Have you ever asked yourself how your grandparents spent their holidays and weekends when they were younger? I’ve asked mine. One of my grandfathers told me how he used to build treehouses and play by the river. Incredible memories only 10 kilometres from his house. My maternal grandfather told me he went from Paris to Nice on a bike at the age of 15. I was happy to know that, I thought I was the only one in the family to do these things on a bike. Of all things, we have converged on one essential concept: adventure. The unexpected, not knowing what will happen and liking it anyway. The numerous problems but always finding a solution. And sleeping under the stars, sitting and eating on the ground, pedalling for hours under the rain, gritting one’s teeth for it to stop. And above all, the encounters. You know, those people who are always there to help you fix your bike, to show you the way or to let you sleep at their place. Above all, I noted that this autonomy, this “doing your own thing”, it’s not really encouraged in our society. Not encouraged, but extremely valued. Marco Polo, Tintin, Sylvain Tesson, Mike Horn. Do you imagine them with their noses glued to their itinerary recommended by 10,000 internet users? Or perhaps leaving three stars on their Airbnb treehouse? Because, joking aside, the wood burner wasn’t great. Do they really make us dream so much? I had a trigger when I spoke about that to a friend who works in a start-up in a sort-of travel agency, and he said to me, “But Amélie, people don’t have time to organise. Besides, they don’t know how to do it.” What do you mean “we don’t have time?” We have five weeks of paid holiday, we’ve never had so much. We’re one of the best-off countries. What do you mean “we don’t know how to organise”? My grandparents, perhaps, but us - we have all the information available in one click. Infrastructure to get around, to stay somewhere, a plethora of tourist offers. We wait, and even so much so that we have created an economy of recommendations. These are all those actors who help us get sorted and who tell us exactly where to sleep, which route to take, where to take one’s beautiful photo. They are the travel guides, the press, the media, influencers, bloggers, travel agencies, communication agencies. With that, we still don’t know how to manage. Weird. This logic highlighted by my friend is that of the tourism industry. It has led us to reduce our autonomy, our great humanist values of gratitude, spontaneity and much more. And all that in just one century. For us to realise this, I prepared a quick inventory that I called “120 Years of Tourism: from nothing to too much”. Let’s take a timeline from 1900 to the present day and some landmarks to navigate. 1936: the first paid holidays, two weeks to kick back - immense social progress. 1950, forty years later: the opening of the first Club Med. Let’s have a look at four major elements in the history of tourism. The first element: The first tourist expedition to Antarctica. It’s 1958. What is it today? 4,000 visitors in the 90s, 10,000 in 2006 and 56,000 before the Covid crisis. 56,000 visitors come each year to gather on a small parcel of pack ice rich in biodiversity, therefore extremely fragile, during the four least cold months of the year. But rest assured, we have taken measures to avoid the crowd affect, we have limited the boats to 500 pasengers. We are saved. It seems that since the 2000s the “penguin selfie” has become a universal dream. Suddenly, we are experiencing exponential growth with visitor numbers doubling every 15 years. We are expecting 100,000 visitors in the 2030s. The second element: The birth of “Routard’s Guide”. It’s interesting because it’s the start of the era of recommendations. It’s 1973. Philippe Gloaguen, having returned from a journey across the world, had the very interesting idea of writing a destination guide for the young and broke, travelling like him. It’s the success we know, selling 2.5 million copies a year these days. It’s enormous. But above all, since then, recommendations have switched sides. Today, Instagram is the first source of inspiration and choice in terms of travel, especially for those under 35. Why not? But each year, millions of travellers cross the world to re-take the exact photo that they saw on Instagram. Photos that are taken in magnificent places which are now experiencing overtourism. The problem, as it happens, is that it’s global. So much so, that from New Zealand to Wyoming in the United States, institutional campaigns are growing in number, trying to discourage - to mock, sometimes - these mimicking behaviours. In France, in 2019, the WWF even created a campaign asking instagrammers to stop tagging photos taken in natural places in order to avoid the crowd effect. The third element: The birth of commercial air travel. Symbolically, in 1914, for the first time, a passenger bought a ticket to make a 30-minute trip, in that case, in Florida. However it took many years for low-cost travel to appear, and with the fall of prices in the 90s usage takes off, or goes crazy - it depends. Today we see 4.4 billion passengers each year. It’s difficult to know if we are in overflow. 4.4 billion, it doesn’t sound like too much to us. Unless we add that 90% of humanity has never been on a plane. It’s therefore 10% who travel a great deal and then the developing countries who want to do the same as us. It’s like we’re in Antarctica with the exponential growth. We envisage 8 billion passengers by 2030. The final element: The birth of Airbnb. This one is a lot more recent - 2008. Two Americans have the idea to sub-let their shared flat in San Francisco and pocket 1,000 euros in three days. The concept is great. In a few years it shows up in Europe. What about overflow? Barcelona. Anti-tourist strikes grow in number. Because of a deterioration in quality of life. Touristification, rent increase, and the inability for inhabitants to find housing. Because the locations are reserved for travellers. From this brief inventory, we can establish two findings. The first is that tourism, even when it gives birth to a good idea, when it happens on a large scale, it has devastating environmental and social effects. The second finding is that overflow, since the 2000s, is coming extremely quickly. Usage is spreading extremely quickly because globalisation and social networking have given birth to universal dreams for everyone, and quickly. I have a fifth element - there is more. It’s the development of the micro adventure. The micro adventure is about going on an adventure around your home. No need to go to the Himalayas. For a few days, we take a bike, our hiking shoes, a regional train, we find ourselves in nature, whether a city dweller, seasoned or not, we all live the adventure near our home all year round. Great. It’s sort of the solution that tourism wasn’t expecting anymore. Sober-minded, sustainable, local - great. We suddenly understand that the press seized it quickly and the touristic strategies. It was in 2017. There were entrepreneurs, start-uppers, applications, booking platforms - you can see where I’m going. In four years, could we already be overflowing? I will let you see. Actually, in France, our natural areas have suffered to extremes in the last two years, because we are all staying in France wanting to reconnect with nature. There was overcrowding but there was also incivility which disturbed the fauna and flora. Because we don’t really have codes anymore. A hundred years of the tourism industry and of a consumerist society has profoundly changed our relationship with nature. If I’m here tonight it’s because we’re at a tipping point. Perhaps you don’t know it, but parks have taken restrictive measures which are necessary. We are going to lose our freedom, the complete freeness that we have in France which is almost an anomaly worldwide. Have you tried to bivouac in Belgium? It’s forbidden. Or go for a multi-day hike in New Zealand? You need to reserve months in advance and pay for all accommodation. Spending your weekend in a national park in the United States? You’ll need to pay for entrance. Or even just go for a simple hike on a marked trail in Argentina or in another country? It doesn’t exist. It’s all about private property. We have an incredible opportunity in France, without fully realising it. Because this freedom, in order to keep it, one must instill conscience, knowledge and humility. It’s not really the choice of the society that we’ve made. So, faced with this report, the tourism sector proposes some options. These are the same in France and in four corners of the world. The first is the restrictive measures, limiting access. It is, for example, placing quotas as on the islands of Porquerolles and Var. Putting in place a reservation system like for the Calanques National Park starting from next spring. Or forbidding - we no longer have the right to bivouac in Chartreuse, or in Mercantour National Park, for example, since this summer. These measures are necessary in the short term but are they really solutions for the future? Is the solution to forbid everything and to reduce? Who would want to live in that world? The second solution is flow management through marketing and promotion. Ten years ago, actors of the recommendation suggested the 10 sites not to be missed. Ten sites which are experiencing overtourism today and that’s problematic. As a result, we innovate and we offer the five hikes - or better - the five nature spots where no one goes. (Laughter) Is this really a solution? Or are we just shifting a little bit the problem? There are other solutions, but what they have in common is searching to reduce the negative effects without ever working on the causes. That’s called mitigation strategies, mitigating the negative effects. You know, there is plenty of that in our society, for example carbon offsetting. When we offer to pay more for a plane ticket to replant trees. The most efficient is just to emit less. Or plastic sorting - we say to ourselves, “I’m doing a good thing.” Except in France we only recycle 30% of plastic. The only way to avoid plastic pollution is just to produce and consume less of it. Yet, there is another approach, which is simple to adapt, to review our modes of thinking in depth, our ways of life, our way of producing and consuming. That’s called the coping strategy. For me, it’s my favourite part because it’s the most exciting. We have to reinvent everything in our world. Above all, it gives pride of place to other actors. Those we kindly call the idealist, the rebels, the creatives, those who have slightly radical ideas, those who dare to question an economic system which profits all. And there, I have to admit something to you. I myself am part of the handful of entrepreneurs who democratised the mini-adventure in France in 2017. And when I saw that it was taking such enthusiasm so quickly, I decided to step aside and I opened a school for adults in the form of an association. It gives pride of place to autonomy, to on-the-job learning, to developing critical thinking - a bit like what we’re doing tonight. It really is a very small initiative. Nothing to make one entrepreneur of the year. Nor to resell my five-year-old business. I wanted to show that we can still act, undertake differently, if we want to put public interest and public good really at the centre of everything. Coping strategy. And what if, based on the observation we have just made, we take a big turn? What if we replace consumerism with education? Imagine if ecology was taught in schools and colleges in 2030, with a part about travel. How to travel in moderation? And how to do other things instead of travelling in our free time? Imagine if two French regions were closed for tourism each year to let nature regenerate and if we request inhabitants to help take care of it, to regenerate it, to learn how to be with nature. Imagine adventure houses in every city, free to access, looking at maps with iced tea and a facilitator. Documentary evenings, debates. It would take years to change mindsets, but wouldn’t it be worth starting now? I imagine that you’re saying to yourselves that these are nice dreams that are based on public and political strength. Certainly, but what can we do, us, today, on our scale, in a concrete manner? I have three courses of action to offer you. The first is to cultivate our imagination instead of the inspiration that we find online. To work our desires, our curiosity, that is the best of solutions to have other dreams and other holidays from everyone else. The second course of action is to revisit the local, to avoid intermediaries, to avoid little local guides and to ask inhabitants. They will give you the best advice, that you will never find on the Internet. The third course: get initiated. We have thousands of associations here, federations, alpine clubs which predate the tourism industry. With volunteers who mark out, who maintain the trails, who pass on their know-how and their knowledge. In fact, the solutions are already there. It’s just about changing the scale to avoid reproducing a consolidation of today’s problem, by another consolidation that we call moderate, sustainable, green, that we want. We really are at tipping point, we have to win back our relationship with nature and our free time. We must restore meaning and values in the way we spend our holidays, our weekends. Make other dreams come true for the younger generation rather than posting landscapes on Instagram. There are still things in the world that can’t be bought. And adventure is one of them. We learn know-how, ways of being, that neither parents nor school transmit - it’s the school of life. It requires sweat, time - learned by experience, but it grows. Above all, we learn one essential thing: that sandwich, placed on the knees after a long morning of walking. We learn that just enough has more flavour to it than too much does. Thank you. (Applause)
