coast COLUMNIST
This month coastal columnist MARTIN DOREY experiences an internet pile-on when he just wants to see us work together
Igot into an online spat recently. I couldn’t help myself. It happened because I was looking at a job advert for a ‘sustainable tourism officer’ here in my hometown of Bude. I was very surprised to note that ‘sustainable’ and ‘tourism’ are trigger words for some internet trolls. And when it’s a job that’s (apparently) not a proper job and is a waste of taxpayers’ money, it really gets Pavlov’s bells ringing. Never mind that ‘emmets’ are ruining Cornwall and all that bait-ball baloney.
It was a red rag and I am sorry. I tried to explain but…some people!!!!
Let me fill you in.
Bude Climate Partnership, a group of local NGOs, recently won a significant award from the National Lottery (not from some loony leftist local council) to develop its response to climate change. The bid was successful because Bude is among the most vulnerable communities to the effects of climate change. Like other places on the coast, we are on the front line when it comes to sea level rise.
Tourism and agriculture are the main industries here - it was built on tourism and has never had any other significant industry – so it stands to reason that any project around resilience should include provision for bringing our tourism model up to date. Sea, sand and surf are, and always have been, our most valuable local resources.
But why is the question of sustainable tourism – and a decent paying job to make it happen - such a difficult beast to grapple?
Colonial-style tourism, where we service the needs of our visitors during the school holidays and build endless holiday apartments that sit empty for TEN months of the year, doesn’t work. Wages remain low, carbon high, jobs insecure... and the water is still rising!
We hav
