Pavlov’s Tourist
Everyone is familiar with Ivan Pavlov’s experiments whereby Pavlov noticed that dogs begin to salivate before the food actually reaches their mouths. He then conducted a long series of experiments manipulating the salivary action of dogs and established the basic laws for what he called “conditional reflexes” (see also Ivan Pavlov, Wikipedia). Through extensive observations of my own, I have uncovered similar conditional reflexes in national park tourists. It has been proven that tourists in an unfamiliar location begin to purchase useless crap before any need for said useless crap is established. The law that governs this behavior is as follows: “If you haven’t bought something, you didn’t go there.” This obligates tourists to buy one or more item from every location visited, no matter how useless those items are. I call it the First Law of Tourism and expect that in the future, it will make me famous just like Newton’s Third Law made him famous (okay, he might have been famous without the laws of motion because apparently he did some other stuff too).
Recently, it was my privilege, pleasure and joy to work as a cashier at a busy gift shop for a couple of weeks. Not really a bad job, but there were two things that just drove me insane. First, you do not need to take a bag. Lots of people seem to think they will be arrested if they don’t take a bag. Others are just wasteful. In any case, i found myself wanting to tell people that, no, they could not have a bag for a single candy bar that would fit in their purses (yes, purses, because women are way more wasteful than men in this respect). The second thing that bothered me from an environmental sustainability point of view was all the crap people buy for the apparent purpose of filling the trash cans of co-workers and family members.
So for hour after hour, people line up like cattle at the feed trough to buy t-shirts by the dozen and stupid carabiner coffee mugs by the score (literally, one guy bought something like 17) which, one can rest assured, the vast majority of his co-workers didn’t necessarily want. We have a steady flow of Chinese customers buying up Yosemite-themed trinkets that, of course, are overwhelmingly made in China. Many people come through the line wearing a t-shirt from Disneyland and a hat from Alcatraz, which is what led me to discover the existence of the first law of tourism. Bad enough that when we travel we burn tons of fuel in our cars and aircraft, but that’s hard to avoid unless we just stay home. However, is it necessary to leave a trail of environmental destruction behind us just because we visit someplace? Is it really necessary to bring back junk that nobody wants to give to our families and friends just because we went somewhere and they didn’t? Does anyone, visiting a fantastic and beautiful natural place, even begin to think that wasting the world’s resources only makes it that much harder to preserve those natural places that still exist?
I guess not, so in the meantime, the lemmings line up to buy a single coffee mug from China, a liter of water which took two liters of petroleum to extract, package and ship from France to California, and then to put their two items in a brand new paper bag instead of the half empty backpack they have on their back. Fortunately, I moved on to less stressful work before screaming at anyone.
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