one the RMOW keeps harping on, the one to which we contribute every time we get in our private auto instead of taking the bus, but the whole carbon enchilada.
Referencing Seville, Spain, Mr. Payne spoke of that tourist town’s efforts to measure and mitigate the totality of its carbon Sasquatch—the carbon cost of visitors coming, holidaying and leaving town plus the internal generation of CO2 generated by the townsfolk. In the über woke future, the desirability of a destination may, it is posited, hinge on how lightly it treads on the atmosphere.
We have seen the enemy and it is us.
I fear if Whistler were to accurately measure our total carbon footprint and if it were to become a significant component of a go/no-go decision, we would become the regional ski hill we were when Blackcomb was still a mountain full of trees and people living here had to go somewhere else for the necessaries of life.
The population Whistler has to draw on in a decarbonized future is tiny. Arguably the Lower Mainland, albeit only with significantly enhanced mass transit or a wholesale uptake in electric vehicles. The rest of Canada is out, compliments of being about as far west as we can be and still have dry feet.
The U.S.? Well, it’s not like they’re going to care one way or another once the border’s open again.
International? As Mr. Payne pointed out, none of us will live long enough to experience electric airplanes much bigger than Cessnas and it’s unlikely atmospheric carbon capture technology will be developed to a scale capable of keeping up with what’s being added, let alone what’s already bouncing around our thin, breathable layer. Particularly so if the projections for post-pandemic travel pan out.
In that sense, there simply is no building back better. We’ll have to be content with muddling through, hoping for the best, whistling past the graveyard and making tiny, incremental steps to maintaining, hopefully reducing, our collective carbon footprint.
At least until the snow disappears.
