Eisbären death: Has the extincer trial tourism go too far?

Eisbären death: Has the extincer trial tourism go too far?

A security guard on a cruise ship recently shot an polar bear. Did the bear came too close or the tourists?

Usually I don't dig into holes from which I cannot climb out. I like strong arguments and clear answers - but there is only one answer here, and unfortunately I don't like it.

let me start with the beginning: On July 28, a security guard of a cruise ship shot an polar bear in Svalbard, an Arctic island group that lies between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole.

The guard and three colleagues, all armed, landed in Spitzbergen from the MS Bremen, which is operated by Hapag-Lloyd Cruises, to ensure that the area is safe before they leave tourists ashore. During the control, one of the guards was attacked by an polar bear. The man did not suffer life -threatening head injuries and should be in stable state. The polar bear is dead.

alt = “”> Fair use An Arctic polar bear was shot by a security guard of a cruise ship

Svalbard, a place with dramatic glaciers, huge ice fields and rough, elementary beauty, is one of the last great wilderness in Europe - but climate change is progressing quickly in the Arctic. The global sea ice was at the lowest level ever measured. Eisbears hunting from sea ice to Robben, and shrinking sea levels have forced to spend more time on land and hunt over major distances.

Spitzbergen has become a honey pot for tourists who are looking for an extreme animal experience. A port plan shows that 18 cruise ships would create Longyearbyen in Spitzbergen's main settlement this week. Seeing an polar bear in the wild has become a must for "extinction tourists", for those who visit people, places and wild animals that could soon disappear.

alt = "shrinking sea ice to force polar bears to spend more time on land"> Dream time shrinking sea ice is forcing polar bears to spend more time on land

The news of the killed polar bear made me angry and sad. People penetrated the bear's territory exclusively for leisure reasons and then killed him because he followed his natural instincts. How the TV personality Ricky Gervais put it: "Let us come too close to an polar bear in his natural environment and then kill him when he comes too close". The episode was absolutely tragic.

Another reason why it was so shaken was that these tourists could have been Peter and I could have been. In fact, we were only in Tromso because it was the wrong season to visit Spitzbergen. Seeing an polar bear in the wild is the fabric for dreams and documentation. Every adventure traveler wants to see these great creatures in their natural environment; to testify their grace and mobility; to be impressed by their size and strength; And of course to take pictures in the wild.

alt = “Dying Tourism”> Dream time Some tourists put pressure for the perfect photo

Significantly, no old snapshot is sufficient. It has to be a money injection, says John, a tour guide at the popular Churchill observation station in Canada: "Bears looking for food in the bone pile or rolling in the dirt have a dirty, matted fur, but not tourists. I don't want to photograph that," he says to me. "They want a mom and their young, two playing boy or a bear who looks directly into the lens. Some customers have asked us to get the bear on two legs, and they don't always jokes."

Churchill sells itself as a "polar bear capital of the world", but I was told that it is not a remote hinterland of striking beauty, but a place where huge Humvees trolleys absorb 50 passengers at the same time, buzzing on sightseeing tours above them and a mobile lodge parked on the grass of the bears and attracts them with meal smells, which from the windows blow. If this is not checked, Svalbard could go in the same direction.

Extinction tourism: Where the border is to be drawn

Where do we draw the border to endangered travel destinations? In the past, this question was particularly concerned with the Galapagos Islands that we visited, which we visited, and most recently the Great Barrier Reef. We have examined landscapes affected by climate change that highlighted the costs of human activities and pleads for top tourism limits.

With all of this we claimed that you should be able to visit endangered places as long as you do this in a sustainable way - but there must be a line. It is true that the vast majority of tourists who observe polar bears do this without incidents, but the incidents that happen are a function of those who are not the case. All visitors are fed into the culture of depression and increase the likelihood of an accident or incident.

alt = “All tourists are fed into the culture of extincer trialism“> dream time All tourists are dining into the culture of extermetry turismus

It is therefore extremely important that ethical guidelines are strictly observed, but that is not always the case, says John: "You can choose an ethical operator, but there is always one that violates the rules," he says. "You will then choose tourists because of their tripadvisor [Reviewers] that they have seen bears up close, while others say they didn't do it."

regulations, fines and the confiscation of licenses and equipment are not a daunting enough, says John: "Some operators feed bears from the rear of the boat. Some get closer than the minimum distance, which brings the bears and tourists in danger."

And so we come to the hole in which I dug myself because I don't see any way out. I want to see Canada and more of Norway. I want to sail through the Arctic and I want to see polar bears in the wild. But how can I justify a trip against this background?

My best answer is that I do not take a trip like this unless I can be sure that the organizer is ethically justifiable. This means that I have to check company data to ensure that there is no greenwashing, reviews on violations of the rules and, if necessary, paid extra. It's an imperfect answer, but given my dilemma it is the only one I can give.

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The sixth species extinction is probably the most permanent legacy of mankind. Elizabeth Kolbert's urgent, humiliating and deeply necessary book forces us, the basic question of what it means to be a person, to rethink.

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