Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
The Sonoma Valley in Northern California is known for it’s world-class wine, gentle hills, and year-round temperate climate, where novelist-gentleman-farmer Jack London set up his ode to wild sustainability one hundred years before it became a thing. Flying over in a hot air balloon, hiking the protected hillsides to find a precious Pinot Noir at one of the 425 wineries, sailing off the coast, there are many ways to get lost in them hills.
Canadians facilitate illegal land sales of ancestral land in Caribbean Honduras, and members of the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH) denounced for defamation by tourism investors Patrick Daniel Forseth (Carivida Villas) and Randy Jorgensen (Life Vision Developments) — see any issues of neocolonialism here?
Morro Bay, the bounty of sea, dune, bay, and estuary ebb and flow against the sacred Nine Volcanic Sisters, the rocky Morros. Small town charm coexists with protected parkland and one of the few remaining functioning wetland estuaries in overpopulated California, a direct counterpoint to its channelized and endlessly pumped and polluted waterways. The landscape invites migrating birds and tourists, fosters endangered plants and animals, and allows fish populations to thrive.
Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains has year-round outdoor attractions, including skiing, hiking, boating, and fishing. Yet long before the resorts, the area was called Yuhaviat, or “Pine Place” by the original inhabitants, the San Manuel Band of Serrano Mission Indians, with their sacred site of snow quartz called the Eye of God.
While Ile à Vache, a 20-square mile island off of Haiti’s southern coast, has been promoted as a jewel of Caribbean ecotourism, the subsistence fishermen and farmers of the island have been ignored. As the government moves forward with development plans, the people have responded with a series of protests.
A gold rush that accelerated with the onset of the 2008 global recession compounds the woes of the Amazon basin, laying waste to Peruvian rain forest and spilling tons of toxic mercury into the air and water.
The Loliondo Game Controlled Area (LGCA), one of Tanzania’s most well-known Maasai community concessions and wildlife destinations, is in the spotlight as local stakeholders and outside financial interests clash over its natural resources. Watch “Welcome to Loliondo,” a documentary on how the Maasai confront the threat of safari tourism taking away their land.