No one likes a tourist and chimps are no different. Eco-tourists and scientists who gawk at these great apes have been giving them colds. Colds kill chimps.
The only question is whether the tourism saves more chimps than it kills. Half the members of habitated groups of apes are dying because of human-passed respiratory illness. Would poachers kill more? They probably would. But at least we’d get chimp-hand doorstops and things of that nature. And there would never be any nonsense about our good intentions.
There’s something wrong, not just with eco-tourism, but with tourism in general. Though I’ve never been able to put my finger on it, I dislike the idea of turning the world into a theme park. There is something very strange and disconcerting about people from the first world galavanting around the third world to marvel at the poverty.
Yet, as tempting as the idea sometimes is, we can’t just lock everyone up in their own countries. If we did that, instead of traveling to foreign climes with cameras, we’d probably take guns. You can’t stop people from moving around. We love to travel.
These chimps are in the same position as a lot of humans. You either let the rich people invade with Starbucks or you have them invade with tanks. Either way, sooner or later, the fuckers are showing up. The question then becomes how do you keep them from killing you with their love. It’s not so easy.
An abundance of tourist money drives local prices up and there’s no corresponding increase in wages. It’s a a weird and pernicious welfare injection. The tourists, of course, don’t stick around long enough to notice and, long after they’ve returned home, the problems they left behind remain.
The best idea is to have these people somehow invested in the areas they travel to. But, if they did that, it wouldn’t be a vacation. It’d be work.
They’ll probably start giving the wild chimps antibiotics to protect them against the thing thing that was supposed to protect them against something else. Nature will just be one big zoo and the world will just be divided between our themeparks and our warzones.
There must be a better way than this but I don’t know what it is.
Tourist sculpture by Duane Hanson
