Tourism in Antarctica

Thanks to Anna who has just sent me this link to a news story about the increase in tourism in Antarctica.

You may well have seen the other day that another tourist cruise ship ran aground just off the Antarctic Peninsula. All the passengers were rescued, and it was thought that the ship was unlikely to sink, but it was leaking fuel... The picture below will take you to the BBC coverage of the story.

South Georgia

I mentioned South Georgia, and in particular the two fab webcams the other day... As well as penguin-watching, it is interesting to see how the view changes throughout the year.

Not many penguins about yet today, but plenty of seals - and a ship!

Looking a bit more carefully at the South Georgia website though, I've just discovered a set of Visitor Management Plans - these have routes for visitors to follow, give warnings for visitors about potential dangers, outline the known impacts of visitors on the flora and fauna, and describe the code of conduct for visitors. Click here to access the plans (links on the left-hand-side). Have a look at the Information for Visitors as well...

Wilderness....

A brief discussion about tourism in Antarctica - the "last great wilderness"... We will look at Antarctica and its legal status, etc. next week.

We then had a look at the US "wilderness areas" and focussed specifically on southern Utah and the impacts of off-roading (with some consideration of mountain biking for Eddie's benefit!).

Some interesting thoughts and ideas about what the value of these wilderness areas is, and whether it matters that they are being destroyed... You need (even if you thought the discussion was "too heated" for you Jak!) to think about these a little bit more and come to some conclusions - particularly considering the idea of sustainability...

The wilderness site I mentioned was www.wilderness.net - spend some time exploring as there is lots and lots of useful stuff on there.

Environmental Benefits of Tourism..

Quick reminder at the start of the lesson about the negative impacts of tourism on the environment.... We then went on to talk about the possible benefits of tourism for the environment - use of tourism revenue to: regenerate old and run-down sites; protect/conserve endangered species; develop new educational resources so that people learn about and come to appreciate the environment; implement cleaning/maintenance (eg beach cleaning on Copacabana Beach in Rio), etc.

We discussed the importance of proper planning and maangement of tourism, and the importance of all stakeholders/interest groups working together.

You then looked at conservation and management in the Peak District - that work for Thursday next week please. On the subject of conservation in the Peak District... I've not listed to all of them, but it might be worth you checking out the podcasts on the PDNP website of Geography students from Lady Manners School in Bakewell talking to representatives from the NPA about conserving the landscape whilst encouraging people to visit.

Tourism in Jamaica

A good place for general information about Jamaica and Jamaican tourism is the Jamaican Tourist Board website. The Sandals website is also worth a look...

This website looks at community tourism in Jamaica, and the Treasure Beach site I mentioned this morning is here.

The news articles I gave you - as well as lots of other news articles - can be found easily with a Google News search for "tourism jamaica".

Wordle

This is a "Wordle" of the current front page of Geogtastic6... (Interesting and surprising to see how little "geography" is!)
The idea is that you copy and paste your text into Wordle, and it creates a word cloud, with the size of the words proportional to the number of times they appear in the text.

If you have an electronic copy of your tourism essay, Wordle it and compare it to the one that I gave you this morning...

Copy and paste some of the news articles or weblinks that I've given you into Wordle and identify the key points/ideas...

Or just create some pretty key word clouds for revision!

www.wordle.net

Paradise almost lost?

A very interesting article from the Guardian here about the Maldives and the plan that their new president is making for their future...