Forests that we scrape bare to make better pastures...
Fields that we replace by animal factories...
Herbivorous livestock that we fatten with animal products...
The result: mad cows!

There is no doubt that by following this model of more, more always more, in which both mass agriculture and mass tourism are presently caught, planet Earth will soon explode¹... And it will explode in the direction whence come its sins: from the North and from greed!

For meat, always more meat...

For consumers, urged to become constantly more greedy, and tourists, with promises of a succession of pleasures and sunshine all year long...

Things would be fine in this brave new world if this meat did not come to lie on our beaches, polluting our lands and our hillsides, destroying the countryside and local cultures. It is to the point where an anonymous hand has written the following graffiti on a wall in the Rambla, the main tourist avenue in Barcelona: "Tourists: you are the terrorists!"

This judgment, though perhaps extreme, does deserve merit for drawing attention to the problem. But how does one respond?

By living out oxymorons², as modernity³ would have us do?

Oxymoron 1: To cease to travel, when humans are such curious beings.

Oxymoron 2: To spit in the face of visitors, although we are a hospitable people.

Oxymoron 3: To massacre the herds and become vegetarians.

Or, shall we instead sink our teeth into the excellent "Dossier on Tourism", prepared in collaboration with Transverses, a French association committed to sustainable tourism (see dossier).

All of this is served with tidbits of the Caravan team's trip to Mallorca (Baleares), the small Mediterranean island where we were able to meet both fans of mass tourism as they lay beneath the palm trees soaking up the sun, and defenders of those birds who still somehow manage to find refuge in the olive trees.

Philippe Guirlet

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