so to preface this i am an outdoor trail work / medical profesh, and i'm talking from that perspective

really holy crap wow am i tired of "outdoor scene" ppl acting condescending abt regular people reacting in fear to wild animals near them like sharks or bears.

the reason these people are scared of these animals is because they entered into a wilderness space without education and practice on how to deal with what the wilderness space is actually like.

this is not the fault of the "tourist," it's the fault of the whole idea of tourism.

as someone who as constantly interacted with tourists who know absolutely zero about the wilderness they're hiking in, that i lived in, that i was doing work to protect from those people:

it's not those souls' fault our system doesn't give a fuck about nature.

the only reason the beautiful places we have are still around is basically just white, indigenous-erasing liberal men like john muir and teddy roosevelt claiming they knew what was best for the land and "preserving" it under federal authority of a national parks/forests system.

so yeah, the only reason we still have places like yosemite, king's canyon, grand canyon, old smokies, etc. is because some white men thought other white men were getting way too greedy and decided to put laws in place to protect some places in really specific ways but not others

the whole entire thing is fucked up, yes, we get that. but it's also important to know about the actual history behind where the enviro laws we have came from so that we can understand some specific ways of how NOT to approach the issue in the future.

and circling back to tourism, it's important to understand that the only reason we get to have these places anymore, with the fucked up way our system is, is that tourists are always willing to pay money to go see trees because capitalism has so displaced humans from trees.

so, yeah, tourists suck. but if what we normalize is just defunding conservation work and programs, and the park service and forest service, just because they're oppressive government entities, we are going to lose those park spaces to corporate interest. 100%.