Too Many Tourists

After breakfast at the hostel, I visited the National Museum of Scotland, eager to learn more about the country’s history.

The museum is humongous.  It would take you a week if you want to peruse everything thoroughly.  I soon learned to window-shop and inspect only the panels that really sparked my interest.  

The museum is divided into a few sections that cover a variety of topics.  The interactive science center, for example, features exhibits that explain the benefits of green energy.  This department also houses Dolly, the first cloned mammal, which was named after a famous country-singer’s large mammory glands.

I briefly browsed a room that catalogued the growth of devices dealing with communications:  radios, cameras, televisions, etc.  One panel about inventions that I read in particular stuck out to me.  It read something like this:  The environment dictates the product’s function.  Therefore, if the product changes, so does the environment.  

TVs, for example, were created to bring the cinema into the home.  Since the invention of the television, the physical layout of the living room revolves around the TV.  Also, this in-home entertainment could potentially alter the inhabitants’ habits.

I tried to think of this dictum in terms of a solitary traveler in a foreign country. Humans are composed of both biological and sociological traits.  In some ways, a man is a product of his environment, whether that be his genetic make-up or his physical surroundings.  In either case, he is able to rise above his shortcomings, or he may even be able to ignore certain situational forces.  The environment inevitably affects his upbringing.  If he lives in northern Canada, he is prone to grow accustomed to cold temperatures.  If he grows up poor, he stands a good chance of learning the value of a dollar.  He may never graduate beyond manual labor, or he could work his way up to the top.  In any circumstance, the environment forces him to make decisions.  Will a child with uneducated parents seek an education?  Or will he follow the paths of his mother and father?  Ultimately, each person chooses his path, although some may be steeper than others.  Some people even get a head start.  Except during extreme periods of racial or religious hostility, no one is the victim of circumstances, unless one falls prey to this notion.

On the other hand, a person has the ability to change his environment.  Mayors can clean up decrepit neighborhoods just as vandals can destroy them once more.  

If both those statements are true——that a person both affects and is affected by his environment——then what happens when you displace one person to a different land?  Surely, one American tourist may do little to radically alter Italy, but many tourists visiting multiple places is bound to change the make-up of the world.  

There are some cities whose tourist population is greater than the native population.  On average, Venice welcomes 60,000 tourists per day, making the city more crowded with foreigners than residents.  The natives long dead and gone are the reason posterity visits their homelands.  These historical sites were once at their height of glory, but now they are merely storage units of historical monuments.  Many native Venetians are moving to get away from the overbearing tourist population, so, in a hundred years or so, what will Venice be remembered for?  Perhaps the city will be on par with Orlando, Florida.  

I encourage everyone to travel, but I also encourage everyone else to stay at home.  Someone needs to hold down the fort long enough to establish the difference between residents and visitors.  If everyone were nomads, there may be no unique architecture——only hotel chains.