Oh I remember this. Tourists.
I live on a very accessible island very close to Vancouver and it’s very easy to get here. Unlike other islands in our archipelago, we are mostly a place of full time residents, with a smaller number of summer families that come over. We have A LOT of short term rentals here which are very hard to track because they kind of hide behind a “contact the host for more details” in the VRBO and AirBnb listings, and like everyone living in a tourist spot with big housing affordability and accessibility issues, I have many opinions about that. Some contradictory even!
We have just had our first long weekend of the summer and as usual, there is the litany of complaints about tourists who just can’t seem to figure out the simple things that we all take for granted. It’s fun to share some stories I suppose, but it is disturbing to see friends and neighbours openly describing how hostile they were, yelling at groups of people or impatiently chewing out people who weren’t able to figure out our – to the untrained eye – totally mystifying ferry marshalling system.
More seriously, tourism is a mixed blessing for communities like ours. Day visitors do provide an massive injection of revenue for the businesses we love that can’t always make it through a dark wet winter on local trade alone. But day trippers can create huge impacts on the land here, and recently the artist who created the lovely piece of public art pictured above which was hidden away in the forest, removed it because too many people were wandering around on private land trying to find it and it was contributing to a lot of erosion and a heightened fire danger. (Also it was a piece about extinction and the fact that it is gone now is a poignant denouement)
Having people come and stay for longer stretches was always a goal we tried to pursue when I was on our Economic Development Committee. We wanted people to sink into the place, come for retreats and be hosted here. I myself have hosted hundreds of people here at our retreat centres at Xenia, Rivendell, the Lodge at the Old Dorm and the Bowen Island Lodge. The advantage of this is that as hosts we get to help people visit here by giving them some local advice and knowledge to help deepen their experience of the place, and also help them understand our local culture. This is a beautiful and special place and it works it’s magic on you if you are hosted into it well. When you are visitor in another place it helps to have a sense of the context in which you are temporarily living.
In the last 10 years however, like almost everywhere, Instagram and AirBnB/VRBO have created a situation where people are coming to this place to have context-free experiences and that creates a lot of issues including environmental impact, fire danger, unsafe situations on the roads, loud stuff happening in quiet places, conflict, and a litany of smaller irritations that make daily living here harder during a busy weekend. Our grocery stores sometimes run out of staples. Local staff are treated horribly at local eateries as they cope to deal with HUGE numbers while simultaneously getting slagged for slow service. Visitors then experience long waits for their food and leave shitty reviews on yelp. It really can be a nightmare.
There is no curing this, really. We try hard to give some fleeting context to visitors who are rushing to find the perfect Instagram spot or the woodfired pizza they heard so much about. Instagram in particular creates a kind of weird cult of personal branding that casts all experiences as a good time, without maybe explaining how you spent the day tramping through a local’s backyard to find the mastadon, irritating dozens of people along the way, getting frustrated and annoyed when people wouldn’t tell you exactly where it was. Instead,a perfect phot of a majestic creature perched atop a bluff. Instagram promotes outcomes based tourism. If that is your approach, save your energy and just steal my photo of it. The thing is gone now.
So what to do? Well, I try the remember that I’m a tourist every time I leave this little island. I have travelled extensively for work and pleasure and I’m aware that I do so many dumb things when I visit other places with a complete lack of awareness of my own impact. I have no idea what places the locals consider “theirs” or how different local cultures work. And of course it’s even worse when I find a lovely little spot off the beaten path, which is full of the delightful locals you won’t meet in the regular tourist haunts. I make sure to share my experiences with friends and family on social media. (I know this sweet little restaurant in southern Estonia run by a Seto family who will comp you food and drink if you start a singing session of folk songs. And they will bring out the good liquor too!) But I have no idea whether they enjoy me renting a little house in their neighbourhood or not. I can’t read Estonian, so I’m not sure what firestorm we have stirred up on the local Facebook page, but I know I must have at some point! I’ve certainly been yelled at by people who assure me that the path DOES NOT GO THROUGH THERE even when it OBVIOUSLY does, and given dirty looks and audible eyerolls as I spend 10 minutes in front of a ticket dispenser on the Frankfurt or Tokyo metros trying to figure out the simple act of buying a ticket from a machine, a task which requires extensive implicit knowledge and is different in every city. (And eventually out of sheer impatience, someone steps up to help, but sometimes not)
In as much as we need to help visitors understand their impact on our little place, we have long been a draw for weekend and summer visitors and living with tourists fumbling through our community is nothing new. I try to be that “friendly helpful local” that gives them some insight into what it’s like to live here. And if I’m feeling riled up or likely to be driven to anger or frustration, I avoid our village on busy weekends unless I manage to prepare myself to meet people acting like I do when I trample through lovely little Mexican villages and Scottish Islands and Hawaiian farming settlements.
All I can offer is a heuristic: assume good intentions and try to be kind. And if you come over to Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island, give me a call beforehand and I’ll let you know how the ferry marshalling works.
(ETA: Nancy has written a nice post that links to this one, and I want acknowledge her wisdom and nuance on the use of the phrase “assume good intentions.” That works in this context and is advice for me to use when meeting tourists who may be unaware of their impact. It is wise not to use this as advice for others to take, especially in contexts of injustice,oppression and trauma. I’ll leave my original wording in, but my practice is to use that heuristic personally.)
It is apparently International Tea Day, and my friend Ciaran Camman sent along this beautiful twitter thread describing tea culture across the Muslim world. It put me in mind of some memorable cups of tea I have had in my time:
- I fell in love with Turkish tea culture sipping tea from tulip glasses in Istanbul, during summer downpours in Taksim, by the side of the Bosphoros, or in the quiet back alleys of the old town as the calls to prayer echoed through the streets. Or on a gullet in the quiet waters off Demera, or in the mountains of Selçuk.
- A impromptu stop in for a gorgeous cup of tea and a perfect scone with my beloved beside the Ouse in St. Ives in the UK on a summer day, pictured above.
- Developing a deep love of the cornflower flavoured black tea that we used to buy from The Tea Merchant on the Byward market in Ottawa.
- Endless cups of Dilmah tea with my lovely mother-in-law. She introduced me to Dilmah, and I’ve never gone back. A lovely Ceylon tea, from a great company.
- Drinking dark thick, bitter tea from a huge pot boiled for hours on a woodstove in a hunting cabin on the tundra of Nunavik as a group of Inuit polar bear hunters sat in circle and discussed their futures over caribou stew and bowhead muktuk.
- Making an impromptu tea ceremony with So Yoshida and friends in a small tea house in a little park near the Tokyo harbour.
- Watching used Irish Breakfast tea bags pile up in a little plate in the kitchen of a cottage I shared with Chris Chapman and Anthony McCann by the shores of Galway Bay in Ballyvaughn, Co. Clare as a kind of metric of the conversations and stories we were telling.
- Sharing a pot of tea with Simon and Julia Lucas back in 1989 when a group of us Native Studies students travelled to Hesquiaht in Clayoquot Sound with Sennan Charleson to spend a week immersed in the community. It was my first trip ever to BC, the first time I ever got to meet Simon and Julia and it was a memorable afternoon, listening to stories of the community, the culture, the language and the plans for the future.
- Drinking rooibos outside our meeting space while watching giraffes carefully pick their way around small dialogue groups during an Art of Hosting at the Heia Safari in South Africa.
Grateful for these experiences and connections.
We are going to be living with this virus for the rest of our lives I think. So for a person like me who works with people in groups and has traditionally travelled globally to deliver workshops, I have to start thinking about considerations related to the health on me and my colleagues and team members and the adherence of public health measures around the world. We know we can do good work online, so that is always an option. But for work in which clients expect me to travel and become exposed to COVID 19, I am considering using language like this in all our contracts:
All work planned with your organization needs to be flexible in delivery taking into account public health measures, and consultant health. For in-person events where travel is involved and quarantine required, your organization is responsible for all costs relating to national public health regulations. Our team members will always adhere to all national, local and commercial COVID-19 safety protocols and will meet or exceed expected standards of protection while travelling for this work. Should our team members contract COVID-19 in the course of their duties, your organization is responsible for costs relating to quarantine and travel plan changes and any health expenses falling outside of our corporate travel insurance. We will develop at least two options for any work to be delivered in person that includes a back-up online contingency plan and a cancellation plan.
I want to be able to do work with people, but I don’t want to put our team members at undue risk or under undue hardship, nor do I want to be creating in-person events that are unsafe or inaccessible. The language above seems fair and relational, given that we are a small company. What do you think? This is a tender new world and despite vaccination which lowers the risk of death, COVID 19 is a very dangerous virus that spreads rapidly and can create long term health risks that may impact my ability or my colleague’s ability to do their work.
I welcome your thoughts. How are you negotiating potential costs and client needs related to COVID in a world that is desperation to pretend that we are back in November 2019?
Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking for evidence that I am NOT on the path. Is there broken foliage? Is the soil compressed and eroded by boots rather than hoofs or water? Are the roots underfoot rubbed clean of bark? Are there any trail markers about? When I find myself answering “no” to these questions I move slower, until the evidence is overwhelming, and I stop and track back to find out where I went wrong.
You can see why looking for evidence to DISPROVE your belief creates a safe to fail situation. If I find a single piece of evidence that confirms my belief that I am on the right track, and I follow it unquestioningly, the results become increasingly dangerous, and failure becomes unsafe.
A lot of my life and work is about paying attention to these weak signals. Whether it is making music with others, facilitating groups, helping organizations with strategy, playing and watching sports like soccer, rugby and hockey, it all comes down to paying attention in a way that challenges your beliefs.
The other day I offered a pithy comment on facebook to the question of “what is the difference between critical thinking and buying conspiracy theories?” and it really came down to this: critical thinkers look for evidence to disprove their beliefs and conspiracy theorists look for evidence to confirm their beliefs.
I think the latter is quite the norm in our current mainstream organizational cultures, even if it doesn’t lead to conspiracy theory. The pressure for accountability and getting it right leaves very little space to see what’s going wrong in the organization. The desire to build on what is working – while being an important part of the strategic toolkit – is not served without a critical look at the fact that we might be doing it wrong.
This is why sensemaking has become a critical part of my practice. And by sensemaking I mean collecting large numbers of small anecdotes about a situation and having large numbers of people look at them together. The idea is that with a diverse set of data points and a diverse number of perspectives, you get a truer picture of the actual culture of an organization, and you can act with more capacity to find multiple ways forward, including those which both challenge your assumptions about what is right and good now and those which discover what is better and better.
Recently in Canada we have been having a little debate about whether celebrating Canada Day on July 1 is appropriate given that fact that this month – National Indigenous Peoples Month, as it turns out – has been marked by a reckoning with the visible evidence of the genocide that has been committed here. While hundreds of thousands of people here are in mourning or grief, and are reliving the trauma that has travelled through their families as a result of the genocidal policies of residential school and the non-consensual adoption of children, many others are predictably coming out with a counter reaction that goes something like this “yeah, well let’s get over it. Canada is still the best country of the world to live in.”
And that makes sense for many people – like me – who live here and have a great life. But as I have been saying elsewhere on Twitter: don’t confuse you having a great life with this being a great country. There is nothing wrong with people having a great life. That is what we should want for all people. But Canada is not a place where that happens for everyone. The story is very different for lots of people who struggle to find contentment and acceptance inside this nation-state. Canada’s very existence is owed to broken treaties, environmental destruction, relational treachery, economic injustice, and genocide.
Paying attention to the weak signals is important here. If all you can see is how great your own life is, and you think we just need to keep doing whatever it is that we are doing that assures that continuity, then we are headed for a precipice. We are headed off an environmental cliff, into a quagmire of injustice and economic inequality that destabilizes everything you have in a catastrophic way.
Listening to First Nations – really paying attention to possibilities – is mutually beneficial to everyone. If one wants all lives to matter, then one has to ensure that every life matters, which means taking the lead from those whose lives have been considered dispensable in the project called “Canada.” And it’s not like they haven’t been out here for the past 250 years calling for a better way. It’s just that the mainstream, largely led by commercial interests who have hungered for and exploited natural resources that never belonged to them, have cheered on the idea that if Canada is good for me, it must be good period.
Let seeing be disbelieving. This country is not an inherently GOOD place. But it could be. It could be great. It could be safe, healthy, prosperous, balanced, creative and monumentally amazing. But it requires us to first question the limiting beliefs we have that it could never be better than this and second to pay attention to the weak signals that help guide us onto a path that takes us there.
It is far too early to celebrate Canada Day. We haven’t yet fulfilled the promise of the treaties and the vision with which indigenous Nations entered into relationships with Europeans oh so long ago, and that vision which is continually offered up to settlers through reciprocity and relationship. If there is anything to celebrate, perhaps it is the fact that we do have the resources to make this country work for all and we have the intelligence and creativity and willingness to do it, but you won’t find that in the Board rooms and the Parliamentary lobbies and the Cabinet offices and the global markets.
It is in the weak signals, the stories and small pathways of promise out there that are born in struggle and resilience and survival and generate connection, sustainability and the promise of well-being for all.
Slack tide in the Salish Sea.
These are the Olympic Mountains across the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait, the body of water that links in inland parts of the Salish Sea to the open Pacific Ocean. So much water flows through this passage twice a day with the ebb and flow of the tides, that the Strait takes on the quality of a slow river, flowing in two directions, in and out, two great long breaths a day, taking in cold North Pacific water, and exhaling the fresh water from the mountains and snowpacks of the Coast and Cascade Mountains, and the silty flow of the Fraser River – Sto:lo, as it is known on the coast.
AS a result of this flow there is tremendous life in this region. Many times a day freighters come and go through the Strait, heading to the ports of Vancouver and Seattle, or the mills at Squamish and Duke Point or Port Angeles. They carry the atoms of capitalism: coal and cars and plastic toys and oil and clothing and computer parts and everything we take for granted to live the lives we live here. They also carry the military power of the US nuclear submarine fleet and the Pacific Command of the Canadian navy based in Victoria. From time to time one sees sinister ships like the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyers, which frankly just creep me out. These are nuclear weapons of mass destruction, cruising lithely through the serene waters. All around this landscape are the scars of clear cutting, new and old, and not an hour from where I am is the Fairy Creek watershed and the the old growth, Indigenous stands of the Carmanah and Walbran forests. Like everything around here, it is a context of mixed and conflicted feelings, activities and histories.
The ocean here is rich and complex and full of life below. Yesterday we watched a pod of five orcas, including a couple of babies and a huge male, frolicking in the slack water. They were breaching and spy hopping and tail lobbing and fin slapping. The young ones were learning hunting techniques while the adults milled around. There are salmon and anchovies and seals and octopuses and all manner of living creatures in the rich near shore kelp beds and in the deep marine canyons and reefs. Walking along the cliff tops here I’m reminded of the Jogasaki Coast on the Izu penisula in Japan, where local fishers steward the forests and have placed signs along the trails to let you know you are walking through a “fish attracting forest.” This is true on the coast here, as at least 30% of the nitrogen in the forest ecosystem come from marine sources, from fish carcasses that litter the salmon streams after spawning and are carried by bears and birds throughout the woods, where they feed the trees that maintain the streams that bring the salmon home to spawn. This is the most ancient cycle of life here on the coast.
I am in T’Sou-ke Te’mekw, and evidence of the ancient and historic use of the land and ocean is all around for those that have eyes to see. Yesterday, walking above the beaches of East Sooke Regional Park, I could hear people down below us on the beaches harvesting mussels. On the trail was a sign indicating that miners had once used the land here for iron, even though there was little evidence of that. But literally below my feet, very near that sign, on a flat spot above the beach near a creek of fresh water was a midden of shells, clearly indicating that the two on the beach were far from the first people to harvest shellfish here. It had all the hallmarks of a historic village site; different signs, different stories.
BC lifted the in-province travel restrictions on Tuesday and it feels good to stretch out and leave home for a few days. While I have loved the global travel of the before-times, I’m lucky enough to live in an incredible natural and cultural landscape here, amongst the ancient Nations of the Salish Sea archipelago, that I really don’t have far to go to actually be in another country. One could simply stay in one place and visit ever deeper into the natural and social history of these places, and perhaps we should. It is important to know our place in all of its complicated and complex realities, to let the emotions and thoughts flow in and out like the tides, bringing new nutrients and new life upwelling from the deeps with the currents and the change of the times.