Ecological grief generates desire for environmental healing in tourism after COVID-19

Abstract

Tourism research is starting to take interest in the psychology of environmental distress, particularly as it relates to climate change. For both the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and the climate change movement that dominated international media in 2019, psychological parallels exist in terms of our experience of loss. As the world grapples with the pandemic and tourism grinds to a halt, stories on social media are surfacing that claim wildlife is returning to quarantined cities and that the Earth is healing itself. Much of the implicit critique of these stories is directed at the tourism industry, with two viral posts in particular supposedly documenting the ‘rewilding’ of Venice, that infamous icon of overtourism. While the popular media have been concerned primarily with the factual accuracy of these claims, what has gone largely unexplored is the apparent desire for environmental reparation that they express. The fixation on environmental healing evidenced in tourist social media can be interpreted as a response to widely-felt ‘ecological grief’, triggered by the events of COVID-19. In this context, animal reclamation of urban spaces can be identified as a motif of environmental hope that symbolises life, regeneration and resilience, the understanding of which may contribute to the project of hopeful tourism in the post-COVID-19 era.     

Foucault toujours

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Mahon, M‐, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy— Truth, Power, and the Subject (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1992), 255pp., ISBN 0 7914 1150 8

Salmagundi — A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences (hiver 1993, no. 97), £3.00     

BEAR-CLAWS IN GERMANIC GRAVES

Summary. The remains of bear-skins for cremation burials of the late pre-Roman and early Roman Iron Age are a long neglected 'grave-good'. This is because of their scattered occurrence in graves on the continent in Sweden, north Germany, Bohemia and in the Celto-Germanic 'contact-zone' as far west as England. Their distribution and connection with many high-status graves marks them as Germanic'prestige goods'. This raises the question of ethnicity in these graves.