Environmental Communication and Travel Journalism

Consumerism, Conflict and Concern

Lyn McGaurr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317682813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Sviluppo sostenibile

Travel journalism about natural attractions is environmental communication at the cusp of consumerism and concern. Countries and regions that market forests, rivers and wildlife to international tourists drive place-of-origin brand recognition that benefits exporters in other sectors. Place-branding in such destinations is not just PR for environmentally sustainable development and consumption, but also a political enterprise.

Environmental Communication and Travel Journalism considers tourism public relations as elite reputation management, and applies models of political conflict and source-media relations to the analysis of the 'soft' genre of travel journalism. The book seeks to understand how, in whose interests and against what odds discourses of cosmopolitanism and place-branding influence the way travel journalists represent vulnerable and contested environments.

Informed by interviews with journalists and their sources, Environmental Communication and Travel Journalism identifies and theorises networks, cultures, discursive strategies and multiple loyalties that can assist or interrupt flows of environmental concern in the cosmopolitan public sphere. The book should be of interest to scholars of environmental communication, environmental politics, journalism, tourism, marketing and public relations.

1
Introduction

On the night Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize, the BBC’s Kirsty Wark (2014) asked him to comment on a statement by the Australian Prime Minister that coal was good for humanity. Flanagan answered that it made him ashamed to be Australian. Then Wark asked him about the repeal of a hard-won forest peace accord by the new government of his home state of Tasmania. The novelist responded that the island’s contested forests were sacred places that the politics of the day wanted to destroy, dividing people unnecessarily. In Tasmania’s capital city, Hobart, The Mercury newspaper called for unity, reflecting on a time when Flanagan had often been “pilloried by some and defended by few” for criticising the woodchip industry (The Mercury 2014). The editorial did not elaborate, but among examples it might have cited in addition to material in its own archive was one that implicated travel journalism. In 2007 Flanagan had told a reporter working for a national magazine that he was being ostracised by a state tourism office intent on ensuring international travel journalists did not cross his path (Fleming 2007). Flanagan had been outspoken in national and international news, essays and opinion pieces, but he had also published a travel feature in The New York Times describing Tasmanian logging in apocalyptic terms (Flanagan 2004) and been quoted in an adventure travel piece in United States magazine Outside reiterating his concerns (Flanagan in Jenkins 2005).

A week after Flanagan received the Booker Prize, Lonely Planet declared Tasmania the fourth best regional travel destination in the world for 2015 (Zeiher 2014). Within hours the state tourism office had written to tourism businesses explaining how to insert the Lonely Planet accolade into their marketing and public relations (Tourism Tasmania 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). The media release template it suggested they use was a lesson in brand-aligned cross-promotion, with references to “the world’s most trusted travel publisher” alongside praise for the state’s natural and cultural attractions (Tourism Tasmania 2014d). There was no mention in Tourism Tasmania’s communications of Lonely Planet’s observation that everyone on the island has a passionate opinion about its logging debate (Zeiher 2014, p. 71). Instead, the tourism office invited businesses to join it in hosting national and international journalists visiting the state (Tourism Tasmania 2014c).

In The Mercury, the Lonely Planet accolade was celebrated individually (Glaetzer 2014) and in combination with reports that British travel journalist and restaurant reviewer AA Gill would soon be dining in Tasmania, along with many other food and wine luminaries (Ironside 2014). Forgotten was Gill’s 2007 assessment in a travel feature in London’s Sunday Times that the island’s forest was being “rubbed out by special pleading, arm-twisting and back-scratching corruption” (Gill 2007, see Chapter 6). Gill has described journalists as performing on “an invisible stage” and himself as read by “more people than will pick up a Booker Prize-nominated novel in a year” (2005, p. 3). When he attended the gala dinner in November at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art – the finale of Tourism Australia’s $40 million 2014 “Restaurant Australia” campaign – he was introduced in national television coverage as one of the “harshest food critics in the world” (Atkin 2014). But on this occasion he was rhapsodic: “It was fantastic. Amazing food in an amazing room. I mean it really is spectacular” (Gill in Atkin 2014).

A month later Gill published a glowing review in The Sunday Times of a Hobart restaurant called Garagistes. In the years since he had last been in the state, a timber company that in 2007 had been planning to build a controversial 1.9 AUD pulp mill in the wine-tourism region of the Tamar Valley had gone into receivership, never having secured the “social licence” it belatedly came to recognise was necessary to attract the financial backing it required to proceed (see Montgomery 2012). Perhaps Gill had concluded environmental conflict in Tasmania had largely abated. Perhaps he believed in the performativity of celebrity suggestion. Whatever the reasons, in his review of Garagistes he did not mention forestry, despite the international attention that had been accorded Flanagan’s comments at the Booker Prize ceremony just two months earlier, including a report in The Times (see Lagan 2014). Rather, he described the state as “very aware of its clean ecological credentials” (Gill 2014).

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere – in Britain or Western Europe, perhaps, or North America – you may assume my opening anecdote is idiosyncratic and parochial, emerging as it does from a small island at the other end of the world. Yet I have found similarly intense passions and politics when researching Canada and Iceland. I have also interviewed travel journalists from Britain and the United States who describe their experience of Tasmanian tourism public relations as, if anything, more skilled and professional than they are used to. So I have opened with this particular story not because it arises from the subject of my primary case study, Tasmania, but because it spans many of the topics that will emerge in the following chapters as important considerations in the study of environmental communication and travel journalism. These include journalistic agency, professional and personal tastes and interests, tourism marketing and public relations strategies and tactics, competition between sources for media access, place identity, projected image, symbols, brand extensions, celebrity, even the power of accolades in travel lists to submerge political frames. Yet for the most part, travel journalism flies under the radar of academic scrutiny. Too often, it seems to me, its tendency to ignore claims of environmental irresponsibility is disregarded in the scholarly calculation of elite advantage. Perhaps because overtly political frames have traditionally been unusual in travel texts (see, for example, Hill-James 2006), journalism scholars rarely take account of the political advantage to pro-development governments of celebratory travel journalism about natural attractions.

Environmental communication is symbolic action (Cox 2013). In its pragmatic form it provides information that helps us to solve environmental problems. In its constitutive capacity it may “invite us to perceive forests and rivers as natural resources for use or exploitation or as vital life support systems” (Cox 2013, p. 19). It defines some subjects as problems but not others, and associates problems with particular values (Cox 2013). And in the tourism sector, it beckons us to form relationships with brands (see Hansen 2010). Tourism’s job-creation potential and capacity to build local pride through affirmative discourses in its products and publicity can attract local goodwill and public support for government destination promotion. This has led to assertions that tourism is “a refreshingly simple and honest business” whose communications have an automatic legitimacy (Anholt 2010, p. 89). Tourism offices frequently portray themselves as contributing to the health of other parts of the economy. They do this by deploying the rhetoric of place-branding to argue that travellers include business people, investors and entrepreneurs from a variety of industries. “The broad benefits that travellers bring to Canada go far beyond supporting our $82-billion dollar tourism industry,” writes the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC), for example. “As these visitors… become acquainted with our country and its high-quality products, they become advocates for Canada, uncovering investment and trade opportunities, identifying business partnerships and creating a foundation for trade” (CTC 2014). In nature-based destinations, landscapes, wildlife and ecotourism that are instrumentalised by tourism offices coincidentally secure access to consumers of travel media for discourses that reflect favourably on government and business. If competition for natural resources leads to controversy, routine celebratory tourism communications can easily become the fulcrum of cross-sectoral brand maintenance or rehabilitation efforts (McGaurr 2010, 2012; McGaurr, Tranter and Lester 2014). Glossy travel journalism that ignores threats to branded nature by extractive industries benefits pro-development interests by presenting target audiences with place-based projections of scenic beauty, natural abundance and social harmony that can function as a form of symbolic annihilation (Shanahan and McComas 1999 in Cox 2013, p. 166) not of the environment per se but of environmental conflict.

According to Chris Ryan and Anne Zahra, jurisdictional tourism offices are usually “quasi-public sector bodies, primarily funded by local and national government” (2004, p. 80). The pivotal role of state, provincial and national tourism offices in reputation-building is evident in public–private and whole-of-government (or multi-agency) approaches to economic development that position the tourism sector at the heart of global marketing initiatives. In Tasmania in the first decade of this century, for example, tourism was described as the most influential sectoral brand under the state’s master brand, which in turn was tasked with nationally and internationally aligning the messages of stakeholders who might be “in competition or in conflict with one another” (Department of Premier and Cabinet, Tasmania, 2006). In Iceland, The Promote Iceland Act 2010 has as its first objective “to strengthen Iceland’s image and reputation, enhance the competitive position of Icelandic undertakings on foreign markets and to attract foreign investment and tourists to the country” (Althing 2010). And in 2014 in Alberta, Canada, a framework that aimed to “solidify” the province as “a world centre for resource-based and resource-related industries” also made tourism central to securing it an expanded global presence (Government of Alberta 2014, pp. 4, 6). This is not to suggest that governments supportive of extractive industries allocate public money to government or quasi-public tourism offices with instructions that it be spent on marketing and public relations to counter the claims of environmental organisations. In times of environmental conflict, public funding for tourism communications usually goes unremarked partly because there is no need for such edicts to be issued. Whether or not the tourism industry disagrees with government priorities – whether or not it considers its own competitiveness threatened by policies that encourage logging, mining, drilling or dam-building – we might reasonably expect that tourism offices will continue to represent destinations to travel journalists in a favourable light, because that is their raison d’être.

There is, of course, more to environmental communication in travel texts than the question of whether or not it mediates political conflict. Travel journalism that ignores disputes over natural resources may include less controversial environmental information or concern. As a mainstay of the tourism industry, landscapes and wildlife provide countless opportunities for businesses and governments as well as “places” to represent themselves as responsible global citizens. In a world of more than 1000 million international tourists (United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) 2014, p. 2), travel media can be conduits for publicising or promoting preservation, conservation or sustainable practices, thereby fulfilling foundational aspirations of the tourism industry by encouraging potential and imaginative travellers to care about distant locations. The sense of attachment created in this manner might inspire people to visit more than once, to the benefit of the local economy, but describing and praising clean, green practices might conceivably also encourage travellers to live their own lives more sustainably. In addition, we must be open to the possibility that financial benefit derived from nature-based tourism publicised through travel journalism will give local communities the motivation to improve their protection and stewardship of the environment (see Hajer 1995).

The legitimacy accorded tourism communications in nature-based destinations often rests, in part, on the qualified endorsement of environmental organisations and green political parties. These actors tend to have an ambivalent or contingent relationship with the travel industry. Overcrowding and demands for roads or commercial developments in national parks and reserves can complicate their engagement with the sector. However, they regularly cite the tourism and brand value of natural attractions in their arguments for conservation (see, for example, McGaurr, Tranter and Lester 2014). “Independent policy advisor on national identity and reputation” (GfK 2013) and co-author of the annual Nation Brand Index Simon Anholt may originally have intended the term “brand” to be a metaphor for the way places compete for visitors, ideas, investment, products, services and influence in a global marketplace (Anholt 2007), but there is a gap between theory and practice. For example, when Travel Alberta demanded a parody of its branding be removed from YouTube, its CEO defended the action by saying his province’s brand was all that distinguished it from competing tourism destinations (Okabe in CBC News 2013). As Celia Lury (2004) observes, brands may be intangible but they are far from immaterial. Environmental groups and green politicians understand this. Their contingent endorsement of tourism facilitates the flow of symbols such as wilderness and iconic animals back and forth between consumerism and activism, allowing them to accumulate salience and power that can be redeployed in times of environmental conflict to argue that government support for extractive industries is damaging the brand (McGaurr, Tranter and Lester 2014).

Even if a general lack of political content in travel journalism suggests an unequal competition in the genre between environmental discourses circulated by elite and challenger media sources, alternative frames do sometimes gain purchase in particular media organisations and occasionally even endure. For example, in January 2014 Outside published another travel feature about Tasmania, and on this occasion, the journalist, Stephanie Pearson, predicted that if a conservative government were elected in a forthcoming poll, Tasmania’s forests would be the losers (Pearson 2014). Nine years after the Outside travel feature quoting Flanagan’s concerns (Jenkins 2005, see above), the magazine was still reporting that forest controversies defined and divided Australia’s poorest state.

The silences that characterise so many travel texts become eloquent when examined in the light of contemporaneous disputes over natural resources, but the reverse is also true: examples such as Outside urge us to be curious about environmental discourses that retain their political edge in “soft” journalism. Cities, regions and countries that deploy natural attractions as brand attributes invoke countless associations, loyalties, expectations, myths, claims and counterclaims about the environment everywhere. In attempting to brand nature, they allow nature to brand them in return, opening the way for environmental organisations, journalists and citizens to hold them to account. When New Zealand attaches the label “100% Pure” to scenes of fjords and glaciers, when Alaska stamps an image of a polar bear and her cub next to the words “Made in Alaska”,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Theoretical foundations
• PART II In the field
• PART III In the media
• Index